The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (5 page)

BOOK: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
4.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

He ordered the surveillance of dozens of peaceful anti–Iraq War groups and instituted an overly harsh crackdown on protesters during the 2004 Republican Convention. He also closed off many of the routes that reporters had traditionally used to obtain public information.

Kelly could focus his attention on all of these things because crime continued to drop. Why mess with a good thing? In fact, Kelly expanded CompStat’s philosophy of tracking crime figures to other areas, including what he called “activity reports.” Spreadsheets can be used with any kind of numbers, and Kelly’s people began tracking the numbers of arrests and summonses of each unit in the city and, later, each cop in the city. They broadened what they were tracking to include stop and frisks, vertical patrols, community visits, and all manner of arcana. Soon, borough commanders were becoming concerned when the activity of a single police officer was down. This obsession with tracking statistics fit nicely with Bloomberg’s management philosophy. The mayor believed strongly in tracking “productivity” in his massive media and technology company, and he brought those principles to City Hall.

The murder rate—that all-important bellwether figure of a city’s health—dropped below 700 per year and kept going down. And Kelly was on his way
to becoming the longest-serving police commissioner in the city’s history and probably the most recognized cop in the country—more well known, maybe, than the director of the FBI. It seemed that every chance they got, Bloomberg and Kelly reminded New Yorkers about the crime decline. As Giuliani did before them, they distorted FBI crime stats and claimed New York was the “safest large city in the country.”

Meanwhile, the success of CompStat had spread across the country. Among other cities, Washington, D.C.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; Dallas; Detroit; Vancouver; Minneapolis; and Camden, New Jersey all adopted the strategy, or at least elements of it. CompStat even spread to London and Australia. By 2004, a third of the nation’s police departments with 100 or more officers had implemented CompStat, with another 25 percent planning to do so.

That success opened up career opportunities for many ranking NYPD officials. Maple formed a consulting company and demanded handsome fees for spreading the gospel in the New Orleans; Birmingham; Philadelphia; Newark; and Jackson, Mississippi police departments. Bratton moved to Los Angeles and brought CompStat there. Much of his “cabinet” also found jobs with other police departments: Chief John Timoney assumed the helm in Miami and Philadelphia; Wilbur Chapman took the reins in Bridgeport, Connecticut; Gary McCarthy was the Newark police chief before moving on to Chicago; Ed Norris ran the Baltimore Police Department. Even ex-mayor Giuliani got in on the CompStat gravy train, scoring a $4.5 million contract to bring the strategy to Mexico City after he left office in 2002.

Over more than a decade, then, Jack Maple’s modest proposal—the CompStat strategy—had burnished the careers of four police commissioners, two mayors, and countless underlings. It had influenced police chiefs across the country. It had generated scholarly articles and appeared in books. However, along the way, it had developed flaws that were, outside the police department, understood by very few people.

Some observers questioned the claims that CompStat led to the reduction in crime in New York City. There were attempts to attribute the crime drop to other things: fewer “crack babies,” more mandatory prison sentences, more cops on the streets. Economist Steven Levitt pointed out in 2004 that while the media credited new police strategies like CompStat, a better economy, and tougher prison sentences, he believes there were more
important factors, like the aforementioned massive funding for new police officers. Moreover, he noted that the sharp decline in crime was experienced across the nation, not just in New York, and in cities that didn’t follow the CompStat model—suggesting that there was more at play than just what was going on in one city. In what must have been viewed as sacrilege by the CompStat devotees, he argued that “innovative police strategy” had little or no effect on the crime decline.

In the beginning, crime was so out of control that once the NYPD committed to CompStat, it was easy to reduce the numbers, but as time went on, it got harder. At the same time, crime numbers became inextricably linked to career trajectory. Those two factors combined to provide an incentive to precinct commanders to fudge the numbers to look better in those CompStat meetings.

Perhaps the first public example—and there were more that did not filter out of the department—took place in 1995 when the
New York Daily News
obtained a memo written by the commander of the Bronx’s 50th Precinct that offered instructions to officers on how to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors. In 1996, the press reported on two rapes, a murder, and a shooting of a car thief by a cop that were not reported by the department. In 1996, the Bronx’s 41st Precinct commander was suspended for downgrading crime complaints and tossing—or “shitcanning”—other crime reports. Two years later, then-Commissioner Safir was forced to disclose that subway crime had been under-reported by 20 percent for years. That disclosure led to the forced retirement of the commanding officer of the transit unit.

In 1998, State Comptroller Carl McCall tried to audit NYPD crime statistics as part of a broader audit of all city agencies. The Giuliani administration fought the effort, sparking a nearly two-year court battle. McCall ultimately won in 1999, but the report he released in 2000 was tepidly done. It focused on a small number of complaints and found an “error rate” in reporting of less than 5 percent.

In 2002, once again in the Bronx’s 50th Precinct, a rape was logged as a lower crime. In 2003, the department disclosed that 203 felonies had been downgraded to misdemeanors in Manhattan’s 10th Precinct, and that in the 50th Precinct, again, in March 2003, police refused to take robbery complaints from restaurant delivery people.

By then, there were only these few episodes, which the NYPD quickly dismissed as both proof of the quality of its oversight and isolated cases by rogue commanders. But then, in March 2004, Leonard Levitt and Rocco Parascandola of
Newsday
reported on a series of questionable cases, including the punishment of an officer who refused to downgrade a felony to a misdemeanor, a former police official who had intervened to get detectives to take a report, a precinct commander who was discouraging robbery victims from reporting crimes, officers talking victims out of filing reports, and the reuse of crime complaint numbers. After the articles went to press, Patrick Lynch, president of the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA), the largest of the city’s police unions, and Ed Mullins, the head of the sergeants’ union, held a press conference and called on Kelly to investigate crime complaint manipulation across the city.

“With 5,000 fewer police officers than we had five years ago, we can no longer hold the line on crime, forcing local commanders to artificially hold down the crime statistics,” Lynch said in a written statement.

Mullins chimed in by pointing out that accurate information was one of the bedrock principles of CompStat. “Deployment of police resources is based on where and when crime is occurring so underreporting felony crime makes a neighborhood more dangerous for the community and the sergeants and police officers who patrol the area,” he said.

A month prior to these statements, 400 PBA delegates had issued a vote of no confidence in Kelly and called for his immediate resignation. That vote was sparked by other issues, including Kelly’s “draconian” disciplinary system and his handling of a police shooting of an unarmed civilian. Kelly’s people defended the 50th Precinct commander, flatly rejected the allegation that crime was being suppressed, and suggested that the union simply had an agenda to embarrass the commissioner. They also insisted that the NYPD carefully monitors crime reporting, and any unreported crimes are simply errors that rarely take place.

The NYPD was worried about articles attacking the accuracy of the crime statistics, and rightly so. The city’s entire reputation is underpinned by the accuracy of its crime stats. It is the most important bellwether of the city’s health, and low crime meant more tourists, more economic development,
more revenue. Any perception that crime was increasing, or that the numbers were inaccurate, could damage the city’s growth.

Lynch’s statements would prove to be the most powerful broadside over the crime stats, but they would go nowhere. Kelly rejected the call for an investigation, and no outside monitors stepped in to examine the crime numbers. Lynch never said another public word about manipulation of crime statistics. The City Council, which holds hearings at the drop of a hat, did nothing. The city and state comptrollers stayed out of it. The feds stayed out of it. The lone voice who did try at least to step up was Mark Pomerantz, then head of the Mayor’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption, a body formed by Giuliani following the Mollen Commission of 1992, which investigated corruption in the NYPD. By 2004, the commission was a gutted shell of its former self, confining itself to issuing reports on relatively minor issues and cloaking its activities in repressive secrecy.

Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor who had handled major cases, decided to take on Kelly and Bloomberg, and asked for NYPD records so the commission could examine whether crime was being downgraded to create the perception that things were better than they were. Kelly refused to cooperate, saying that Pomerantz was overreaching his authority, which of course he was not. Pomerantz complained to the Bloomberg administration, and he got the stiff-arm. Bloomberg turned his back on him, and Pomerantz, having been undercut, had to resign. After Pomerantz’s departure, the mayor’s commission became even less of what it was before. Some years, it released just one report, written in the most boring possible bureaucratic style as if its authors did not want anyone to read it.

Among the rank and file, the problems with CompStat were already fairly clear, but no one would really talk about it. In part, this was because keeping crime down made everyone look good, and just as there was an incentive at the top of city government for lower crime numbers, so was there an incentive at the bottom, among the line patrol officers, sergeants, and lieutenants, to go along with the agenda of the precinct commanders. As Robert Zink, the secretary for the PBA, wrote in a 2004 essay for the union’s newsletter, “When you finally get a real handle on crime, you eventually hit a wall where you can’t push it down any more. CompStat does not recognize
that wall, so the commanders have to get creative to keep their numbers going down.”

Well aware that their careers were on the line, commanders evolved a series of techniques to “fudge” the numbers and trained their line supervisors—the sergeants and lieutenants—on how to do it. Zink wrote, “How do you fake a crime decrease? Don’t file reports, misclassify crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, under-value the property lost to crime, and report a series of crimes as a single event. A particularly insidious way to fudge the numbers is to make it difficult for people to report crimes—in other words, make the victims feel like criminals so they walk away just to spare themselves further pain and suffering.”

The manipulation of crime statistics wasn’t confined only to New York, and CompStat—and some of the very same methods noted by Zink—fueled downgrading scandals that took place in other cities. In 2001, a Philadelphia newspaper exposed how 1,700 rape cases were dumped into a vague classification that allowed the Philadelphia Police Department to not count them as offenses. The scandal caused an overhaul of how rape cases were investigated. In October 2003, five New Orleans police officers were fired and a sixth demoted for downgrading crime complaints. A 2004 audit of the Atlanta police showed that 22,000 police reports of 911 calls vanished in 2002. In 2008, Detroit Police Chief James Barnes was fired after the department and the city medical examiner’s office were caught classifying homicides as “self-defense and suicide.”

In 2009, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement blamed chronic under-reporting of crime in the Miami Police Department on the pressures of CompStat. In Dallas, police were caught classifying people beaten with lead pipes as simple assault rather than aggravated or felony assault. Baltimore police were caught classifying a multiple shooting as a single incident. In other words, if six people were shot, that would be counted as a single shooting, rather than six shootings. The Baltimore Police Department was also downgrading the value of stolen property to classify thefts as misdemeanors, rather than felonies. By April 2010, the Baltimore police commissioner, Fredrick Bealefeld, was canceling CompStat meetings while he weighed changes to the management strategy based on complaints that the method led to browbeating of commanders and manipulation of crime statistics.

The irony was that while these disclosures in other cities led to investigations, hearings, firings, suspensions, and reforms, the CompStat scandals in New York had little or no effect on the NYPD, Kelly, or Bloomberg. Logically, if it was happening elsewhere, it had to be happening in New York, too. Sure, a few commanders got transferred or retired, but there was never any searching investigation of the numbers, nor did any outside agencies ever have the courage or will to do any comprehensive examination of the numbers. And unlike the Serpico years and the Mollen Commission, the city’s newspapers and television outlets largely stayed on the sidelines. There were articles here and there, but nothing powerful enough to embarrass the mayor into doing anything about it. The few canaries in the coal mine who did hop forward were suffocated by the NYPD’s rhetorical stone wall. And Kelly became the city’s longest-serving police commissioner, his power only continued to increase, and his job approval ratings remained routinely higher than those of Bloomberg.

In short, if Ray Kelly was at the top of the NYPD, sitting behind his Teddy Roosevelt desk, running the war against terror, Adrian Schoolcraft was close to the bottom, making his anonymous rounds along forgotten streets, just another cop in the blue bag they call a uniform. Eventually, the journeys of the two men would collide.

BOOK: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
4.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym
Beneath a Trojan Moon by Anna Hackett
Be My Baby by Meg Benjamin
I Drove It My Way by John Healy
Battle Earth V by Thomas, Nick S.