The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (9 page)

BOOK: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
8.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Schoolcraft continued to get poor evaluations. In September, his bosses wrote, he “does not meet activity standards. He has been in numerous meetings with the squad sergeant and the precinct commander concerning his low activity.”

At the same time, Schoolcraft was picking up more and more evidence of unethical behavior on his recorder. During a September 12, 2008, roll call, a fellow cop told him that the commanders were downgrading robbery, a major crime, to petit larceny, a misdemeanor. “A lot of 61s, if it’s a robbery, they’ll make it a petty larceny. I saw a 61, at t/p/o [time and place of occurrence], civilian punched in the face, menaced with a gun, and his wallet was removed, and they wrote lost property.”

The quota pressure continued unabated. On October 28, Mauriello told the cops he would change their tours if they didn’t make their numbers. “If I hear about disgruntled people moaning about getting thrown off their tours, it is what it is. Mess up, bring heat on the precinct, you know what, I’ll give you tough love, but it doesn’t mean you can’t work your way back into good graces and get back to the detail and platoon you want.”

He added, “If you don’t work and I get the same names back again, I’m moving you. You’re going to go to another platoon. I’m done. I don’t want to be embarrassed no more.”

In the same roll call, a sergeant warned officers to make sure their appearance was within standards or else the inspections unit would come in and discipline them. “It keeps the hounds off,” he said. “That includes smirks. One smirk cost the whole borough 13 CDs last week.” (A CD is a Command Discipline, usually a light penalty of five vacation days for lesser misconduct.)

On the afternoon of Halloween that year, Mauriello was particularly aggressive about arresting anyone doing anything that might even come close to a crime. “Everybody goes. I don’t care. You’re on 120 Chauncey and they’re popping champagne? Yoke ’em. Put them through the system. They got bandannas on, arrest them. Everybody goes tonight. They’re underage? Fuck it.”

He added, “You’re on a foot post, fuck it. Take the first guy you got and lock them all up from 120 Chauncey. Boom. Bring ’em in. Log them. You’re going to go back out and process it later on.”

As the campaign went on into the winter of 2008, Mauriello seemed to be aware that there was some resentment in the community, but he justified the campaign by saying the “good people” were supportive. “Fuck ’em, I don’t give a shit,” he said on November 8, 2008. “They are going to come to a community council meeting, yell at me, whatever, I know the good people over there are happy we have officers there.”

A lieutenant followed up, telling the cops to be more aggressive. “If they don’t move, they are going to get out of control and think that they own the block. They don’t own the block. We own the block. They might live there, but we own the block. We own the streets here.”

All of Mauriello’s work under the Damocles sword of CompStat paid off, for him. In October 2008, Kelly promoted him from captain to deputy inspector, based on his achieving a crime reduction of 9 percent, increasing the number of arrests and qualify-of-life summonses, and winning a unit citation. His relationships with community leaders were also lauded.

Meanwhile, Schoolcraft wasn’t entirely happy with the quality of his recordings, and he bought a more sophisticated recorder. He spent $324.15 on an Olympus LS-10 Linear Recorder on Amazon.com and had it shipped to his home. His dossier on the precinct was getting thicker by the day.

Around that time, an aspiring screenwriter named Timothy Covell contacted the precinct to inquire about his complaint that he had been assaulted on October 23. Schoolcraft took the call. Covell complained that the officers seemed to discount his story. Schoolcraft asked him to supply a written account of the incident.

Covell faxed over a two-page description of what had happened on the evening in question. He said he was riding home on the J train, when four black teens got on at Marcy. The quartet left the train at the Myrtle stop, followed by Covell, who lived nearby. It was about 7:20 in the evening. Covell walked in the dark down Myrtle Avenue to Lewis, crossed the street, turned right on Pulaski, passed a bodega, and heard footsteps running toward him.

“I froze, and an instant later a male was on my back and a pair of arms was around my neck. My glasses flew off at the impact. I was hit in the face several times. I believe this was done by the male who grabbed me, while another male ran up past my right side and tore my side-bag from me. The
strap snapped immediately. A male voice yelled, ‘It’s empty!’ I was thrown to the ground, where I was punched and kicked by a number of people.”

Covell screamed for help. One of his attackers tried to cover his mouth, and they struggled. People looked on at this without doing anything. While choking him, his attackers grabbed for his cell phone and wallet. Just to get them to stop, he pulled the items out of his pocket and handed them over. The quartet took off down Pulaski.

He walked home alone. He had dried blood on his nose, bloodied wrists, and blood soaking through the back of his T-shirt. Once home, he canceled his cards and emailed a friend to send police to his apartment. A few minutes later, two 81st Precinct police officers arrived. He gave his account of the incident, declining their offer to go to the hospital because he did not have health insurance.

“I was asked if I could come down to the precinct and try to identify the attackers,” he wrote. “I responded that I could come down there, but I didn’t think that I could actually identify anyone, because it was dark when I was attacked, and I didn’t get a good look at anyone’s face.”

He wrote that one cop called it in, and a supervisor called back and they spoke for several minutes.

“Perhaps twenty minutes later, they called up on my intercom again,” he wrote. “I went downstairs to find Officer Deck standing outside of his car. He informed me that, since I couldn’t identify the people who had attacked me, his sergeant had the incident reported as ‘lost property.’ He apologized, saying, ‘I know this sucks.’ He then got back into his car, and I went back inside.”

Schoolcraft learned from one of the officers that the supervisor, a lieutenant, told him, “We can’t take this robbery.” To Schoolcraft, this was sinister. Here was a regular person getting viciously assaulted and robbed while just walking home from the train, and the police officers ignored his attempts to file a crime complaint and instead marked it noncriminal and walked away. Here was a real-world example of how CompStat and the pressure from 1 Police Plaza led directly to an injured civilian being mistreated and criminals left on the street to commit other crimes.

“This kind of thing is occurring in every precinct in the city,” said Marquez Claxton, the retired detective. “Another dodge is if the person who comes in
doesn’t have their ID, you don’t take the report. Every precinct in the city has a crime analysis unit, and they call the victims back and try to get them to change their story. If you leave your door unlocked and you’re burglarized, they’ll call it lost property, or instead of burglary, it becomes trespass and a larceny.

“What you’ll find is that in the current PD environment, the precinct commander has a lot more authority,” he said. “Now you have precinct commanders challenging the detectives on classification. That’s the mentality. There has to be an outside audit of the complaint reports to really get at the problem. If you give people a false sense of security, you create more victims.”

Schoolcraft’s activity report for November 2008 showed he was making an effort at the job. He took 36 radio runs, did 25 vertical patrols, and took 10 complaints. But he only wrote two parking tickets. The constant practice of pulling cops out of the precincts left him with just eight tours actually on patrol.

The drumbeat for low-level arrests continued. On November 23, 2008, he recorded: “If they’re on a corner, make ’em move. If they don’t want to move, lock ’em up. Done deal. You can always articulate [a charge] later.” Here, the sergeant was literally telling cops to make a nuisance arrest of people standing on a corner, a public space, for refusing to move.

On December 5, Schoolcraft picked up yet another example of downgrading: A teen was attacked by a gang of thugs who tried to steal his videogame player. He took the report as an attempted robbery, but his sergeant reclassified it as misdemeanor assault. “Why didn’t you call a supervisor over?” the sergeant asked. “We can’t take another robbery.”

In the December 8 roll call, Mauriello was extremely verbose, going on for ten minutes on various issues. “I’ll say one thing. My legacy in this place, if it’s another year, another week or whatever, is that I fucking, we fucking cleaned up Malcolm X, Bainbridge and Chauncey,” he said, describing himself as “old school.” “I’m an overachiever. I’m not an underachiever. Never will be. Never have. I’m an overachiever. Is that a curse? Yes. I expect everybody to at least try.”

He excoriated officers who failed to write enough tickets for double-parking, running red lights, and disorderly conduct, and those who failed to stop and frisk enough people.

“I see eight fucking summonses for a 20-day period or a month,” Mauriello said. “If you mess up, how the hell you want me to do the right thing by you? You come in, 5 parkers, 3 As, no Cs, and the only 250 you do is when I force you to do overtime? I mean it’s a two-way street out here.”

Later, he added, “In the end, I hate to say it, you need me more than I need you because I’m what separates the wolves from coming in here and chewing on your bones.”

In the same roll call, a sergeant added, “When I tell you to get your activity up, it’s for a reason because they are looking to move people, and he’s serious. . . . There’s people in here that may not be here next month. Just keep the hounds off.”

In 2008, Schoolcraft worked 62 hours of overtime, did 619 radio runs and 171 vertical patrols, made no felony arrests, made 3 misdemeanor arrests, wrote 35 tickets, did 37 stop and frisks, took 81 complaints, and wrote 72 domestic incident reports. Between all the tours he was pulled away for other assignments, he worked just 88 days on patrol.

As Mauriello’s career bloomed, Schoolcraft’s career was rotting. In December 2008, Schoolcraft received the lowest rating of his career from his immediate supervisor, Raymond Stukes—2.5 out of 5, or below standards.

In total, Schoolcraft had written 34 summonses for the year, an average of less than 3 a month.

Stukes wanted Schoolcraft transferred. “P.O. Schoolcraft’s poor activity is a direct result of his lack of innovativeness. He needs constant supervision. He performs his tasks idly. He is unwilling to change his approach to meeting the performance standards.”

He added, “The performance exhibited by P.O. Schoolcraft is well below standard. He frequently disregards adherence to activity standards of a New York City police officer.”

Mauriello agreed. “He has been counseled by both his squad supervisor and his platoon commander about his lack of drive. He has yet to show any improvement. I concur with the above evaluation,” the precinct commander wrote.

If one happened to average the 28 individual rating categories in the evaluation, Schoolcraft should have received a 3.4. After all, he received a 4 in 16 of the 28 categories. And yet, in NYPD math, it averaged to a 2.5.

If it was not already completely clear, the rating signaled to Schoolcraft that his bosses were after his job. He was furious with the rating, refused to sign it, and sent notice that he would appeal. He had been thinking about leaving New York for another police department, possibly in Arizona or New Mexico, but the bad evaluation would pretty much kill that idea. The realization set in that he was stuck in a bad place, and he didn’t know what to do.

CHAPTER 5

THE HUNTS POINT DIGRESSION

R
ight around the time that Schoolcraft was struggling with his commanders, a very similar thing was happening to an officer assigned to the 41st Precinct, which is in the high-crime Hunts Point section of the Bronx. His name was Adhyl Polanco, and he and Schoolcraft couldn’t be more different—or more similar.

Polanco was born fifteen hundred miles from New York in a small, dilapidated town in the Dominican Republic called San Francisco de Macorís. As a boy, he recalls waiting outside the wooden two-bedroom shack where he lived for his father, Ramon Polanco, to return home. In 1986, Ramon had followed the timeworn course of many Dominicans. He had gone off to New York to make money and send it home to the family.

Adhyl was being raised by his mother, along with two sisters and a brother. Polanco said the town was home to many people who later went into the narcotics business, often in New York. Narco dollars built houses and paid for paved streets and office buildings in the town.

“We were very poor,” he said. “This was when the drug dealers were in their prime. They would go to New York or somewhere in the U.S. and come back with millions of dollars. Some came back dead, including people in my family.”

In 1990, after four years of hard work, Ramon Polanco finally had made enough money to bring his family to New York. They settled in their grandmother’s cramped apartment in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, a largely Dominican enclave that was rife with drugs, crime, and poverty. Ramon worked hard as a waiter and a bus boy.

“We had to walk through the drug dealers to get to school,” Adhyl said. “There were three stash houses in the building. Everywhere you turned, there was crack—under the steps, in the alley. I saw a lot of shootings. I saw people shot, stabbed, people thrown off roofs. All of it was drug related. The thing with drug dealers is if they knew you lived there, they left you alone.”

At the time, Washington Heights was the home turf for a number of extremely violent drug gangs—the most notorious of which was the Wild Cowboys, which were credited, or blamed, with at least 50 killings in those years. The fruits of San Francisco de Macorís were visible on the streets of Washington Heights.

At some point, living with seven other people became too much for his grandmother, and she ordered the Polancos to find another place to live. Meanwhile, the restaurant cut Roman’s hours.

BOOK: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage
8.11Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Heirs of War by Mara Valderran
Kachina and the Cross by Carroll L Riley
Again (Time for Love Book 3) by Miranda P. Charles
Cold Blooded by Lisa Jackson
Crime in the Cards by Franklin W. Dixon
Next to Me by Emily Walker
Time and Chance by Sharon Kay Penman