The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (35 page)

The victim subsequently confirmed that he felt that Mauriello was “interrogating” him and doubted he was telling the truth.

The report should have been an auto theft, not an “unauthorized use of a vehicle.” They also found that Mauriello’s account contradicted that of the victim and his cousin and wasn’t credible.

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Investigators also recommended charges against a sergeant who told officers on Mauriello’s orders not to take robbery reports if victims refused to return to the station house. Though the remark was on the Schoolcraft recordings, she initially denied ever saying that. Mauriello denied issuing any such order.

Investigators learned that no report was ever taken for the incident that led to the sergeant’s order.

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After a woman reported a knifepoint robbery, another precinct sergeant told cops, “If no surveillance cameras show her getting robbed, she’s going to be locked up.” In essence, cops were pressuring her not to file the complaint. She got frustrated, and no report was filed.

Investigators concluded that two officers failed to take the report, and the sergeant failed to follow up. All three cops are facing possible charges.

As to Schoolcraft’s claims that Mauriello and one of his lieutenants repeatedly ordered cops to downgrade index crimes, investigators examined hundreds of complaints and found several dozen misclassified reports.

In their interviews with QAD, Mauriello and precinct supervisors still denied there was any extensive manipulation of crime reports. Another signal of the obsession with CompStat in the precinct was that Mauriello was reviewing crime reports on a daily basis—not really the job of a commanding officer.

For his part, Mauriello denied the allegations and denied calling crime victims to question them on their reports.

When the precinct upgraded complaints, and that was rare, they usually waited a month, making it highly unlikely they could solve the crime.

“This represents a severe delay in accurate crime reporting and calls into question the motive for changing the classification” after so much time had passed, the investigators wrote. “This was more than just administrative error.”

Overall, investigators wrote that they found “severe deficiencies in the overall crime reporting process as a whole.”

“The investigation revealed the lengths that some members of the command went to, in order to avoid index crime reports,” investigators concluded, going on to describe a “reluctance” to submit index crime reports. Since it was Mauriello’s ultimate responsibility, investigators cited a “serious failure” in his command.

Schoolcraft should be credited with bringing to light a series of issues related to crime reporting, a police source said.

“Mauriello saw it as a numbers game,” the source said. “There was no evidence he gave direct orders, but he was influencing members not to take reports or would fly off the handle at them.”

Overall, the practice was certainly more widespread than the department admitted, this official said. “It really falls on the supervisors to follow the rules,” the source said.

The general rule? “Even if the victim does not cooperate, you still take the report. It’s wrong not to take the report.”

In the aftermath of the report’s disclosure, the problem that confronted the police department, given the new revelations, was that it had already sharply limited the charges against Mauriello, the two sergeants, and the two officers to misclassifying just two crime reports. Even as they did that, someone in the agency had to know that the problems were more widespread in
the precinct based on the QAD report. And logically, then, it was likely to be happening in other precincts. Yet no broader review was ordered. This was a stunning contradiction that has yet to be explained at this writing.

The revelations of the QAD report caused a stir. “In our view, the results of the 81st Precinct investigative report completely vindicate Adrian Schoolcraft,” said Norinsberg. “The report leaves no doubt that crime statistics have been flagrantly and deliberately manipulated so as to create an utterly false portrait of crime levels in the 81st Precinct. . . . And this is no isolated incident.

“The fact that the NYPD knew about a report that wholly vindicated Adrian’s claims, but never released to the public—much less acknowledged its existence—is disgraceful and a complete betrayal of the trust of the people of New York,” he added. “Rather than attacking Adrian’s credibility, the NYPD should have commended this officer’s courage in coming forward—at great risk to himself and his own career—to expose the dishonesty and fraud which was taking place at the 81st Precinct.”

Anything Kelly had done to date, he said, was “nothing more than window dressing.” Neither Kelly nor his spokesmen responded to these statements.

Mauriello’s union representative, Roy Richter of the Captains Endowment Association, pointed out that the former precinct commander was charged with obstructing the taking of a single auto theft report, the point being that if there was anything worse, he would have been charged with it.

“It’s important to note that Mauriello was not charged in any administrative action, related to the broad conclusions that are contained in the report,” Richter said. “Prior to the investigation, his command was rated very highly in previous crime statistics audits. We will challenge the charges against him. We feel he’s been wrongly charged.”

And then we come to the reaction from John Eterno and Eli Silverman, the two criminologists whose surveys of retired police commanders on CompStat had been attacked not only by the NYPD but by the
Daily News
editorial page as well.

“How in good conscience NYPD could continue to attack Adrian Schoolcraft and our research is beyond shame; it is revolting,” they wrote. “The evidence of a problem with NYPD culture is obvious to any person
who looks at the mountains of evidence. Apparently, the NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg are in complete denial. The NYPD needs a complete overhaul. A neutral outside investigative body with subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity is needed. Let’s stop the charade and get it done.”

Browne, in keeping with his practice, told the
Daily News
that it wasn’t unusual for such reports to stay confidential. He insisted that the report was proof the NYPD took Schoolcraft’s claims seriously. He said nothing else.

When he learned about these conclusions, Schoolcraft did not react quite as dramatically as everyone else. He was actually a little bit disappointed in the result. “What I was giving them were just examples of things that had happened,” he said later. “I was hoping they would do a lot more to really examine the problem and correct it.”

The report was picked up by numerous media outlets. On March 8, 13, and 15, 2012, the
New York Times’
s Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Jim Dwyer wrote three pieces about the case. They were headlined, “For Detained Whistleblower, a Hospital Bill, Not an Apology”; “An Officer Had Backup: Secret Tapes”; and “Telling the Truth Like Crazy.”

The
Times
also moved to unseal documents in the case, arguing the sealing order was too broad and out of line with established precedent. “Sealing is especially inappropriate when a lawsuit is the subject of immense and legitimate public interest and deals with the practices and policies of a critical public agency,” wrote
Times
lawyer David McCraw.

Opposing the motion, Suzanne Publicker, a lawyer for the city, wrote, “There is no right of public access to discovery materials.” She suggested that the
Times
file a Freedom of Information request for the documents. That was a laughable idea, because the NYPD had basically shut down that avenue for those seeking public records. The
Times
was already suing the NYPD over its lack of transparency.

Eventually, Sweet ordered the parties to create a list of the documents that he would review to make decisions about which should be released. (As of this writing, no documents have been released.)

The disclosure of the report created a firestorm in the lawsuit. The city assumed someone in the case leaked the document and asked Judge Sweet to order an investigation into the source. Norinsberg denied having leaked it
and even asked the
Village Voice
to swear in an affidavit that the lawyers did not leak it. The
Voice
declined to provide an affidavit or discuss its sourcing. The city also brought discovery to a grinding halt, refusing to provide any more documents until it conducted its own investigation.

In June, lawyers for Schoolcraft moved to amend the complaint by adding a first amendment claim.

Toward the end of March, another officer had stepped forward to claim that he, too, was retaliated against for alleging the downgrading of crime. Sergeant Robert Borrelli, who had been part of the NYPD for 19 years, said that the practice was going on in the 100th Precinct in the Far Rockaways section of Queens. When he complained about it, he said he was transferred to the other side of the city, the Siberia of the Bronx courts. The NYPD disclosed that four complaints were reclassified after Borrelli filed his allegations but denied his transfer was punitive. The NYPD painted Borrelli as a disgruntled officer and said most of his reports were “unfounded.”

In April 2012, nine officers claimed they were given lower evaluations as retaliation for griping about a quota system in the precinct. PBA chief Pat Lynch told the
Daily News
it was a department-wide problem.

“There are some unscrupulous bosses in the NYPD who use the evaluation system as a weapon,” Lynch told the
News
. “Instead of providing constructive criticism some use it to extract retribution for personal petty differences. The PBA will use every tool at its disposal, legal and otherwise, to ensure that our members are treated fairly and with respect.”

The following month, Judge Sweet allowed
Stinson v. City of New York
, the lawsuit filed by 12 New Yorkers alleging they got tickets because of an illegal quota policy, to go forward as a class action. The plaintiffs, also represented by Norinsberg, used the tapes made by Schoolcraft and Adhyl Polanco in their complaints.

Sweet quoted statistics that showed that more than 25 percent of the 3.6 million summonses issued between 2004 and 2009 were dismissed before trial, and 50 percent of the remainder were dismissed at trial. In other words, more than half the criminal court summonses that received a hearing were dismissed. This finding meant that a lot of criminal court summonses—for
open container, pot smoking, blocking the sidewalk, etc.—were not worth the paper they were written on.

On May 7, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association paid for a newspaper ad attacking the NYPD on quotas. “Don’t blame the cop,” it read. “Blame NYPD management for pressure to write summonses and the pressure to convict motorists.” The ad claimed the department was using its personnel powers to punish officers who don’t write enough tickets.

In early June 2012, the two criminologists, Eterno and Silverman, published their latest survey on crime statistics, which they announced with this headline: “Smoking Gun Emerges.”

In big, bolded print, they wrote that the survey, “strongly substantiates pressures to play numbers game, and confirms crime report manipulation and quotas.”

The survey contains “glaring evidence that central problems prominently emerged during the Kelly-Bloomberg era.” It “substantiates our longstanding position—that CompStat was initially a positive development but morphed into a numbers game.”

“These new findings clearly debunk the NYPD’s rotten apple theory of isolated crime manipulation,” they wrote.

Based on almost 2,000 responses from NYPD retirees, including nearly 900 who had retired during the Bloomberg/Kelly era, these were their main conclusions:

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60 percent had little confidence in the accuracy of the crime statistics.

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Nine out of ten felt crime went down less than the NYPD claimed, and most of them believed it dropped by only about half as much as the NYPD claimed.

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Just as Schoolcraft’s tapes showed, pressure for stop and frisks grew much more intense in the Bloomberg/Kelly era.

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38 percent felt pressure during Bloomberg/Kelly to downgrade crime complaints. Half of the retirees in the period had direct knowledge that stats were changed, reports weren’t taken, and reports were changed to downgrade crime. Close to nine out of ten had personal knowledge of three or more such incidents.

In their comments, retired police bosses confided to the professors a series of disturbing comments:

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“I was ordered not to review complaints because I often raised the charges and refused to lower false classifications. False reporting is endemic in the police department.”

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“Assault becomes harassment, grand larceny becomes petty larceny. . . . All with editing/creative writing on complaint reports by supervisors after submission.”