Blue on Blue Page 11

  The problem is that if it gets out—and it will—that you can buck the IAB draft without any consequences, everybody’s going to do it. So finally we bounce the sergeant out of IAB and into the new assignment the police commissioner has approved for him. The sergeant lives in south Brooklyn, and we all hope he’s going to be very happy pushing papers on the eight p.m. to four a.m. shift in a precinct on the far side of the Bronx.

  The sergeant was right. I couldn’t make him become part of the new IAB—but I could make him wish he had. And if that sounds hard, well, we’re in a hard business.

  Some of the investigators we drafted into the new IAB stayed on long after their two-year commitments were up. Once they got over the emotional hurdle of investigating other cops, they found that pursuing smart and well-trained but crooked cops actually was a lot more challenging than locking up sixth-grade-dropout crackheads in the squads.

  But most of the IAB draftees left after their two years—which meant that every year we’d lose about a third of our investigators as they rotated out. The high turnover was sometimes a problem, especially if a guy being rotated out was in the middle of a big investigation—in which case, he might have to stay a few months longer.

  But the constant rotation had a positive corollary effect, one that we had intended from the start.

  Over the years we rotated hundreds, even thousands, of IAB investigators and supervisors back into the regular ranks of the NYPD. When they get there, the other cops know that they’ve been with Internal Affairs for the past two years, but they also know that they hadn’t volunteered for it, the Department made them do it—and thus they aren’t rats. And they’re good cops!

  Back in the old IAD days, most cops never said the words “Internal Affairs” without adding the word “assholes.” But when you’re working with a gold shield detective or a sergeant or a lieutenant that you like and respect, and who just happens to have been shanghaied into IAB for a couple of years, it’s at least a little harder to make that juxtaposition.

  Of course, I’m not saying that IAB ever became beloved within the NYPD. No cop ever stood up at a precinct Christmas party and proposed a toast to the Internal Affairs Bureau.

  But the Internal Affairs draft system—a system that has since been copied by police departments across the country and the world—changed the perception of IAB and anticorruption efforts within the Department. IAB was no longer an isolated unit in the NYPD; it was a unit of the NYPD.

  And the cops who work for IAB are just that. They’re cops like everybody else.

  * * *

  It’s a funny thing about the infamous Blue Wall of Silence, the code that allegedly prevents cops from reporting corruption or misconduct by other cops. What’s funny is that the wall isn’t quite as high and impenetrable as a lot of people seem to think—and it’s not always blue.

  Actual case in point: Two FDNY firefighters at a fire station on Staten Island get into a beef, which ends with one firefighter whacking the other over the head with a folding metal chair. He hits him a little harder than he meant to, and the guy goes down unconscious and bleeding heavily from the head wound. The other firefighters transport him to the hospital, where a hospital worker reports it to the NYPD as a possible assault. But when the precinct detectives go to the firehouse to question the other firefighters about the fight, the response is: What fight? There was no fight. Eddie fell off a ladder. And after Eddie wakes up and the detectives try to question him, he’s already gotten the word: There was no fight. I fell off a ladder. There’s no complainant, no witnesses, and since the firefighters have already hosed the blood off the chair and the floor, no evidence—and thus no case.

  So what is that? The Red Wall of Silence?

  Another case in point: I’m teaching a police science class at John Jay and I decide to conduct an experiment on silences and walls. There’s this young woman in class, she’s my star student, she’s aced every test so far, and she has expressed fascination with police undercover investigations. I call her into my office and tell her: Look, I’m going to give you an A on the final exam before you even take it, because I know you’d ace it anyway. All you have to do is . . . Then I lay out the scenario. She’s more than game.

  So final exam day comes, and the thirty students in the class are all at their desks, hunched over their test papers, when, as arranged, there’s a knock at the classroom door. Professor Campisi, they need to see you in the dean’s office right away. So I tell the class, I’m going to be gone for a few minutes, but you’re on your honor here—no cheating. I’m not gone for three seconds before my star student makes a big show of grabbing a textbook out of her backpack and thumbing through it. Then she calls out: Anybody know the answer to number sixteen? Nobody answers, so she keeps thumbing through the textbook, then loudly says: Oh, here it is, and goes back to the test. I come back, collect all the tests—and then I wait. I wait for anyone in that class to call me or drop me a note or come by my office to tell me, Professor Campisi, I feel obligated to tell you that Ms. Star Student cheated on the test. And nobody does, ever, not one person, not even anonymously.

  So what’s that? The Ivy-Covered Wall of Silence?

  I could go on. How often do lawyers inform on corrupt lawyers? It’s the Pinstripe Wall of Silence. How often does a medical intern turn in a surgeon for botching an operation? It’s the White Wall of Silence.

  You get the point. Almost every profession tends to protect its own. And nobody wants to be a snitch, an informer, a rat.

  Sure, you can argue that it’s different with cops, that people’s lives and freedom are involved—and you’re right. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Dowd case and other police corruption cases was the fact that many of the other cops in their precincts knew or at least suspected what was going on. But none of those cops openly stood up and said so.

  The Mollen Commission concluded that “the vast majority of police officers throughout the city do not engage in corruption,” that serious corruption in the NYPD was generally limited to small pockets of corrupt and brutal officers in the high-crime precincts. But it also found that those groups of bad cops depended on the silence of honest cops to protect them from being caught.

  Which sounds pretty bad. How can you be an honest cop and not report corruption by dishonest cops?

  But try to look at it from a cop’s point of view.

  It’s something that came up again and again in the cop focus groups I ran before and after I went to IAB. A dozen or so cops are sitting around the conference table, and they’re saying, Look, we hate guys like Michael Dowd, we hate dirty cops, we won’t work with them—and they don’t want to work with us, either, ’cause they know we’re straight. They don’t want us to see what they’re doing.

  But even if we suspect they’re dirty, the cops say, what are we going to do? Report our suspicions to the precinct CO, who’s going to contact IAD? Do we contact IAD directly, call ’em up and say, This is Officer Krupke in the One-Five, and I want to turn in some dirty cops? Yeah, right. Even if we do it anonymously, maybe they have ways of finding out who we are. And the first thing IAD is gonna do is try to get us to wear a wire on other cops—and if we refuse, maybe the Department is gonna say we’re impeding an investigation. If we do wear a wire, sure, maybe we can get close to the bad cops and help IAD build a provable case—assuming that the bad cops are stupid enough to talk about their scores in front of us. But remember, that wire’s going to pick up everything else, too. Maybe one of our friends is complaining about his wife or his girlfriend. Or maybe he mentions he had a beer with his meal, which is a violation, or he was cooping on shift, and now it’s on tape, and he gets jammed up, too.

  And then what? the cops say. We get called in front of a grand jury to testify and authenticate the tapes, and maybe the assistant district attorney or one of the grand jurors asks us if we’ve ever witnessed any other acts of corruption. Well, what’s corruption? A cop getting a free extra scoop of ice cream? A cop padd
ing his overtime a little? So we say no, we’ve never seen any other corruption, and then later it comes out somehow, and now we’re looking at a potential perjury charge.

  Or maybe IAD arrests the dirty cops and turns ’em, gets them to cooperate. The dirty cops are looking for payback, so maybe they try to dirty us up, say that we’re corrupt, too. Or maybe the case goes to trial, and some slick defense lawyer beats the shit out of us on the witness stand, he brings up every minor violation and bogus complaint we’ve ever got, he tries to make us look like bad cops—and the jurors, who don’t like snitches any more than anybody else, believe him.

  And then, these cops say, when we get back to the precinct, or even transfer to another precinct, who are we? Are we heroes who busted some bad cops? Hell no. We’re rats, that’s who we are. We’re the cops who went undercover against other cops, including the innocent ones. The other cops are gonna think that the only reason we did it is because we got jammed up and we were trying to save our own asses—because why else would any cop wear a wire against another cop? And how does anybody know we’re not still wearing a wire? That we’re not trying to put some chicken-shit departmental charge on them? Sure, it’s easy for the Department brass to say it’s our duty to stand up and report corruption and misconduct. It’s easy for the lieutenant and the captain to lecture us at roll call about turning in crooked cops. But once we do, our lives as cops are over.

  So yeah, the cops say, we hate guys like Michael Dowd, but investigating corruption isn’t our job. That’s the job of Internal Affairs. Leave us out of it.

  The cops have a point. Historically, NYPD cops who openly came forward with corruption allegations did not fare well. Most of the cops in the focus groups are too young to remember the Knapp Commission—it’s ancient history to them—but some of them have caught the movie Serpico on late-night TV. They know that when Officer Frank Serpico tried to bring corruption to light, he was at first ignored and then turned into a pariah—and then he wound up being shot and wounded on duty under some possibly questionable circumstances.

  Or maybe they’ve seen the film Prince of the City, based on a real-life corrupt NYPD narcotics cop named Bob Leuci who went undercover against other crooked cops and then openly testified against them in court. Leuci eventually was assigned to the Internal Affairs Division because no one else in the Department wanted him—which, as I’ve said, was another problem with the old IAD. Too often it was used as a dumping ground for corrupt cops who agreed to cooperate, or as an assignment of last resort for cops who really didn’t belong there but couldn’t be sent anywhere else.

  Given all that, how can we reasonably expect cops to report corruption by other cops, even anonymously? In fact, under the old system, there was a time when cops were specifically prohibited from reporting corruption anonymously. They were supposed to stand up and give their names and shield numbers, just as they would if they were making an allegation against a civilian suspect; if somehow they were caught whispering an anonymous police corruption allegation into a phone, they could be in trouble. It’s just too much to ask of cops—or of anyone, really. We had to set up a system where cops could report corruption without fear of ruining their careers and even their lives.

  I called it the PRIDE line—1-800-PRIDE-PD. It was a special line for cops only at the IAB Command Center at the new IAB headquarters on Hudson Street. Unlike the regular IAB complaint line, calls to the PRIDE line were not recorded or caller ID’d. They were completely anonymous—again, we promise. And we made sure that cops in the precincts knew about it, putting up posters in every muster room and having the number read out at roll calls.

  I’m not saying we had to bring in extra staff to handle the flood of phone calls from cops reporting corruption; in any given year we’d get about a dozen tips from cops on the PRIDE line. But as we’ll see, the PRIDE line produced some good leads on significant corruption cases. And cops who tolerated corruption could no longer use the excuse that there was no avenue for them to safely report it.

  The Command Center itself was an innovation. In the old IAD days, Internal Affairs was headquartered just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, in a grimy old three-story building with bars on the lower windows that had formerly been the 84th Precinct headquarters; once IAD moved in it was known to cops as “The Rat’s Nest.” IAD had what it called an “Action Desk,” a bank of phones manned by bored, sullen cops who took calls from citizens who had complaints—that cop beat the shit out of me, that cop stole my watch, that cop’s on the take. The IAD “intake” cops were poorly trained, unmotivated, and often hostile to the complainants. A cop beat the shit out of you? they might say. Well, did you deserve it?

  Every legitimate or even potentially legitimate complaint about police corruption that the IAD Action Desk received was supposed to be logged into the records, get a log number, be assigned to an investigator, and be forwarded to the appropriate borough District Attorney’s Office. But as the Mollen Commission reported, that didn’t always happen; in fact, it didn’t happen a lot. Hundreds of corruption allegations disappeared, with sensitive cases being sent to the infamous “tickler file.”

  In the new IAB we changed all that. For one thing, we moved out of The Rat’s Nest and into better quarters, on the third floor of an office building on Hudson Street. (Because of the nature of IAB’s work, its headquarters are always kept separate from NYPD precincts or command headquarters; it wouldn’t do to have cooperating cops or IAB undercovers walking in and out in front of other cops. But as bureau chief, my office was on the twelfth floor of NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza.)

  We get rid of the old Action Desk and introduce a new IAB Command Center as the initial contact point for reporting corruption. Again, that’s more than just a name change. The Command Center is a state-of-the-art call center, manned twenty-four/seven by a half dozen or so police officers and a couple of supervisors. The “intake” officers are usually young cops who want to make detective but who need eighteen months of investigative experience before they can get their gold shields.

  Answering phones may not seem like investigative work, but in IAB it is. We teach the intake officers how to interview people who call, what questions to ask, how to assess the information and write a report—which is what detectives do on the streets and in the squad rooms. Each call is logged—meaning a report is filled out—and given a log number; subsequent calls or actions on the initial case will also be logged and added to the file. In every case of alleged criminal behavior by a cop, we also notify the appropriate borough District Attorney’s Office, and we work closely with the DA’s anticorruption team throughout the case. In a way, the DAs and ADAs (assistant district attorneys) act as our legal advisers, guiding us through any potential legal snags as we build a case. In the old days the DAs and Internal Affairs barely spoke to one another—neither trusted the other—but in the new IAB we made it a point to partner up with them.

  The Command Center takes in thousands of calls and e-mails every year, but not all of them, or even most of them, result in an IAB corruption or misconduct investigation. Some complaints involve cops who turn out not to be NYPD—say, the Port Authority Police—and those cases will be logged and then passed over to that agency. Or maybe a desk sergeant will call to report that a cop has lost some Department property, such as his shield; unless there’s some unusual or suspicious circumstances—This is the fourth shield this guy says he lost!—that won’t be an IAB case, but we’ll log it anyway. A lot of calls from citizens concern rude behavior or excessive force by cops, which are handled not by IAB but by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the CCRB. But they all get logged.

  (A word here about the CCRB. Established in its current form in 1993, the CCRB is an independent civilian agency, not affiliated with the NYPD, that investigates all FADO complaints from the public—that is, Force (a cop roughed me up), Abuse of authority (a cop illegally searched my car), Discourtesy (a cop called me a “shithead”), and Offensive language
(a cop used a racial or sexual slur against me). The CCRB has its own team of about a hundred fifty investigators who examine the allegations and the CCRB board then makes recommendations on discipline to the Department Advocate’s Office, the NYPD’s internal prosecutor. In serious or potentially criminal cases of alleged police excessive force—for example, if a suspect is injured, or if the individual officer has a series of complaints—IAB will also conduct its own concurrent but separate investigation. I should point out that in an average year the CCRB gets about five thousand complaints about cops—this in a city of eight million people—of which about half are fully investigated; only 1 or 2 percent of the complaints are eventually substantiated.

  In any given year, the IAB command desk generates about fifty or sixty thousand logs, of which about a thousand will ultimately involve an IAB corruption or misconduct investigation—which has caused some confusion. At one point the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)—and the press—took a look at the numbers and said: What? Internal Affairs is getting fifty thousand “logs” a year and only investigating a thousand misconduct allegations? They’re ignoring tens of thousands of tips! It’s a cover-up!

  Well, I try to explain to them that a “log” is not a “tip,” but simply a report of a call, or an action taken on a previous complaint; a single misconduct allegation may generate ten or twenty or more “logs” as the case progresses. I also try to explain that most of the calls the Command Center takes in do not involve corruption or misconduct allegations, or if they do, they’re about other police agencies or they are outside IAB’s area of primary authority. For example, of about two thousand civilian calls a year concerning alleged NYPD misconduct, about fifteen hundred are CCRB cases—That cop was rude to me! That cop put my handcuffs on too tight! Even though those complaints are referred to and investigated by CCRB, they still get a log number from us.