The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (27 page)

When Bolanos called some time later to check on the complaint, he was told that there was no record of it.

He wrote: “One of the primary goals of Compstat was to address crime and, more importantly, quality of life issues. No matter how seemingly insignificant a crime or violation was perceived to be, it earned a place in CompStat.

“After 9/11, however, a perception developed that terrorism and some crime became the only priorities. As a result, quality of life issues fell by the wayside. Today, quality of life issues are non-issues as it pertains to the NYPD.

“And because the crime stat emphasis is on major crime, and its decrease, a systemic mindset has developed that only ‘stat heavy’ crimes will be pursued, investigated and reported. If crimes and violations are not reported/recorded by responding police officers, the data will never reach the precinct, and certainly not CompStat. This results in flawed or omitted data that nullifies the purpose of CompStat. Filing a police report should be the right of all civilians, no matter how insignificant a violation may appear.”

In the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood, 59-year-old author Debbie Nathan stepped forward to tell her story of how she was sexually assaulted, but police downgraded her report to a misdemeanor.

On February 21, 2010, she said she was walking through Inwood Park, which contains one of the last old-growth forests in the city, when she was grabbed by a young man and pushed off the path. She tried to fight him off, but he pinned his arms at her sides. He told her his name was Michael and
he was 17. He was wearing a tan jacket. He was African American. He began masturbating against her body, had an orgasm, and fled.

“I was terrified for my safety and my life,” Nathan said.

Nathan quickly made her way out of the park to a cafe nearby and called the police. If they could arrive quickly enough, she felt there would still be time to catch him because there were only a few ways out of the park.

She waited at the cafe for 30 minutes, but the police didn’t arrive. At home, she called 911 again. No police. Another 45 minutes passed. No police. Finally after two hours had elapsed and she’d made three 911 calls, officers arrived.

Six officers went over her complaint. “I stressed that I was at all times overpowered,” she said. “The female officer, I thought she was acting weird. She wasn’t writing anything down.”

Nathan was basically interrogated for two hours. One of the cops told her they didn’t know how to classify the crime. They called the Special Victims Unit. Special Victims told them the crime was “forcible touching,” which is a misdemeanor.

Nathan argued with the officers. It was an attempted rape, a felony. “I argued that the force used against me, the masturbation and the veritable kidnapping constituted far more than a misdemeanor,” Nathan said.

The officers ignored her protests and left.

On February 22, Nathan called the Inwood Safety Forum, a citizens’ group that monitors neighborhood safety. That group called the local state assemblyman, Adriano Espaillat, and the 34th Precinct commander to complain.

After that, Nathan’s complaint was upgraded to felony attempted rape. At a packed community meeting, the precinct commander apologized to Nathan and promised an investigation.

“There were some breakdowns,” Deputy Inspector Andrew Capul, the precinct commander, said at the meeting, blaming miscommunication and inexperienced officers. “It should not have happened. We are conducting a more detailed investigation, and following through on this matter.”

When she got her complaint report, she couldn’t believe it. “My story had been scrubbed of everything except the fact that the perp grabbed me, pushed me and mentioned sex,” she said. “Almost every detail of the crime was missing from the report.”

The officers had left out her being overpowered and pushed into the woods, the duration of the assault, the masturbation. The report, she said, even said she had reported no sexual assault.

“After special victims downgraded my crime to a misdemeanor, an officer from my precinct tweaked my report so it described a misdemeanor,” she said. “They had written non-report to conform to a misdemeanor. They were so sloppy, they forgot to rewrite the report to conform to felony.”

Nathan said she was told by Assistant District Attorney Lisa Friel, chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s sex crimes unit, that there was no question that the crime she described was a felony.

Friel, Nathan said, interviewed the police officers involved and learned that they admitted to omitting many details from the report. “It is difficult to believe the omissions were accidental,” Nathan said.

Nathan said she spoke with rape crisis advocacy groups, which told her that her case was not unique, that it had been happening across the city over the past year and a half.

“The difference here was that I was a well-educated journalist, someone who knew how to get action,” she said.

Harriet Lessel, the director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, told the
Village Voice
that her group met with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly about three weeks before the Nathan story broke.

Lessel saw the downgrading of sex crimes as a growing problem in 2009 and 2010. “We have been hearing that this is something that has been happening more frequently,” Lessel said. “We feel that these programs are the canaries in the coal mine and we have brought it to the attention of the Police Commissioner. We are trying to figure out how to do something about it.”

She said the commissioner pledged to look into the issue and created an internal task force to study the problem.

“We’re seeing it as both a patrol and a special victims problem,” she said. “This is something that is going to take time. Things aren’t going to change after one meeting. And it’s in everyone’s best interest to have accurate statistics about rape, even if the numbers go up. How can we do what needs to be done if we’re not getting the right information from the start?”

Capul, the precinct commander, was transferred out of the command on May 2, 2010, and sent to Patrol Borough Manhattan North. And on this
issue, Kelly actually responded to the concern: Plans were set in motion for better training, and he ordered the city’s special victims unit to be involved in the investigation of every sex crime.

Other reports of crime downgrading filtered in. “This exact scenario happened to me earlier this year,” one commenter said. “I was assaulted and the police who reported to the scene as well as the detective assigned to my case turned the tables on me, as if I had done something wrong. The detective who did one of those ‘callbacks’ was very nasty and accused me of lying. He dropped the case.

“I even have an officer on recording saying that it’s not really an assault unless you’re bruised bloody and broken. I asked, so you’re telling me that anyone can walk up to you on the street in NYC and punch you in the face and you wouldn’t investigate that?”

A man talked about a being drugged and robbed in his apartment by men he took home from a gay club. “They took an astounding majority of the material possessions that I own, including a computer, phone, guitar, Wii, most of my jackets, clothes, shoes, underwear (no joke), cologne, and toothbrush (seriously),” he said. He gave personal information on the robbers to police, but they were unresponsive. “I filled out the initial inventory report of what was stolen, listing first a MacBook Pro that was taken. The police later stated that a computer was never reported missing and they tried to knock down a clear felony to a misdemeanor. I was ignored by police, my apartment was never printed, and I had to contact my city councilman to get them to contact me back.”

Meanwhile, the revelations of downgrading in Bed-Stuy’s 81st Precinct led to a sudden and shocking increase in the crime rate. After logging a 10.9 percent crime decline for all of 2009, crime in the precinct jumped by 13 percent for the first quarter of 2010. Observers said this was proof that downgrading had been going on in the 81st Precinct, and that the current scrutiny of the station house had made the precinct commanders more honest.

Someone obviously in city government sends an anonymous letter to City Councilman Vallone, claiming that the NYPD did not record murders in cases in which the district attorney was unable to charge anyone, listed burglaries as lost property, and lowered assaults and grand larcenies to misdemeanors.

“This game is played by every precinct commanding officers, and Kelly is very aware, but turns a blind eye,” the letter concluded. “The precinct
commanders know that if they don’t play they will not only lose their command, but will never see a promotion under this administration.”

These allegations were of course unconfirmed, and there was no record that they were investigated. But the letter, when combined with other allegations and anecdotal information, was a symptom of a larger problem and a signal that Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg had a problem.

A retired sergeant, Sean McCafferty, said the crime analysis unit in each precinct was the source for the manipulation of crime reports. “They get the report before the detective squad, and they would call the complainant and question them about their complaint,” he said. “CompStat has helped the department, but some people use it as a weapon. The commanding officers—their future depends on it.”

A police officer assigned to Manhattan said, “The cop writing the report is now cross-examining the victim. This insane CompStat pressure has turned a police officer who shouldn’t care about what the complaint is into a defense attorney. I’m all about letting the paperwork reflect the reality. Let’s just get it done and go on to the next job.”

Levitt, writing on June 21, noted that despite all the indicia of problems with CompStat over the years, Kelly had been able to “diffuse their political impact.” “While some people think Kelly’s greatest success lies in combating terrorism, his greatest accomplishment has actually been in closing the police department to outside scrutiny,” Levitt wrote. “Just think. When four mopes are charged with plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues in a case that smacks of entrapment [the FBI supplied the bombs and its informant promised the mopes $250, 000], the story is front page news because the plot was ‘terror-related.’

“But when a cop says that crimes are systemically being downgraded and that victims are encouraged not to file crime reports and he has the tapes to prove it, the police break down his door, take him in handcuffs to a Queens hospital, where he’s locked up in a psych ward for six days, a move that seems reminiscent of how things were done in the old Soviet Union.

“Where is the outcry in the media about what happened to Schoolcraft? Which politician has the guts to take on Kelly and Bloomberg and demand an outside investigation of the doctored crime stats?”

Schoolcraft’s strategy was quietly being duplicated in other precincts—and once again, the 81st. On April 1, 2010, a supervisor in the 81st Precinct wore a recorder in a meeting of bosses. From the recording, it was clear that in terms of the message from precinct commanders, little had changed. Mauriello and his new executive officer, Captain Alex Perez, called out officers by name they said hadn’t been producing enough summonses and arrests and noted the pressure coming down from above. Meanwhile, his executive officer identified the specific number of summonses and arrests his bosses wanted—20 per week per shift—and threatened to penalize any officer who didn’t hit the number. He indicated that the quota number was being demanded by the patrol borough command.

Referring to two precinct officers, Mauriello said, “They couldn’t get a collar in a laundromat, those guys.”

Mauriello went on to say, “Pass the word: I got a heads-up from somebody at 1PP [police headquarters]. From now on, they gonna look at any traffic stat and CompStat, and the [commanding officer] and my XO [executive officer] are gonna get our cojones busted in for patrol’s activity.”

“What happens is I’m going to shake it up,” Mauriello said later in the meeting. “That’s coming down the pike, but to step this up is I got an irate bureau chief [Deputy Chief Michael Marino] calling me up here yelling at me two days in a row about midnights and cell phones and this bullshit initiative.

“And now he’s going to grab platoon commanders and look at their evaluations and I look at the sergeants and I look at every cop in the squad and see what we’re giving them. That means I have to go down there and get my balls, cojones busted by these two guys telling me I don’t know how to run my command.

“So now—I will say right now—it’s not good to be a boss right now if your squad ain’t pulling weight,” he added. “Your squad ain’t pulling weight, that ain’t good.”

Captain Perez went on to specify the number of summonses required from each shift of officers, saying the number had been established at the borough command.

“They are counting seat belts and cell phones, double-parkers and bus stops,” he said. “If the day tours contributed with five seat belts and five cell phones a week, five double-parkers and five bus stops a week, okay.

“If I get the same numbers from the third platoon and whatever the midnight kicks in, it’s gravy,” he added. “You as the bosses have to demand this, and you have to count it. Your goal is five in each of these categories. . . . I’m not looking to break records here, but there is no reason we should be missing this number by 30 a week. That’s what your job is as bosses.”

Perez then told his sergeants and lieutenants that he had little problem punishing officers who did not “pull their weight.” He told them he was transferring three officers from days to the midnight tour.

“I don’t care about people’s families,” he said. “If they don’t want to do their job, their paycheck is taking care of their family. If they don’t realize that, they’re going to change their tour, they are going to start being productive if they want a tour that works for their family.

“When I identify who’s stealing, they are going to go to a different platoon,” he added. “If this job don’t work for them, they can find another job. That’s my attitude.”