Good Cops and Bad Cops: The NYPD Tapes, "They Came and Got Me"

[This was originally posted on another blog on 30 June 2015. And now it's here.]

What if you knew that senior police officials were breaking the law? What if you gathered evidence against them by recording their conversations? What if they found out what you were doing, then showed up at your apartment, arrested you, and had you locked up in a mental hospital?

That's what happened to New York City Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2009. And that's the story told in Graham A. Rayman's book: The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage.

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Schoolcraft started his police career in 2002 and did pretty well until Steven Mauriello took over the 81^st Precinct in October 2006. Mauriello used a "...hands-on, numbers- and productivity-focused approach that was favored by ambitious commanders in the era of CompStat." CompStat was the NYPD's computerized system for tracking the crime rate in every precinct, and the "activity" of every police officer, in the city.

Naturally, if Precinct Commanders are judged by CompStat, they are going to do everything possible to keep police "activity" up and crime down – or at least give the appearance this is happening. Schoolcraft's ratings started to suffer as he resisted the pressure to increase "activity" by arresting innocent people and "reduce" crime by falsifying reports.

One technique used to increase "activity" in the 81^st Precinct was called a "Mauriello Special" – find people loitering on street corners and arrest them all. Even if no crime had been committed these arrestees would be held for a few hours and then released. This counted for police "activity" in CompStat and would look good on Mauriello's job reviews.

To keep crime down cops were pressured to deliberately falsify reports. When a man named Timothy Covel was attacked and robbed the police wrote it up as "lost property." This same type of corruption was happening not just in Schoolcraft's 81^st Precinct but also all over the city. Rayman provides numerous examples from other precincts.

One of the most horrifying cases was exposed by a retired Detective First Grade Harold Hernandez who arrested a sexual predator named Daryl Thomas in 2002. Hernandez discovered that many of Thomas's earlier crimes had been falsely reported as misdemeanors. This hid the pattern of what was really going on, delayed Thomas's arrest, and caused more women to suffer attacks – all to keep the "official" crime rate down in CompStat so Precinct Commanders would look good.

It was in this corrupt environment that Adrian Schoolcraft collected 1000 hours of recorded conversations documenting the crimes being committed against the people of New York by the very police department sworn to protect them. When the department finally became aware what Schoolcraft was up to they tried various means to pressure or discredit him. Most frighteningly, on 31 October 2009, they arrested him in his apartment and then had him held in a mental hospital for six days against his will.

One morning while he was there a doctor asked Schoolcraft, "Do you feel they are coming after you?" and he answered, "Well, they did. They came and got me."

This book could have been better edited; there are occasional errors that should have been caught and corrected before publication. The story is dramatic enough however, and important enough, to over-ride these small problems. This is a very important book about how a large police department can become corrupt and turn into the enemy of the people it was meant to serve. This is a book that should be read by every citizen of the United States.

Copyright © 2016 by Joseph Wayne Gadway

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