NEW YORK — Shouts followed the pounding on the apartment door: “Adrian! Adrian!”
It was Halloween night, but the scene outside patrolman Adrian Schoolcraft’s home had nothing to do with trick-or-treating. The unannounced visitors were fellow New York Police Department officers from the Emergency Service Unit — men trained to capture dangerous suspects once they’re cornered. Hearing the commotion outside, Schoolcraft did what had become second-nature for him: He clicked on a tape recorder.
Schoolcraft then whispered into it: “All right. . . . ESU is here.”
As several armed officers entered the apartment that night in 2009, a ranking NYPD officer found Schoolcraft resting on his bed — and gave him a scolding.
“Adrian . . . you didn’t hear us knocking on that door?” Deputy Chief Michael Marino can be heard saying on tape.
“No,” Schoolcraft replies, saying he had taken Nyquil.
“For the last couple hours?” Marino asks.
“No. . . . Why would I expect anyone to knock on my door, chief?” Schoolcraft asks, sounding groggy.
Schoolcraft’s account of the messy episode that unfolded next bumps against the NYPD’s carefully crafted image as a fine-tuned crime fighting machine.
His account of being taken in handcuffs to a psychiatric ward that night — and being kept there for several days — suggests the nation’s largest police force could have a vindictive underbelly.
He claims that cops risk retribution when they try, as he did, to blow the whistle on supervisors’ faking of crime statistics to make the stats look better.
To back up his allegations, he made hundreds of hours of secret tapes while on duty — everything from roll calls to locker room chatter to bosses yelling at him. The tapes, along with medical records and other documents, were supplied to The Associated Press.
Police officials say Schoolcraft’s allegations about ticket quotas and fudged stats were taken seriously, but he was uncooperative in an investigation of them. They also view his case as an isolated incident, not a corruption scandal.
Legitimate whistle-blower or not, Schoolcraft would pay dearly after the Halloween encounter. After what he describes as a frightening, involuntary hospital stay, he was suspended from the force. He has gone into self-exile in upstate New York while his lawyer pursues a $50 million civil rights lawsuit against the city.
Decade-long crime dip
Eight years ago, when Schoolcraft joined the NYPD, it was enjoying a decade-long decline in serious crime that made it the envy of departments across the country. Murders, rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts together had fallen more than 60 percent since 1993, a trend that continues today.
Part of the formula for success has been CompStat — a program to squash spikes in crimes, petty and otherwise, before they get out of control. Patterns are tracked by computer. Patrols are deployed based on where and when criminals are most active.
Precinct commanders are judged mercilessly on the results at CompStat meetings at police headquarters. Critics say the strict accountability has created the temptation to record felonies as misdemeanors — or to not record them at all. In recent years, a handful of commanders have been demoted or transferred amid allegations of cooking the books.
The NYPD stands by its numbers, but officers insist the fudging still exists.
Schoolcraft started carrying the tape recorder in 2008, he said, initially to protect himself against false complaints by the public. Soon, he said, he started recording roll calls at the beginning of every shift at the precinct — in case he ever needed to protect himself from his own department.
He claims a pattern of misconduct was emerging: Officers were being told, he said, to hand out more summonses and to make more arrests. He said he saw others downgrading crimes on purpose to improve the precinct’s numbers.
Those who didn’t, he said, were threatened by superiors with transfers and undesirable schedules.
He received a substandard review — he says for not meeting quotas. On paper, his commanding officers said he was “unwilling to change his approach to meeting the performance standards of a New York City Police Officer.”
Stripped of his badge
The pressure went on, he said, and he started feeling pains in his chest. He said he felt nervous, anxious.
Finally, he spoke to a departmental therapist. The therapist’s report had a result he didn’t expect: He was stripped of his gun and badge and put on desk duty.
On Oct. 31, 2009, he said, he got into an argument with his lieutenant, and he left that day in part to defuse the situation. He said he got permission to do so, but the department says he wasn’t authorized to leave and an AWOL cop always must be accounted for.
What ultimate impact the Schoolcraft case will have on the NYPD is unclear.
The Halloween episode “is still being looked at, but there’s been no disciplinary action so far involving any of the parties involved,” said Paul Browne, the NYPD’s top spokesman.
Schoolcraft himself remains in limbo.
“This has been incredibly difficult for Adrian,” his attorney, Jon Norinsberg, said. “He’s trying to go on, he’s doing his best, but the fact of the matter is Adrian is an absolute whistle-blower and they were going to shut him up but good.”
This story has been corrected in this online archive to reflect that the officers entered the apartment in 2009.
