The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (6 page)

CHAPTER 3

BED-STUY: DO OR DIE

B
y the end of his eight months at the Police Academy, Schoolcraft earned a fairly good rating of “competent” to “highly competent.” He scored an average of 91 on academy exams, placing him high in the class. Not bad for a guy who didn’t really want to become a cop in the first place.

Rookie police officers out of the academy are immediately sent to what is known as Operation Impact—one of Kelly’s patrol initiatives. In the Safir era, there was the Street Crime Unit (SCU)—plainclothes cops patrolling high-crime neighborhoods—but it collapsed in 1999 when four officers approached a young immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo, mistook his wallet for a gun, and fired 41 shots at him. Diallo was struck 19 times and died. The officers were later acquitted of murder charges, but the SCU was eventually disbanded by Kelly.

Kelly had Impact, which, from the lofty heights of the fourteenth floor at 1 Police Plaza, essentially looked like sending clouds of rookie cops into high-crime areas to bolster the ranks of veteran precinct patrol officers. The program got plaudits, but as Schoolcraft would soon learn, it also had its problems down at street level. His path into Impact took him to the 75th Precinct in the East New York section of Brooklyn, a place where they dumped bodies back in the mob days, a place that had been crippled by the crack wars of the 1980s and 1990s, and had 125 murders in one particular year. At any rate, on January 1, 2002, Schoolcraft reported for duty at
the 75th Precinct. The NYPD was nothing if not obsessive about bureaucracy: His personnel card lists that he was issued shield number 12943, Patrol Guide 342563, handcuffs number 453802, and ID card 057143.

Michael Marino happened to be the precinct commander of the 75th Precinct at the time. If Schoolcraft looked like a guy who could walk through a brick wall if he wanted, Marino actually did and loved it. He was a hard-charging macho guy who liked lifting weights. His career burnished by the CompStat model, he would eventually rise to deputy chief, and he would become a hugely important character in the life of Adrian Schoolcraft seven years later, but at the time, the two men had no interaction. Schoolcraft was just another rookie, thrown into the streets of the 75th Precinct on foot without much supervision. He was told to just go out and write summonses—or tickets—for low-level offenses. Every so often, during the tour, a field sergeant would wander along and sign his memo book.

This was Schoolcraft’s first indoctrination to the NYPD’s unwritten quota system. He was supposed to write a certain number of summonses and make a certain number of arrests each month—and his “productivity” was closely tracked, even as the NYPD insisted up and down that there was no quota system. At that point, he went along with the program. He really had no choice—as a rookie fresh out of the academy, aka a “probationary” officer, he had no job protection. He could be fired for anything.

“Quotas have always been a part of the Police Department for as long as I can remember,” Marquez Claxton, a retired detective and director of the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, told me. “When I started in the NYPD in 1985 in the 28th precinct, our quota was 20 parking summonses, 5 moving violations and two arrests.”

Indeed, in the 1973 movie
Serpico
, during a roll call in one of the very first scenes, the tour commander said, “Now we want summonses, summonses, summonses.”

That was 35 years ago. The difference in the Kelly era, Claxton said, is there were “quotas for everything.” The CompStat model means numbers alone gauge the success of fighting crime. “It’s like factory work. The difficulty is that you can’t quantify prevention. There is no number which says I stopped seven burglaries today. People have made careers out of summonses and arrests, but that’s not even the main component of police work.

“A lot of cops come on the job to have relationships with the community, to be public servants,” he said. “But in today’s PD, the officers are ostracized unless they have their numbers. You’re punishing officers who say their job is not to be the hammer.”

The other problem with quotas is that they take the discretion away from street cops. “Not everybody who violates a rule needs to be summonsed,” Claxton said. “You can talk to them. You can give them a warning.”

Schoolcraft was surprised at the relative lack of supervision of this group of rookie officers by the precinct bosses. Other police departments assigned a field training officer to each new recruit, who then learned on the job over a significant period of time, but not the NYPD. He had his quota. He was supposed to write tickets. He would get an occasional drive-by from a boss, and that was it. He got through it well enough, and the stint ended as quietly as it began. This was his first encounter with the contradiction between the mass public perception of how the NYPD operates, based on television and the movies, and the reality of how it really works. A patrol officer’s work is usually incredibly mundane and bureaucratic. Standing on a corner. Working a traffic detail. Spending time in Times Square or another tourist-heavy area. Filling out paperwork triplicate. Filing carbon copies in the right inboxes. Cleaning the patrol car of garbage. Making sure you use the right color ink. Babysitting a drug addict or a homeless guy in the hospital. Getting upbraided because you don’t have your required whistle holder on your belt.

Still, his work was rated “competent,” and “highly competent” in two areas: police ethics/integrity and comprehension. “P.O. Schoolcraft is very respectful to supervisors and peers,” Sergeant John McCarthy’s evaluation read. “He responds to all jobs on his post in a timely manner.”

After eight months in East New York, Schoolcraft had aged out of Impact and would now be sent to another command. He would have no choice in the decision. He got the message via Finest—an internal NYPD teletype system that announced personnel changes: who was being transferred, reassigned, charged, suspended, and promoted. The Finest system was the ultimate flat-toned arbiter of rising and failing careers in the NYPD. His new command would be the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. It was still unclear whether that was bad or good.

The piece of land in central Brooklyn known as Bedford-Stuyvesant began life as a forest of great oaks thence converted to pasture land hewn by Dutch farmers. The name derives from two of the early towns in the area, Bedford Village and Stuyvesant Heights, the latter of which was named for Peter Stuyvesant, a governor of the Dutch colony in New York known as New Netherlands.

The farms gave way to wood-framed houses for working- and middle-class immigrants from Europe, and as the population swelled, by 1890, the wood-framed houses gave way to brownstones.

As time passed, the neighborhood became largely African American, a cultural, economic, and religious hub for black families who had emigrated from the south and then left the overcrowding of Harlem for better, less expensive housing.

Things started to go bad, and the fortunes of the neighborhood suffered, most notably in a surge of gang violence beginning in the early 1960s. Bed-Stuy became a touchstone for many of the great racial and economic issues dividing the nation through the 1960s and 1970s, including the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school dispute, which pitted black parents against largely white and Jewish teachers.

In 1964, a riot that started in Harlem after a police officer shot and killed a black teen named James Powell spread to Bed-Stuy, causing the burning and looting of many white- and Jewish-owned shops. The tension between African Americans and the police was constant. Ironically, the 79th Precinct, which also covered a part of Bed-Stuy, was one of just three precincts that staffed some black patrol officers.

The social ills in the neighborhood were so problematic that after the 1964 election, Robert F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator representing New York, ordered a study of Bed-Stuy because it received little federal funding despite being the city’s largest black community. The findings inspired a new wave of community groups, and Kennedy’s ideas were used in similarly afflicted neighborhoods across the country.

Bed-Stuy also became a voting rights battleground. In 1965, Andrew Cooper, an African American journalist, filed a lawsuit alleging racial gerrymandering. He alleged that five surrounding congressional districts had divided up the neighborhood to dilute the black vote so white politicians
could remain in office in each district. He won the lawsuit, and the resulting Twelfth Congressional District votes selected Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress. Chisholm went on to a distinguished career on Capitol Hill.

A second round of race riots took place in 1967 and 1968, caused by high unemployment, poor housing, and civil rights issues. Yet another devastating riot took place during the 1977 blackout. Some 130 stores were either burned or looted or both, and some of the scars were visible for many years.

Bed-Stuy became a cultural touchstone, featured in
The French Connection
,
NYPD Blue
,
RFK
, and five Spike Lee films, including
Do the Right Thing
(1989), which portrayed the racial tension of the time. The comedian Chris Rock produced and starred in a sitcom about his life as a teen in Bed-Stuy from 1982 to 1987, and Dave Chappelle filmed
Block Party
there. Hip-hop and rap stars from the neighborhood include Jay-Z, Lil’ Kim, The Notorious B.I.G., Mos Def, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and for them, the neighborhood served as the metaphor for the tough urban milieu. “I rely on Bed-Stuy to shut it down if I die,” B.I.G. raps on a Lil’ Kim track. In a 2005 track, Young Jeezy raps, “I’m from even where the dead die, but try and do it big like the kid from Bed-Stuy.”

The streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant have been angry, buildings have burned, drugs beset the corners, gunshots echoed in the night. But as the 1990s progressed, crime dropped in Bed-Stuy, as it did across the city, and this began to have profound effects in the neighborhood. As the new century began, as Adrian Schoolcraft moved closer toward his destiny, Bed-Stuy found itself in the beginnings of a new demographic movement—whites priced out of Manhattan and even the tonier areas of Brooklyn, like Prospect Park, began to migrate into the neighborhood, attracted by the brownstones and tree-lined streets. That gentrification had the effect of pushing out lower-income blacks, but it also resulted in the renovation of abandoned properties and a swell of new businesses, and it made the neighborhood more diverse ethnically and economically.

In July 2003, knowing little of the rich history of the neighborhood, Schoolcraft arrived at the 81st Precinct station house, a low-slung utilitarian fortress, with small windows all the better for defending and a walled parking lot on one end, along Ralph Avenue, a two-lane roadway set between the
C subway line along Fulton and the J and Z lines along Broadway. The station house sat across from a Baptist church and a school that had seen better days.

The architectural style of the building seemed to combine elements of 1970s school, 1980s penitentiary, and 1990s neighborhood fortress. Other than running water and electricity, the structure literally had no frills. It was just a block of concrete cubes that someone had tried to dress up with blue and white paint and vending machines, maybe to make it seem like a place where one would remotely want to be. Outside the lot, cops parked their civilian cars wherever they could. Often, they left them on the sidewalk. One window set into the steel front door was cracked, and there was probably a good story about how it happened. Ralph Avenue was a key artery for folks, high and low, through the area, but it had its share of boarded up storefronts, and the first flush of gentrification had only begun to sweep through the once majestic brownstones and walkups along the side streets.

The 81st Precinct is a 1.7-square-mile trapezoid, geographically one of the smallest precincts in the city, but it contains about 70,000 residents. At the time that Schoolcraft began his work there, it had an air of both rising fortunes and fallen aristocracy. The old touchstone buildings remained—the gothic heights of Boys and Girls High School, the curved turrets of the Renaissance and Alhambra apartment houses, the ranks of dignified brownstones, the peaked elegance of the John Wesley United Methodist Church—but crack violence had left its scars in urine-stained hallways of yellowing tenements, in the dented doors and grimy floors of the Brevoort Houses, in the suspicious bustle late at night on Ralph and Chauncey. In the meantime, the cost of living in Manhattan and wealthier Brooklyn neighborhoods like Prospect Heights was pushing pioneers into those rows of brownstones.

Among cops, the 81st Precinct had a certain reputation, accompanied by its own peculiar slang. The 81st Precinct was not a “hook house,” like the 1st Precinct in Manhattan’s financial district. To get assigned to the first, you needed a “hook,” a connection, a rabbi, to get you in those doors. Nor was it a glamour precinct, like Midtown South or Central Park or the 19th Precinct on the Upper East Side. Nor was it an easy, low-crime precinct like the 122nd in Staten Island or the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens. And it didn’t have any particular political juice, like the heavily orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn’s 66th Precinct.

The cops there labored in grim anonymity. The place had its share of horrific crimes, sure, but they rarely merited attention in the tabloids. Folks expected crime in Bed-Stuy. The robbery-assaults. The drug-fueled shootings. The odd slashing. These were poor folks killing poor folks, druggies killing druggies. It was an outpost, about as far as you can get from City Hall and still be within city limits, or that’s how the cops viewed it.

If the precinct was known for anything, it was as a dumping ground for benighted cops, for cops with no rabbi, for cops in trouble with headquarters, for cops who ran afoul of a boss, for cops who had the black spot on them. Its most famous alum was Frank Serpico, the 1970s-era whistle-blower, and even he was reviled before and after his information resulted in a huge corruption scandal that turned the department upside down.