The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (16 page)

A
drian Schoolcraft’s complaint to Internal Affairs had been percolating through the system for two months. IAB was aware that none other than David Durk had been used as an intermediary, but they hadn’t responded to his August letter. Finally, things started to happen. Schoolcraft received a call from a Lieutenant Michael Brill of the Quality Assurance Division (QAD). Brill wanted to speak with him about his allegations of crime downgrading . They traded phone messages, and then Schoolcraft got a notification to appear on the morning of October 7 at the QAD offices at 300 Gold Street in Brooklyn.

It would be a formal interview, which meant that Schoolcraft had to be absolutely truthful. If he lied, QAD would bring him up on administrative charges and get him fired, or worse, would file criminal charges against him for filing a false report. He was well aware of the stakes of the meeting. He had been secretly recording in his precinct for more than 18 months. He had been collecting records of crime complaints. He had been making notes in his memo book of issues in the precinct. And now, he would be breaking the blue wall of silence, going outside of his command, and reporting all of this to official investigators.

On October 6, the night before the meeting, Adrian talked over strategy with his father, and a portion of their conversation was reproduced in a subsequent Internal Affairs report.

“Let it all out,” Larry said at one point. “Never let them know that you’re doing this for revenge. . . . Don’t direct it to just one supervisor. It’s a problem as a whole and that you’re concerned and that you want to address it that way. Get in there and tell your story. Don’t show them everything. Show them a little at a time.”

“That’s what he wants me to do,” Adrian replied. “Go crying. I would be suing the NYPD and it would be some motherfucker from Corporation Counsel handing out cookie-cutter bullshit, but you’re right, this is the way to fuck him over and it benefits us because if they do something and we go to civil court and say well look, they even said he was wrong.”

In isolation this comment sounds like Adrian is planning on using the QAD meeting as a way to get back at Mauriello for giving him the poor evaluation. Indeed, these statements were later used by IAB to accuse Schoolcraft of setting the whole thing up to angle toward a lawsuit.

They then talked about misclassifying complaint reports. Adrian rehearsed answers he might give. “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe this only happens in minority neighborhoods. None of these guys came to my aid. Fuck them. We just worked together so that we didn’t have to work with any niggers.”

This remark was included in the subsequent IAB report specifically to suggest that Schoolcraft was a racist, though it wasn’t explicitly stated. Larry said later that Adrian used the word, but only in the context of imitating how other white cops spoke to each other.

He went on. “He wants to talk about bigger issues, which are chronic, systematic problems,” Adrian told his father. “I’m not looking for vengeance or to get anyone in trouble or I’m not here for retaliation, it just has to stop. It’s happening in minority communities where people have no voice. . . . I’m not looking to burn anyone; it’s not coming from the bottom.”

Later these excerpts were used by IAB to accuse Schoolcraft of setting up the NYPD, but both Adrian and Larry vehemently denied any such plot.

“Absolutely not,” Larry said later. “There was no conspiracy to sue the NYPD. We were talking about his appeal of the evaluation and whether he would have to file court papers to get his job back if they tried to get rid of him.”

The following day, Schoolcraft drove to the QAD offices in Brooklyn. There, he was greeted by one of the QAD supervisors. The two men had an
informal conversation, with the QAD cop offering a frank assessment about the extent of crime statistic manipulation in the NYPD. Schoolcraft told the officer he brought some samples of crime report manipulation with him. “I don’t want to come in here as a disgruntled employee,” he said. “I want to fix the problem. Let’s make the 8-1 an example of how to fix it.”

“You’re not unfortunately the first individual who’s come down and, you know, presented us with information and some of those instances have been substantiated,” the officer said.

When Adrian wondered whether such instances could be crimes, the officer said that prosecutors are hesitant to file charges. “I’ve sat down with the DAs on a couple of occasions, outlining this is what we had, do they want to proceed. More often than not, they don’t want to touch it. They’ll give it back to the department to handle it internally. But you’re right. It’s an official department record. It’s falsifying business records, so to speak.”

This officer added, “You know, I’ve been doing this over eight years, I’ve seen a lot. The lengths people will go to try not to take a report, or not take a report for a 7 major. So nothing surprises me anymore.”

Schoolcraft was ushered into a meeting room, where he found a deputy inspector named Abramo, a lieutenant, and three sergeants. He spoke with them for three hours, carefully detailing each questionable crime report and providing the backup documents. Though the interview was not conducted under oath, Schoolcraft knew that if he lied, he could face departmental and even criminal charges.

“I’ve noticed this has progressively been getting worse,” he said. “2008 is the year I think we really need to look at. 2009 I’ve seen the same thing. I’ve seen the walk-ins come in and say where’s my report. I need this, the insurance company needs this, and we’re looking for it, and it doesn’t exist.

“I think this is a public safety issue, and I think it involves the safety of the police officers by these supervisors not taking these felony reports. It’s a disservice to the public, and it dumbs down the police force. They twist my head. I don’t know what a grand larceny is, or a robbery. I mean I know what a robbery is, but they twist it around your head so much.”

Schoolcraft described how lieutenants responded to every major crime that took place in the precinct by looking over the shoulder and second-guessing
officers taking reports. He related one incident where a sergeant told him to rewrite robbery complaint as a misdemeanor assault because “we can’t take another robbery.”

The incident in question took place on December 15, 2008. A group of thugs accosted a young man and demanded his Playstation. When he refused they beat him severely. Looking through their computer records, QAD was able to confirm that the demand for the Playstation was deleted from the final report, justifying the lower assault charge.

“I remember him shaking his head,” Schoolcraft said. “I scratched out another one. I don’t know what I changed if I changed anything. I gave it to him and he said, ‘We can’t take this.’ ”

The sergeant was not at fault, he added. “It’s coming from the top. It’s a closed environment that enables this corruption. Someone’s benefitting from this. I don’t know who, I don’t claim to know who. I’m just a street patrolman. I get their name, number, who are you, what happened.”

He told the story of a woman who needed a report for a stolen car to give to her insurance company. She called and visited the station house numerous times but never got her report. He described how, after two men filed a stolen car report, Mauriello said, “I’m not taking this,” and called them into his office where a loud argument could be overheard. The men stormed out of the office, yelling and screaming. He told them about a man who reported that $22,000 had been stolen from his apartment. The police first told the man that it’s more of a civil matter, not a crime. Then, they send him to another precinct.

In another incident, a victim came in to look at mug books. Schoolcraft sent him upstairs, but the detectives sent him back downstairs because he didn’t have a complaint number. “They told him, you can’t look at pictures without a complaint number,” he said. “I don’t know what that means, but that’s what they said.”

He described another incident in which a man was punched by three men during a robbery. Two days later, when he went to the station house, the report had disappeared.

He related how officers were repeatedly told to refer robbery victims to the detectives, rather than take the report in the street.

He talked about a 2008 case in which a patrol responded to a man who was beaten bloody. A lieutenant arrived on the scene and said, “We can’t take
this robbery.” The case was reported as “lost property.” Schoolcraft contacted the victim, who wrote up an account that said he was jumped by several men who took his wallet and cell phone.

“We get a lot of stolen computers. The first thing the desk says, how old was it? It’s too old. That’s petit larceny. It’s not worth anything, that’s not exactly the truth, because the data on the computer is also valuable.”

The meeting ended with a promise from QAD to investigate the allegations. Abramo thanked Schoolcraft for his courage in coming in. “We’re very serious about this and we will do a thorough investigation,” Abramo said. “That I can promise you. If we’re finding that they are not taking seven major crimes, I can tell you that the police commissioner, Deputy Commissioner Farrell, we take it very seriously, and there will be disciplinary measures taken. It’s not taken lightly at all.”

As Adrian left, one of the men in the meeting said, “Just to educate you, they fudge crime to show a reduction. That’s what this whole thing is. Everyone wants to show a decrease in crime. It’s what Kelly wants, it’s what Bloomberg wants, which is why sometimes people have agendas to try to do what they can to avoid taking a seven major crime. Shame on them for doing what they shouldn’t be doing.”

That investigation was supposed to be secret, and Schoolcraft was assured that his bosses would not know the source of the allegations. But it’s fairly clear that Mauriello soon found out that Schoolcraft had spoken to QAD.

Around October 13, in an effort to get precinct bosses off his son’s back, Larry called a Bloomberg administration official. “I told her, listen, someone is going to get hurt,” Larry recalled, the subtext being that Adrian was being retaliated against by his bosses. “They took his guns, they put him on some kind of modified duty, he’s on the desk, and he doesn’t know what his duties are supposed to be. This is no way to run a railroad.”

According to Larry, she replied by asking what he wanted them to do. Larry responded, “Do your job.”

She evidently called the police commissioner’s office, because Larry got a call from a Sergeant Bonilla, who was assigned at the time to Kelly. When the call came in, Larry was walking through an Albany shopping mall.

“Bonilla calls and says the deputy mayor’s office called us and now we are responding to your complaint,” Larry said. “I was really ticked.
I told him something bad was going to happen. There are rules and policies. You can’t just do what you want to do. If this is legit, it has to be documented.”

“There doesn’t have to be anything in writing, he just needs to do what he’s told,” Bonilla told him, according to Larry.

“Whatever he’s told?” Larry asked.

“Whatever he’s told,” Bonilla replied.

“I was shocked,” Larry said later. “Here I was trying to stop this thing before it got worse, and he wouldn’t do anything.”

Bonilla then called Schoolcraft and said something similar, according to his memo book notes.

In the context of this story, these conversations are extremely significant. They show that both the mayor’s office and the police commissioner’s office were aware of the brewing problem in the 81st Precinct. Bonilla certainly must have documented the conversation with Larry and Adrian and put it in a file somewhere, and it’s not out of the question that he also probably told a superior about it. It is logical that someone in Kelly’s office would have called the precinct and maybe looked into whether there were any open investigations. However, nothing changed for the better.

Instead, it got worse for Schoolcraft. The following day, the NYPD placed him on “Level 1 Performance Monitoring” because of his low activity. Technically, the decision was made by a personnel unit, but Schoolcraft suspects that Mauriello had recommended the move. Schoolcraft had been sitting behind a desk for seven months, unable to do any enforcement activity, as a result of his restricted duty designation, but that didn’t seem to matter. The designation meant his work would be closely scrutinized by his bosses, and they would try to motivate him to work more.

Schoolcraft saw this move as another turn of the screws to place him under even more pressure. He walked into Mauriello’s office and demanded, “What’s the number?”

On October 19, perhaps because of the messages from IAB to Schoolcraft being left in the station house, Lieutenant Caughey issued a memo ordering all officers to direct all Internal Affairs contacts to him.

On October 20, Sergeant Scott of Internal Affairs called Schoolcraft at the precinct office, which is certainly not a good idea because of the danger
that other officers would find out that he was talking to IAB. The same day, a sergeant from QAD also called.

That very same day, in Washington, Mauriello was honored in a speech entered into the Congressional Record by Representative Edolphus Towns. “Madam Speaker, today I rise in recognition of Steven Mauriello, Deputy Inspector of the 81st Precinct and honorable public servant.” The honor is not uncommon for local politicians looking to curry favor with the NYPD and their precinct commanders.

The next day, Schoolcraft was interviewed on the phone by Internal Affairs.

Three days later, in the roll call, which Schoolcraft recorded, cops were again told not to take robbery complaints, but to make people go to the station and talk to the detectives. The drumbeat demanding activity continued, and Schoolcraft’s bosses continued to keep a close watch on him.

On October 27, Schoolcraft visited Lamstein, the NYPD psychologist, again. She told him to get more medical attention and stress management counseling.

On October 28, Larry Schoolcraft called the mayor’s office to report “repeated and continuing instances of corruption within the precinct.” It remains unclear what happened to this complaint.