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Old 12-23-2014, 08:31 PM   #73
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Radio program This American Life does a story on the Schoolcraft tapes, his illegal arrest and commitment to a psych ward by his police commander, and the subsequent harrassment of Schoolcraft by NYPD cops, hours outside of their jurisdiction in upstate New York. A stunningly good and revealing episode that helped expose corruption in the New York police department to a national audience.

This American Life: Episode 414--Right To Remain Silent, September 10, 2010

Transcript:
Quote:
Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me?

Ira Glass
It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today-- Right to Remain Silent. We have two stories of people who very much do not choose to remain silent. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me? Adrian Schoolcraft is a New York City policeman who decided to secretly record himself and his fellow officers on the job-- all day, every workday, he says for 17 months. Including lots of days when he was ordered to do all kinds of things cops are not supposed to do. It's led to a small scandal, Several people removed from their jobs, and four investigations of the New York Police Department. Though Adrian insists he didn't get into this looking for trouble.

Graham Rayman
His father is a police officer, and, I would say, he went along with the program for a few years.

Ira Glass
This is the reporter who broke the story in The Village Voice about Adrian and what he recorded those 17 months, a reporter named Graham Rayman. When I asked Graham what Adrian, the person at the center of this scandal, is like, the first thing out of his mouth is--

Graham Rayman
I would describe him as an extremely earnest person, almost-- in this cynical age-- almost to the point of almost too earnest. He actually believed that he could get the police commissioner to change certain things about how the police department was being run.

Ira Glass
Adrian Schoolcraft was working in Brooklyn-- precinct 81, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rough neighborhood, mostly black, that was slowly gentrifying. The precinct is just seven blocks wide and 20 blocks long, roughly, and had 13 murders last year, which is a third of what it used to be. Adrian's kind of an electronics buff, and he bought himself one of those tiny digital recorders, tucked it in his breast pocket, and started recording-- as he walked his beat, when he talked to other cops--

Police Sergeant
All right, attention. Roll call.

Ira Glass
--morning roll calls.

Police Sergeant
Enison.

Enison
Here.

Police Sergeant
Lewis.

Adrian Schoolcraft
The only reason the thought entered my head was because-- to protect myself.

Ira Glass
This is Adrian.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Like any other officer would carry a recorder-- was to protect themselves from any false accusations. Usually from civilians who are upset.

Ira Glass
How big was the recorder?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Oh, about the size of a pack of gum.

Ira Glass
The atmosphere at the 81st precinct was set by its commander, Stephen Mauriello. When Mauriello showed up, Adrian Schoolcraft says, things changed. Offices were told to write more tickets, do more stop-and-frisks, arrest more people for low level offenses that they might otherwise let go-- get their numbers up.

Adrian Schoolcraft
The pressure definitely increased when he arrived and took over as the commanding officer. The analogy I would uses is like having a boot to the back of your heel. It is do this or else. The rent's due.

Ira Glass
The rent's due?

Adrian Schoolcraft
The rent is due. Pay the rent. Did you pay the rent last month?

Ira Glass
Pay the rent means did you get your numbers?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Correct.

Ira Glass
Now, it's perfectly legal for police to be told-- like anybody in any job-- here's the amount of work that we expect you to do, number of tickets and arrests that are normal for somebody in your job in this neighborhood. But what's not allowed is to penalize police officers who do not make those targets. We don't want police officers under such pressure to deliver numbers that they make stops and arrests and write summons with no valid reason, just to get their goals. Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Graham Rayman
In other words, as a police supervisor I can't tell you, you better give me 20 tickets a month or else I'm going to transfer you to the graveyard shift. There can't be a direct relationship between the two.

Ira Glass
That's just against the rules.

Graham Rayman
It's against the law.

Ira Glass
Oh, it's against the law?

Graham Rayman
Yeah, there's a state law against that kind of thing. But what was happening in the precinct, and what the tapes show repeatedly, is that they were tying it to disciplinary action. They were threatening the cops. If you don't hit your numbers, you'll get transferred, you'll lose your assignment, we'll change your partner, you'll go on a foot post, you can be given a worse assignment.

Ira Glass
On November 1, 2008, one sergeant declares at a roll call, quote "they are looking at these numbers and people are going to be moved. They can make your job real uncomfortable, and we all know what that means." On December 8, 2008, the sergeant tells the officers that if they don't get their activity up, quote, "there's some people here that may not be here come next month."

Police Sergeant
There's some people here that may not be here come next month.

Ira Glass
Because officially the NYPD doesn't allow numeric quotas to be tied to job performance, you hear the supervisors in the recording sometimes get into real verbal contortions to get the point across. Like in this excerpt from a roll call the first month that Schoolcraft was recording, June 2008.

Police Sergeant
The XO was in the other day. I don't know who was here. He actually laid down a number.

Ira Glass
I'm just going to repeat this because it's hard to hear. "The XO was in the other day," that's a commanding officer, right?

Adrian Schoolcraft
The Execuitve Officer.

Ira Glass
Or, the Executive Officer. --"was in the other day. He laid down a number."

Police Sergeant
All right. So, I'm not going to quote him on that, because I don't want to be quoted stating numbers.

Ira Glass
I'm not going to quote him on that, because I don't want to be quoted stating members.

Police Sergeant
All right. He wants at least three seat belts, one cell phone, and 11 others.

Ira Glass
"He wants three seat belts, one cell phone, and 11 others." What does that mean?

Adrian Schoolcraft
He wants three seat-belt summonses, tickets for people not wearing their seat-belt, one cell phone, someone driving in their car talking on the cell phone, and eleven others, there are dozens of other categories of summonses that you can give people.

Police Sergeant
I don't know what the number is, but that's what he wants.

Ira Glass
I don't know what the number is, but that's what he wants. That's a really-- what does that mean?

Adrian Schoolcraft
He's playing the same game. He knows he's not supposed to state a number, but he wants to get his point across. So it's kind of like, if you remember All the President's Men, it's a non-denial denial.

Ira Glass
Adrian Schoolcraft says he isn't exactly sure when, but at some point he had decided that it was important to document the orders that he was given that he thought were out of line. He recorded roll calls where officers were constantly being told to do more stop-and-frisks, even though it's illegal to stop a random person on the street and frisk them without reasonable suspicion. In December 2008, a sergeant tells officers to stop-and-frisk quote, "anybody walking around, no matter what the explanation is." He recorded Stephen Mauriello, the commander the 81st precinct-- and the person Adrian Schoolcraft says really brought the hammer down for higher numbers-- ordering the officers to arrest everyone they see. This happens in a couple of recordings, like this one from Halloween 2008.

Stephen Mauriello
Any roving bands-- you hear me-- roving bands more than two or three people--

Ira Glass
He's saying "any roving bands of more than two or three people"-- he's talking about just people going around on Halloween night--

Stephen Mauriello
I want them stopped--

Ira Glass
I want them stopped--

Stephen Mauriello
--cuffed--

Ira Glass
--cuffed--

Stephen Mauriello
--throw them in here, run some warrants.

Ira Glass
--throw them in here, run some warrants.

Stephen Mauriello
You're on a foot post? [BLEEP] it. Take the first guy you've got and lock them all up. Boom.

Ira Glass
You're on a foot post? F it. Take the first guy you've got, lock them all up. Boom.

Stephen Mauriello
We're going to go back out and process them later on, I've got no problems--

Ira Glass
--go back out and then we'll come back in and process them later on."

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yes. Yeah, what he's saying is, arrest people simply for the purpose of clearing the streets.

Ira Glass
Again, Graham Rayman. He says the problem with that is--

Graham Rayman
There has to be a violation of the law to make an arrest. He's essentially making the arrest before the crime takes place.

John Eterno
This is an example of something that I would say-- they're going out in the street and just grabbing people-- that's unlawful imprisonment. It's an illegal arrest.

Ira Glass
That's John Eterno, a former New York City cop, who went up the ranks from officer to sergeant, to lieutenant, to captain. He now chairs the Department of Criminal Justice at Molloy College and researches and writes about police practices with Professor Eli Silverman. And he says that some of the things that Adrian Schoolcraft documented on his recordings were no surprise to anybody-- like sergeants hounding officers to get their numbers up. That's been happening in every precinct for a long time, he says. But for commanders to tell cops, just lock people up and figure it out later-- Eterno says the word for that is kidnapping.

John Eterno
That's exactly what it is. They're just pulling people off the street. It's an unlawful imprisonment and they're being kidnapped. If they don't have probable cause, you cannot grab people off the street. It is kidnapping. At this point, from what I'm hearing on this tape, it seems to me that this is probably illegal behavior that's taking place on the part of the police department.

Andre Wade
We were arrested, they take us to the 81st precinct, put us in lock up for maybe an hour or two. And they processed us and checked for warrants. And once they see no warrants, they let us go, but we were still issued a citation.

Ira Glass
Andre Wade has lived in the neighborhood for over twenty years. He's a commercial driver. One day, he and two friends were picking up his brother to go to work together. They were standing on the sidewalk, and a police officer came over, and said they were trespassing. When his brother came down and confirmed, no, no they were there to pick them up, Andre says the officer wouldn't listen.

Andre Wade
He was just saying stuff like, you know you're not supposed to be standing here. He started getting upset when we were trying to talk him out of giving us the citations. And it's like he just got out of control. He got real erratic and got on the radio. And the next thing you know, we turn around and there's eight, nine police cars. It was to the point to where you would think that somebody was getting arrested for murder, or something like that. And they were just jumping out of their vehicles, and me and my buddies already knew that we were in for a ride.

Ira Glass
The citation that the police gave Wade lists his name, the day that he's supposed to appear in court, but in the spot where it's supposed to specify his crime--

Andre Wade
Yes, in that field of the ticket there was nothing-- no violation. The violation was blank.

Ira Glass
One of the producers of our radio show lives in the 81st precinct. And she says that it's one of those neighborhoods where everybody has stories of ridiculous tickets. One of her neighbors was bringing his aunt home from the hospital, and he double parked. Two officers told him to move his car, and when he didn't, he was handcuffed, forced to lie down in the street, and tasered twice-- all in front of a crowd of people, including her, who live on the block and heard him calling for help. One common citation is for having an open container of alcohol. One neighbor says he was walking home from church with his six year old daughter, drinking a small carton of Tropicana orange juice, and he got a ticket for that. Others got tickets for water and Gatorade that was being given away at the park. George Walker has lived on the same block for over 40 years and says older guys like him get a lot of tickets. He thinks maybe they're targeted because they don't give the cops any fuss. He says he's gotten a dozen tickets this past year, nearly all for open container, even though he says he wasn't drinking alcohol.

George Walker
Every last ticket was dismissed. Every one was not a valid ticket. Because if you see someone drinking alcohol, and you give them a ticket for open container, you have to name what they were drinking. But if they can't name it, they just say cup with alcohol in it. But that's not the name of the alcohol, so it gets dismissed-- because it wasn't alcohol in the first place. But they feel like they can do anything the want to us.

Ira Glass
So in this police station, where everybody's obsessed with how many tickets they're writing-- where cops are told to pull people off corners and throw them in jail and figure out later what to charge them with-- comes Adrian Schoolcraft, who had no interest in making his numbers.

Adrian Schoolcraft
No, I never tried to make anything happen. I went out there, and you walk you beat. And whatever happened, happened.

Ira Glass
When you would talk to other officers in the precinct, did you have friends who felt the same way?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yes.

Ira Glass
And would they not get the numbers, or would they get the numbers?

Adrian Schoolcraft
They would get the numbers. It's easier. Especially if you have a wife, kids. Then they're devoted to their pension and retiring.

Ira Glass
Do you not have a wife and kids?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Ira Glass
And so you wouldn't go up to people just to give them a ticket?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Ira Glass
Because?

Adrian Schoolcraft
It just wasn't right. I found I was getting along with a lot of the local business owners, and I started interacting with the residents, and they would tell me who the problems were. Now, if you start messing with the residents, and you start going into the barber shops and writing summonses that I don't feel police officers have any business writing-- they didn't sweep the floor of hair-- these are the same people that could help you perform your job as a patrolman or a police officer. That was my philosophy, and it did work.

Ira Glass
And so did you get a lot of heat for doing this?

Adrian Schoolcraft
He [UNINTELLIGIBLE] pressure from supervisors.

Ira Glass
What would they do?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Well I think they considered the foot post punishment, but I always enjoyed the foot post. But there's also hospitalized prisoners, prisoner transports.

Ira Glass
So they would assign you to these lousy posts?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yeah. To get my mind right, they would try those, but I accepted those as normal duties as a police officer.

Ira Glass
But we still haven't gotten to the most disturbing thing documented by Adrian Schoolcraft and his recordings. Schoolcraft shows, over and over, that sometimes when real crimes would happen, serious crimes, the 81st precinct would reclassify them as lesser crimes-- or simply not put them in the system at all-- to make it look like the precinct was doing a better job driving down crime rates than it really was. Again reporter Graham Rayman.

Graham Rayman
There's a remarkable conversation that Schoolcraft has with another officer. And the other officer is just telling him three anecdotes of how the precinct commanding supervisor basically dumped three criminal complaints that should've been recorded.

Ira Glass
Yeah, what are the stories that he tells?

Graham Rayman
One is-- a young woman reports her cell phone was robbed, and the precinct commander basically says--

Police Officer
--what do you want me to do? What do you want to do with this?

Graham Rayman
What do you want us to do with this? How are we going to solve this? Are you going to get your phone back? You're not going to get your phone back.

Police Officer
I mean, he's like, "well, what if we can't get it back?" He's like, "are you going to press charges?"

Graham Rayman
He basically talks her out of filing a complaint, and that should be a robbery that should go in their numbers. And one of the other ones is-- the precinct commander responds to a report of a stolen vehicle. And his first question is, he asks the victim have you done jail time?

Police Officer
He's like, "you ever been arrested before?" He's like, "yeah." And he's like, "what for?"

Graham Rayman
--which is not really a proper question to ask of a crime victim. But he asks it, and the guy says yes. Yeah, I did eight years in prison when I was younger. And the precinct commander says maybe karma stole your car.

Police Officer
"So you think maybe Karma woke up this morning and took your car?"

Adrian Schoolcraft
Karma as in the spiritual--

Police Officer
He was like, "no, I don't think Karma takes cars." He's like, "I think somebody took my car."

Adrian Schoolcraft
So he didn't take his report because he's a felon?

Police Officer
Yeah. Basically.

Ira Glass
In the end, this cop tells Adrian, their supervisor, Stephen Mauriello, told him to file the case as an unauthorized driver.

Graham Rayman
--meaning that the guy loaned his car to somebody else who now has it.

Ira Glass
Then when the officer tried to file it that way, because he didn't have a name for the unauthorized driver, he couldn't file it at all. So the robbery went unreported. Rules go into effect in the 81st precinct that make it harder to report serious crimes. Officers are told that if there's a robbery, one of their supervisors has to come out to the scene themselves. And robbery victims are told that if they don't come into the police station, no crime report will be filed at all. After Graham Rayman started publishing these stories about Adrian Schoolcraft, retired cops and some on-duty cops started contacting him with their own anecdotes about crimes being downgraded from serious to much less serious-- the most shocking of these from a high ranking detective name Harold Hernandez.

Graham Rayman
He's a very distinguished detective. He was working in the 33rd precinct in Washington Heights. And one morning he comes into work and there's a guy who's accused of first degree rape sitting in his interview room. So he sits down and he looks at the guy. And he has a little twinge, and he says, have you ever done this before? And the guy said, yeah. And Hernandez says, how many times? And he says, oh, I don't know, seven or eight. And Hernandez says, where? And he goes, in this neighborhood. And Hernandez is now dumbstruck because there's been no report of a serial rapist-- sexual predator-- working the neighborhood.

Ira Glass
Like, no crimes have shown up. People haven't shown up saying they've been raped or assaulted.

Graham Rayman
He hasn't been notified. And he would be notified as a senior detective in the unit. It would be a very big deal. And so he says, can you give me the dates and locations? And the guy says, well, I can try, but you're going to have to take me around and I'll show. I'll show you. So he and a fellow detective get in the car and they drive around. And they look, and the suspect-- whose name is Darryl Thomas-- points out the locations. And then Hernandez takes his notebook and he writes down the locations. And then he goes back and he looks through stacks of crime complaints. And he finds them. And he realizes that they've been classified-- they've been downgraded. They've been classified either as criminal trespassing or criminal possession of a weapon-- both relatively minor crimes, given that the actual conduct in the narrative that the victims are describing is either first degree burglary, robbery, or sexual abuse, sexual assault. And he confronts his bosses about it. He confronts the precinct commander. And he confronts his detective squad commander. And everyone just shrugs. Meanwhile everyone's terrified that it's going to come out-- that these women are going to go to the press, and it's going to be a huge embarrassment, a huge scandal for the department. And if it had come out, it would have been a huge scandal for the department. But the department was able to keep it quiet. The District Attorney's office prosecuted Thomas and he went away for 50 years. But here's the interesting part-- they never publicized the case. There was never a press release issued about it. There was never a news article written about the case.

Ira Glass
Normally, Graham says, that a case like this-- serial rapist-- they'd try to get some press. But the misclassifications of the crimes would have made the NYPD look bad. No one was ever disciplined for what happened, for downgrading. The precinct commander was promoted twice by Commissioner Kelly.

Ira Glass
The guy who was in charge of that precinct where all this stuff happened?

Graham Rayman
Where this stuff happened. He's been promoted twice. It just went on, business as usual. Hernandez-- here's a guy who probably would've stayed in the department for 35 years, 30, 35-- as long as he could. But he was so upset about this incident and about other instances of downgrading and of manipulation of the crime stats that he retired.

Ira Glass
And so the NYPD has denied that crimes were downgraded like this.

Graham Rayman
Yeah. Well, they said that it only happens in a very tiny percentage of cases. And they say that the crimes stats are audited very carefully, And if it was a wider problem it would be spotted.

Ira Glass
The New York Police Department declined our request to come onto the radio or to have the officers who supervised Adrian Schoolcraft, and who are heard on his recordings, to be interviewed about their side of all this. But the pressure on police commanders to get better numbers really goes back to 1994, when New York started tracking crimes with a system called CompStat. CompStat, for the first time, gave commanders timely, accurate data once a week on what crimes are happening, so they could send more cops to deal with it. Chances are you've heard of all this. It became one of the best known successes in modern policing. Serious crime has dropped an astonishing 77% in New York City since CompStat began in 1994. Other cities very quickly started imitating it-- DC, Philly, LA. Baltimore's version of CompStat ended up in a recurring plot line on the TV show The Wire, where street cops are told by the bosses to do anything to pump up their numbers. And the problem with CompStat, says Professor Eli Silverman, who studies the way police forces use numbers, is that the early success of CompStat created the expectation that numbers must get better every single year, no matter what.

Eli Silverman
In the beginning it was like an orange. You could squeeze juice from an orange in the beginning much more readily than you can as you extract juice from that orange. And now, it gets harder and harder to drive crime down, because you're compared to not how you were in '94, but how you were last year the same week. And when something's pushed to the excess that it is now, and numbers dominate the system, that's when you have negative consequences.

Ira Glass
As apparently the one person in the 81st precinct who was not obsessed by the numbers, Adrian Schoolcraft, by January 2009, had so displeased his bosses that they gave him a failing job evaluation that covered the entire year of 2008-- which meant one thing, Schoolcraft says.

Adrian Schoolcraft
They're starting a paper trail, and they'll just keep documenting. They're starting to move you out.

Ira Glass
He hired a lawyer and appealed the evaluation, but started feeling more pressure than ever to go out and do what his bosses wanted. He began to get stomach pains and tightness in his chest. He had trouble sleeping. Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Graham Rayman
I think within the precinct, he was probably seen as a little bit eccentric. And also, he wasn't going with the program. And anyone who doesn't go with the program is automatically marked.

Ira Glass
Schoolcraft began to feel that he was being retaliated against. He got written up for taking a bathroom break without putting it in his log. Another officer was written up for talking to him. When he went to the duty captain, he was told yes, he was being monitored.

Duty Captain
Because of your past activity. When people at the same level as you and the same post as you, are doing a lot more than what you do when you're out there, we don't know if you're even out there. That's the problem.

Ira Glass
If there's a bunch of kids on a stoop and you're walking past, the duty captain asks him, and then named some addresses where that might happen, you just go on your merry way, because you don't see anything going on? Schoolcraft tells him he wouldn't just create fake charges. That's a common practice here, he says. Captain asks him what he means, and says in 19 years, he's never seen anybody create charges. Then he asks Schoolcraft the question again.

Duty Captain
Those kids on the step. Are you going to keep walking?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Duty Captain
Are you going to ask them if they live there?

Adrian Schoolcraft
You usually won't get a response, but--

Duty Captain
Right. [BLEEP] you, Schoolcraft. Right?

Adrian Schoolcraft
That's how it usually happens.

Duty Captain
Yeah. Are you going to create something there? Because I could tell you that if that [BLEEP] told me to [BLEEP] myself. Yeah, so you go in the handcuffs for telling me that? Yeah. That's it. If you let that go because there's no violation, because he didn't break the law, then I feel bad for you. Because then you have a tough job. And then maybe you should find something else to do, you know? So if you call that creating something? You call that creating something? Or do you call that a matter of keeping the respect, because they'll step all over you when they see you out there. They'll do whatever they want in front of you when you're out there.

Ira Glass
Schoolcraft says that around this time, the recordings became about trying to keep his job. Somebody tells him that one of his bosses wants to force him out on psychiatric grounds.

Ira Glass
During this whole time that you were recording, who did you tell?

Adrian Schoolcraft
My father knew.

Ira Glass
Friends?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Ira Glass
Fellow officers?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Ira Glass
Were you tempted to tell anybody ever?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No.

Ira Glass
What'd your dad say?

Adrian Schoolcraft
He would ask me if I heard anything that day.

Ira Glass
And when you were getting these orders to get your numbers up and you wouldn't do it, what did your dad say about that?

Adrian Schoolcraft
He would just reiterate to me how the quota system-- wherever you are, whatever city you're in-- it's unethical and it's illegal.

Ira Glass
So he was on your side.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yes.

Ira Glass
Finally in April, Schoolcraft takes off a week for stomach and chest pains and is sent to a police department doctor. The doctor finds nothing wrong with him physically.

Adrian Schoolcraft
And he asked me if I was experiencing stress or anything. I said, well, yes. Matter of fact, this is what's going on. And he said, are you sure you want to tell me this?

Ira Glass
Schoolcraft says he laid it all out for the doctor-- his bad performance evaluation, the numbers he was asked to hit, and also more personal disputes with his bosses about whether his evaluation was falsified, was the precinct doing training it claimed it was doing. And the police department doctor referred Schoolcraft to see a police department psychologist for an evaluation. And when Schoolcraft tells the psychologist the same things that he told the doctor, she asked him to turn in his gun and shield.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Well, she made it sound like it was normal. She said, it's not unusual for us to take an officer's gun and shield if he or she is having chest pains. Schoolcraft moves to a job answering phones at the precinct, where he continues to gather evidence. And in October, he finally talks to the people in the police department who investigate unethical practices-- the Internal Affairs Bureau, IAB-- and it doesn't go well. Schoolcraft says that not only did they seem very skeptical, he claims that Internal Affairs left phone messages for him at the precinct. He says this alerted his bosses to the fact that he was talking to Internal Affairs. Internal Affairs does start an investigation, though. And soon, Schoolcraft gets a phone call from the division of the police department whose main purpose is to make sure that crime reporting and statistics using CompStat are accurate. It's called the Quality Assurance Division. And at last, Schoolcraft says, somebody seems to take his accusations seriously. Investigators hear him out, ask lots of questions, and promise to look into it.

Qad Representative
I appreciate you coming in, and bringing [INAUDIBLE] to our attention.

Ira Glass
He doesn't tell them that he has recordings. In fact, as you can hear, he secretly records this three hour meeting with them. But he does give them documentation-- real evidence to back up his charges. And what happens next to Adrian Schoolcraft is very, very strange. Just a few weeks after his meetings with Internal Affairs and QAD, he shows up to work. It's the end of October.

Adrian Schoolcraft
As soon as I sit down, a lieutenant approaches me and asks for my activity log. Well, this activity log is where I keep a lot of my notes regarding what people are saying and the times they're saying it.

Ira Glass
And all the things, basically, you're trying to report that you think are going wrong in the precinct.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Correct. And it wasn't until I got it back that I realized the cat was out of the bag. He had bent the corners on some of the pages, and I saw what piqued his interest. And I became very worried, how he was looming around me-- I felt threatened by it. And again, all these officers are armed. But I left with permission.

Ira Glass
Because you though, what was going to happen?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Well, I wasn't sure. I just felt his behavior worried me. And--

Ira Glass
But you thought he might provoke you into something, and then he would shoot you, or something?

Adrian Schoolcraft
That was one of the fears. I'm not just an officer inside. Now I'm an officer that has this psych issue. No one's supposed to know, but everyone knows that when you have your gun and shield taken, you've been psyched. And you have that brand on you. So what's going to happen? Are they going to say I lunged at him? Or are they-- any kind of scenario could play out. And I just didn't feel comfortable, so I left.

Ira Glass
How he left is in dispute. Schoolcraft says that he told a sergeant that he was feeling sick and went home an hour early. The police say the sergeant never said yes to this request. In any case, Schoolcraft went home and went to bed.

Adrian Schoolcraft
A few hours later, I received a phone call from my father, and he told me he received a phone call from my XO. He says, look outside your window. And I looked out my window and there were multiple police vehicles, and there seemed to be quite a crowd.

Police Officer
[KNOCKING] [INAUDIBLE]

Ira Glass
Adrian has no idea what they want, but he knows the situation is bad, so he starts recording.

Adrian Schoolcraft
31 October, 2009. [KNOCKING]

Ira Glass
The officers open Adrian's door with a key they get from his landlord.

Police Officer
Adrian! Police department, buddy. Let me see your hands.

Adrian Schoolcraft
They've just entered my home. And they were in their helmets, and gear, and tasers. They had the special weapon-- basically SWAT.

Police Officer
You all right?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yeah, I think so.

Police Officer
Everybody's worried about you. They haven't heard from you.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Who's worried about me?

Michael Marino
Adrian, didn't you hear us knocking on this door for a couple of hours?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No. Why would I expect anyone to knock on my door?

Michael Marino
I don't know, Adrian. But if you hear somebody knocking, normally you get up and answer it. They were kicking on that door loud and yelling.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I wasn't feeling well.

Michael Marino
All right. Sit down. Sit down.

Ira Glass
That voice you just heard in Adrian's bedroom is a man of much higher rank than anybody in any of the recordings to this point. He's the number two commander for the NYPD for all of Brooklyn North, Michael Marino. Stephen Mauriello, the head of the 81st precinct, the commander that Adrian contends had been putting pressure on all the officers to deliver better numbers, is also there in the bedroom. He talks next.

Stephen Mauriello
You've got everybody worried. They're worried about your safety. All right?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Worried about what?

Stephen Mauriello
What do you mean, worried about what? They tried calling you. You got-- everybody's been calling you. You just walked out of the precinct, you know? That's what we're worried about. Your safety, your well-being.

Adrian Schoolcraft
All right. I'm fine.

Ira Glass
Why does he keep saying that he's worried about your safety?

Adrian Schoolcraft
That's his excuse to come into my home.

Stephen Mauriello
Get your stuff on. We're going back to the precinct.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I'm not going back to the precinct.

Stephen Mauriello
Adrian, we're going to go back to the precinct.

Adrian Schoolcraft
For?

Stephen Mauriello
Because we're going to do it the right way. You can't just walk out of command--

Adrian Schoolcraft
What's going to be done if I go to the 8-1?

Stephen Mauriello
What's going to be done. We're going to investigate why you left.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I'm telling you why I left. I was feeling sick.

Stephen Mauriello
Adrian, that's not the reason why you leave. All right, you know that.

Ira Glass
Adrian knows the rules and he asks if he's under arrest. He's not under arrest. But the number two commander for Brooklyn North, Michael Marino, tells him he's giving him an order.

Michael Marino
Listen to me. I'm a chief in the New York City Police Department, and you're a police officer. So this is what's going to happen, my friend. You've disobeyed an order, and the way you're acting is not right, at the very least.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Chief, if you--

Michael Marino
Stop right there.

Adrian Schoolcraft
--open up your house--

Michael Marino
Stop. Stop right there, son.

Adrian Schoolcraft
--how would you behave?

Michael Marino
Son, I'm doing the talking right now, not you.

Adrian Schoolcraft
In my apartment.

Michael Marino
In your apartment. You are going--

Adrian Schoolcraft
Is this Russia?

Michael Marino
You are going to be suspended. All right? That's what's going to happen. You're suspended son.

Adrian Schoolcraft
That's when I found out what they-- that's what they were so desperate to accomplish.

Ira Glass
How many people are in your bedroom at this point?

Adrian Schoolcraft
In the bedroom, at all times, there's at least four. And then there's a living room-- at least a dozen.

Ira Glass
If this seems like an extreme response to you, reporter Graham Rayman confirms, it is.

Graham Rayman
Yeah, it's very extreme for going home from work early-- an hour early.

Ira Glass
An officer asks Adrian if he wants medical aid-- an EMT to come check him out. Adrian's blood pressure turns out to be sky high. They offer to take him to a hospital, but not his local hospital-- to one that he's never heard of. And he doesn't get what they're up to, and he refuses medical attention. Under the law, they should leave him alone. But for some reason, they will not take no for an answer.

Stephen Mauriello
Adrian, lie down in the bus and we'll go.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I can lie down in my own bed. I haven't done anything wrong.

Stephen Mauriello
Yeah, you have.

Adrian Schoolcraft
OK, file it. Write it up.

Stephen Mauriello
Now, it's a matter of your health.

Michael Marino
Adrian, listen to me. All right, son?

Ira Glass
Again, this is Deputy Chief Marino, from Brooklyn North.

Michael Marino
Right now, EMS is saying that you're acting irrational-- this is them, not us-- and that if you go to the hospital, listen to me--

Adrian Schoolcraft
Yeah, and you're whispering in their ear--

Michael Marino
Adrian, they are not--

Adrian Schoolcraft
Chief, do what you've got to do.

Michael Marino
--listen to me. Now you have a choice. You get up like a man and put your shoes on and walk into that bus--

Adrian Schoolcraft
Like a man.

Michael Marino
--like a man. Or son, they're going to treat you as an EDP and that means handcuffs. And I do not want to see that happen to a cop.

Ira Glass
EDP is?

Adrian Schoolcraft
Emotionally Disturbed Person.

Michael Marino
Son, you've caused this.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I didn't cause anything.

Michael Marino
You have caused this. Now you have a choice. They're saying you have to go to the hospital. That's EMS. These are trained medical professionals. And if you don't go, then you're not acting rationally. And they say now they're afraid you're emotionally disturbed.

Adrian Schoolcraft
It was all very surreal. At that point right there, he's very agitated. His face is red, and I knew then that anything could happen. I had no witnesses. No one was living with me.

Michael Marino
So you have a choice. What is it going to be?

Adrian Schoolcraft
I'm laying right here until I feel better.

Michael Marino
OK, son. He's EDP. He's EDP.

Police Officer
Put your hands behind your back.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Why am I putting my hands behind my back?

Michael Marino
Because you have to go to the hosptial. All right, just take him. I can't [BLEEP] understand him anymore.

Police Officer
Adrian, come here. Put your hands behind your back.

Adrian Schoolcraft
[GRUNTS]

Police Officer
Get your hands behind your back.

Adrian Schoolcraft
[GRUNTS]

Police Officer
Get one hand. Go ahead. Get one hand.

Adrian Schoolcraft
They pulled me off the bed. They slammed me to the floor. The way they were stomping on my back, they were pressing on my chest in a way that it was affecting my circulation.

Michael Marino
Adrian stop it.

Adrian Schoolcraft
My chest. Oh, my chest.

Ira Glass
During the struggle, as they cuff Adrian, the little recorder falls out of his pocket. Deputy Chief Marino spots it.

Michael Marino
Absolutely amazing, Adrian. You put your fellow police officers through this. Absolutely amazing. Yeah, it's a recorder. Recording devices, and everything else-- so he's playing a game here. Cute.

Ira Glass
So if he found that recorder, how are we hearing this tape?

Adrian Schoolcraft
No, he found the recorder that was in my pocket. There was another recorder. The one that was running was just a recorder on the shelf.

Ira Glass
In plain sight?

Adrian Schoolcraft
I had some books around it.

Ira Glass
Now that Deputy Chief Marino has labeled Schoolcraft EDP, the police take Schoolcraft and commit him to a psychiatric ward, saying he was a danger to himself. Schoolcraft, who had spent months documenting his bosses telling cops to lock people up on contrived pretenses, now found himself locked up on contrived pretenses.

Adrian Schoolcraft
They told the hospital staff that I left work early, I yelled at my supervisor-- and I swore at my supervisors, cursed at them-- that I ran from them, and I barricaded myself in my home.

Ira Glass
But the tapes showed that isn't true.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Correct, no. None of that happened.

Ira Glass
Schoolcraft's father, the last person Schoolcraft talked to, is unable to find him for days. The last he heard, his son was in an apartment surrounded by police, the next, he just vanished. His father says he called Internal Affairs, the FBI, the press. Finally he located him by calling around the hospitals all over Queens.

Adrian Schoolcraft
That's the only way I got out, because he confronted the hospital administration and said, here's my son's health care proxy, I'm his father. Why have you imprisoned my son here? And they had no answer, and they had to release me.

Ira Glass
Why do you think they went so far with you?

Adrian Schoolcraft
It seemed like an act of desperation. Panic.

Graham Rayman
You can look at it in a couple of different ways.

Ira Glass
Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Graham Rayman
One is that they put him in the psych ward because he tried to report corruption and misconduct. They literally tried to destroy his reputation.

Ira Glass
Like, he's literally crazy. That's the message.

Graham Rayman
Yeah, right. That they were trying to portray him as crazy. You could also look at it-- that the chief lost his temper that night. Just got angry and gave an order that turns out to be a totally inappropriate order. I could see that being the case also.

Ira Glass
At the time that he led the raid on Schoolcraft's apartment, Deputy Chief Michael Marino was already under a microscope. It was just a month after he had been put on trial inside the department after a sting named him as one of 27 cops who illegally bought human growth hormone, or steroids. Marino claimed that he used the human growth hormone for a medical condition. And back in 2006, an arbitrator found that Marino was in violation of New York labor laws for a very similar situation to the one that Schoolcraft was documenting. The arbitrator ruled that Marino had set up an illegal quota for police officers of four parking tickets, three moving violations, three quality of life summons, and two stop-and-frisk per month and then penalized the officers when they didn't make the quota.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I didn't figure I would lose my job.

Ira Glass
Adrian Schoolcraft says that in the end, none of this worked out the way he thought it would during all those months of recording.

Adrian Schoolcraft
I figured someone would approach the supervisor and say, listen you got caught. Knock it off. And everything's in house, still. Just knock it off. This is getting out of control. I never saw myself as an adversary.

Ira Glass
Because you assumed that the police commissioner-- the people at the very top of the police force-- that they would be on your side.

Adrian Schoolcraft
Correct.

Ira Glass
But now do you believe that, in fact, they would be on your side?

Adrian Schoolcraft
I don't believe they were, or ever intended to be.

Ira Glass
That's the question, of course. And there's really no way to know how typical the 81st precinct is. Reporter Graham Rayman has heard from retired cops who say the same things happened where they worked. And he's found a policeman who was secretly recording in the Bronx at the same time as Schoolcraft finding the same things. The guys who study the way CompStat is used by the police, John Eterno and Eli Silverman, say manipulating stats to get better numbers seems to happen in a lot of places where CompStat is used.

Eli Silverman
There's evidence of the same kind of distortion-- we've done research, where people have written in our blog-- from other countries, UK, Australia, as well. Commanders attesting to the same phenomenon. This is not unique to New York.

Ira Glass
Having failed to reach any results working inside the department, Schoolcraft finally went to the press. And Graham's five-part series in The Village Voice has been, Adrian says, like a meteor hitting the 81st precinct. The police commissioner transferred Commander Stephen Mauriello, and some of the other senior-level supervisors, out of the precinct. Though he only did that after several weeks of pressure from politicians and clergy. There's now one police investigation into Schoolcraft's allegations, there's another investigation of Deputy Chief Marino's order to put Schoolcraft into a psych ward, another into the charge that serious crimes were downgraded to lesser ones, and a fourth that is just about the misclassification of crimes in Detective Hernandez's sexual assault case. Schoolcraft's recordings will be used in two class action lawsuits, one about stop-and-frisks, one about quotas. Schoolcraft himself is suing the department for $50 million. Two officers have come forward to back up his charges. A website, schoolcraftjustice.com has been set up looking for more. Schoolcraft himself is suspended without pay, living with his dad, 350 miles away, in upstate New York-- where, he says, a dozen times city police have shown up and pounded on his door, yelling, "NYPD, we know you're in there. Open up." [KNOCKING] Of course, he recorded it.

Police Officer
Adrian, we know you're in there. Just open the door please, so we can get back to New York.

Ira Glass
Schoolcraft assumes that he'll never again work as a police officer anywhere.

Ira Glass
Is it weird not to be a policeman anymore?

Adrian Schoolcraft
It feels odd. But I still feel like I am a policeman. I'm going forward with this investigation. I just feel like this is my case. This is the one. And I'll go all the way with it.

Ira Glass
And finally, with the 81st precinct under new supervision, the numbers on serious crime have risen by 10-15%. Are the crimes going up, or that's closer to the true amount of crime that was already there, only now being recorded? [MUSIC - "OFFICER" BY THE PHARCYDE] Well, our program today was produced by me and Sarah Koenig, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feeltes, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robin Semien, and Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Production help from Shawn Wen. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight of our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's got no problem with the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Seriously.

Joe Lipari
No, I have a gay cousin. I am the least homophobic person in the world.

Ira Glass
I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.
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