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  And I also try to explain that there are people out there like Barry from Brooklyn.

  A call comes in to the Command Center and one of the POs on duty answers it the way he’s been trained to do: Internal Affairs Command Center, Officer Smith speaking, how may I help you? But he barely gets the words out before the guy on the other end starts screaming.

  He stabbed me in the eye! That cop stabbed me in the fucking eye! He was writing me a ticket and he took his pen and for no reason he stabbed me in my right eye!

  We teach our intake officers to establish a rapport with callers, just as they’ll have to do when they’re interviewing witnesses or suspects as detectives. So Officer Smith says: Oh my goodness, that’s terrible! Are you all right?

  No, I’m not all right! the caller says. That cop stabbed me in my fucking eye!

  Officer Smith finally gets him calmed down enough to get his name and address—he’s Barry from Brooklyn—which he writes down in a log. He calls in a supervisor, a lieutenant, who sends a bus (an ambulance) to Barry’s address, and calls the local precinct to have a patrol sergeant immediately respond to check on him. But when they get there, Barry’s right eye is fine—and so is his left eye. There’s no sign of any injury. Barry is still sticking to his story—That cop stabbed me in the eye!—but he doesn’t have a name or a shield number or any other information. It’s obvious that Barry is, well, a little mixed up.

  And then a few days later the phone rings in the Command Center and it’s Barry again. He stabbed me in the eye! That fucking cop took a pencil and stabbed me in my fucking right eye!

  So just in case, we send a bus and a patrol supervisor again, and again, Barry’s fine, physically, at least. And then a few days later Barry calls again, and then again a few days after that. Over the next six months, Barry calls the Command Center more than forty times—every call is logged—to report an eye-stabbing by a cop. The weapon allegedly used in each attack varies—a pen, a toothpick, a swizzle stick, a Popsicle stick—but Barry doggedly sticks to the basic story: That cop stabbed me in the eye! And then for some reason, Barry stops calling. Maybe he finally got back on his meds.

  Or how about Mrs. Guzman in the Bronx? Poor Mrs. Guzman calls the IAB Command Center to report that every time a police car or ambulance goes by her apartment with its siren wailing, she loses bladder control—and she wants to know what are we going to do about it? We have to explain to her that as distressing and uncomfortable as we know her situation must be, there’s really nothing the Internal Affairs Bureau can do, that emergency sirens are a public safety issue. We explain this to her more than thirty times over the course of a year—and each one of those thirty explanations becomes a “log” that the NYCLU thinks is a “tip” about police corruption and brutality.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that a large percentage of the people who call IAB to complain about cops are EDPs. Most callers are people who honestly believe they have a legitimate complaint, and we’ll help them as much as we can. And I’m not saying that the IAB citizen complaint system is perfect, either. We made some mistakes. But I can honestly say that while I was chief the Internal Affairs Bureau did its best to handle civilian complaints properly and effectively.

  Like I said. There’s a new IAB in town.

  So that’s how the new IAB is organized, and how it came to be. But maybe by now you’re wondering, How do we actually do what we do? How do we keep honest cops honest? How do we protect good cops from false allegations?

  And exactly how do we catch a crooked cop?

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  TO CATCH A CROOKED COP

  It starts with an accusation: There’s this crooked cop . . .

  The accusation may come in the form of a furtive, whispered call on our 1-800-PRIDE-PD line, and an anonymous cop will tell us, Look, I don’t want to get involved, but there’s these cops on midnights in the Nine-Nine, Smith and Jones and Alvarez, they’re busting doors and ripping off drug dealers, that’s all I’m gonna say, I won’t call again—click!

  Or maybe it’s a woman who owns a bodega in Brooklyn, and she calls the regular IAB line and tells us, Hey, there’s these two cops, they come into my store, and I didn’t see them take it, but I’ve got money in a cigar box under the counter, and when the cops come in the money’s there, and after they leave some of the money’s gone, and no, I don’t know the cops’ names, but it happened on this day and at this time, and what are you gonna do about it?

  Or maybe we get a call from another agency—the FBI, the DEA, another police department—and they tell us, Hey, we’ve got this informant who says he can give up some NYPD cops who did a hundred-thousand-dollar drug rip, are you interested? You bet we are.

  Or maybe sometimes—actually, a lot—it’s a cop’s angry ex-wife looking to get even with a bad ex-husband, or a recently arrested perp looking for payback. We take those seriously, because who knows, they could be true.

  But it’s not just phone calls and tips that launch IAB investigations. Like I said, if the IAB really wants to fight police corruption and misconduct, we can’t just wait for accusations against cops to come in over the transom. Sometimes we have to go out and look for corruption ourselves—and so we set up programs to do just that. And because everything in the NYPD has to have an acronym, we called those programs EDITs (Enforcement, Debriefing, Intelligence, and Testing) and AWAREs (Active Warrant Address Review and Enforcement).

  Here’s an example. In the NYPD, every arrestee being processed through the system is supposed to be “debriefed,” meaning that squad detectives will ask him or her about other crimes they weren’t necessarily involved in but that they may have information about: Do you have knowledge of any murders, shootings, robberies, illegal guns, drug dealing, police corruption or misconduct, rapes, assaults, and on and on—there’s a long checklist the detectives go through. If a perp who’s in for selling a couple of grams of crack knows who robbed that bodega on 164th Street the other day, the detective might offer to help him work out a deal for a reduced sentence on the crack charge in exchange for solid information that leads to an arrest on the armed robbery.

  Which is fine. That’s the way the system works, in the NYPD and in every other law enforcement agency in America. You may be a low-life, crack-slinging skell, but if you do something nice for us—which is to say, if you give us somebody who’s a worse crook than you are—in return we’ll do something nice for you.

  The problem for us in IAB is that too often the precinct detectives will skip over the “police corruption or misconduct” part of the checklist. They’ll say something like, You don’t know anything about police corruption or misconduct, right? Good, let’s move on. Being cops, they aren’t looking that hard for misconduct allegations against other cops.

  But we are. That’s our job—and that’s where EDITs come in. At least once a week, in every borough command, a team of IAB detectives goes out and debriefs perps who are being booked, or re-debriefs perps who have already been debriefed by the squad detectives. And if one of those perps says he knows about a cop ripping off a drug dealer or stealing money or beating people up, we’ll work with the guy.

  Yo, there’s this cop in New Lots, the perp might say, I don’t know his name, but I seen it, he banged Tay Weez and took his money.

  Really? Tell us more.

  Sometimes we won’t wait for the perps to be arrested by other cops; we go out and arrest them ourselves. For example, a lot of our guys worked in Narcotics before we drafted them into IAB, and they know how to work a drug set. So they go out to a dope spot in Brooklyn or the Bronx, make some drug buys, make some collars, take the perps to the local precinct and go through the checklist: Do you have knowledge of any murders, shootings, robberies, illegal guns, drug dealing, police corruption or misconduct, rapes, assaults . . . If the perp gives up another criminal on a murder or a gun or a robbery or whatever, we’ll hand him over to the regular squad detectives. If he gives us an allegedly croo
ked cop, he’s ours.

  Same thing with the AWARE program. Our IAB guys go out and pick up people who have outstanding warrants—usually for relatively minor stuff, like subway fare beating or a summons for public urination, stuff they forgot to show up in court for—and put them through the drill: Do you have any knowledge of . . .

  Over the years we debriefed thousands of perps, and arrested hundreds more, and developed information on more than twenty-five hundred non-cop-related crimes that we handed over to other detectives. And while it didn’t happen often, maybe a dozen times a year, every now and then one of those perps would tell us, There’s this crooked cop . . .

  So now we’ve got an allegation against a cop or cops—from a perp or a bodega owner or a nervous anonymous cop or another law enforcement agency or from our own EDIT and AWARE programs. But at this point, it’s just that—an allegation, an accusation.

  Now we have to find out if it’s true.

  Sure, sometimes we catch a cop corruption case with a nice neat bow on it, a case that’s easy to make. For example, we once got a call on our PRIDE line from a nervous cop in a precinct in Queens. They’ve been having a string of bank robberies in the precinct, one-on-one “note job” robberies in which a bank robber confronts an individual teller and hands her a note that says: Give me the money in your cash drawer or else! This guy has hit four banks for a total of about $17,000, so they’ve posted a bank surveillance photo of the robber on a “Wanted for Bank Robbery” poster in the precinct muster room. The thing is, while the cop calling on the PRIDE line can’t be sure, he says the surveillance photo looks a whole lot like another cop who works in the same precinct.

  So we yank the suspect cop’s official Department photo and compare it to the surveillance shot, and yeah, that’s the guy. It also helps that we find out that at the exact time of every robbery the cop had checked out in civilian clothes to run a personal errand—the personal errand being to rob a bank. We pick him up, he confesses—I needed the money, he tells us, which is something we hear a lot—we kick him out of the Department, and he does five years in prison. (After he gets out, he actually lands another city job, driving a bus in Brooklyn.)

  Unfortunately, most of our cases aren’t that simple. Usually when we have an allegation against a cop, we can’t just go out and scoop him up, take his badge and shield, and put him on desk duty while we investigate. That’s especially true if the only thing we’ve got is an anonymous voice on the phone, or the uncertain memory of a victim, or an accusation from a perp who’s trying to get out from under a charge. Again, our job in IAB is not only to catch crooked cops, but to protect innocent ones. We aren’t going to put a cop on modified duty and damage his career unless we’re pretty sure the allegation against him is true. Besides, if there is corruption, we also want to find out if any other cops are involved before we make any overt moves.

  So unless the accused cop (or cops) poses an immediate danger, we’ll leave him out there while we try to figure out: Who is this guy?

  There have been numerous academic studies of police corruption and misconduct over the years—I’ve studied it a lot myself—and it would be nice if there were some consistent indicator, some reliable red flag in a cop’s background to tell us if he or she is likely to be corrupt or brutal.

  Yes, you can make a few generalities: better-educated cops are statistically less likely to be corrupt than lesser-educated ones; corrupt female cops are statistically less common than corrupt male cops; cops who were hired when the Department had to lower its standards to bring in enough recruits—the 1980s are an example—sometimes had incomplete background checks, and a few were criminals even before they became crooked cops, so there’s a somewhat higher proportion of dirty cops in that cohort.

  But to an IAB investigator those generalities are pretty much useless. An investigator can only safely assume that all corrupt cops are white, except when they’re black or Hispanic or Asian, that they all grew up poor in the ghetto, except for the ones who grew up in middle-class suburbs, that they’re all young, except for the old ones, or they’re all males, except for the female ones . . .

  Well, you get the point. There is no typical corrupt cop.

  And there’s no typical reason why cops decide to cross the line into corruption, either. Whenever we arrest a corrupt cop we always try to ask him why he did it, what made him steal from a DOA or shake down a drug dealer or whatever it was he’d been caught doing; on a few occasions it could even be a condition of a plea agreement with the prosecutor that the cop allow IAB to debrief him about his motives. As you might expect with cops caught for financial corruption, most of them say they simply needed extra money, like that cop who was robbing banks. But their underlying reasons vary as widely as they do in the civilian world: I’m going through a bad divorce, my child support payments are killing me, I’m a gambling addict, I just want a few of the little extras in life—a boat, a house in the country, expensive vacations with the wife, or with the girlfriend that the wife doesn’t know about.

  But whatever the reason, it’s a fool’s calculation. A crooked Wall Street hedge fund manager might be able to make tens of millions of dollars through his crimes, but no NYPD cop ever did; they just don’t have the opportunities. For a crooked cop, it’s a few hundred here, on rare occasions maybe ten or twenty grand there, on even rarer occasions maybe a hundred grand if they rip off a major drug dealer. But compared to what they’re giving up, it’s chump change. As chief of IAB, I would regularly go to the Academy and talk to the recruits about what I called “the Million Dollar Mistake.” If you get caught up in corruption, I tell them, not only have you given up your honor, and your job, and your salary, and your freedom, but we’re also going to take away your pension—a pension that over the course of twenty years can amount to well over a million dollars. I tell them, even if you can’t think of another reason not to be a corrupt cop—and there are many—do yourself a favor and do the math.

  So anyway, there is no hard-and-fast profile of a “typical” corrupt cop. Still, if you pull an accused cop’s package, his personnel file—and that’s one of the first things we do—and if you pore through other available records, there are some things that can stand out. None of them is proof of anything, but . . .

  One of the things we’ll look for is criminal associations in his background. Remember how I said that during my NYPD application process I had to list not only all my family members but almost everyone I ever knew? Well, maybe it’s not relevant that a cop’s second cousin or best friend from high school is now ganged up or Mobbed up or just got out of prison on a drug-dealing charge . . . but maybe it is. In New York City especially, ties to family and neighborhood are strong—sometimes strong enough to induce a cop to cross the line, or to continue in a family business that’s already on the other side of the line.

  For example, we had one cop under investigation for money laundering, taking the proceeds from a large-scale counterfeit sports apparel operation—fake NFL and Major League Baseball jerseys, that kind of thing—and making “structured” cash deposits in banks to avoid reporting requirements. When we pull his PA-15 (his Academy application) and run some names, we find that his father, his mother, and his brother have all done prison time for—you guessed it—money laundering and counterfeit goods trafficking. It’s not always true, but sometimes the apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  There are other things to look for. Has the cop in question bounced around from precinct to precinct? Okay, maybe he just likes a change of scenery—or maybe the other cops don’t like to work with him, or his CO got suspicious and palmed him off on somebody else. Does the cop have a lot of Civilian Complaint Review Board complaints, even if most of them are unsubstantiated? It could just be that he’s a hard charger, that he makes a lot of arrests, and everybody knows that the more arrests you make the more CCRB complaints you’re going to accumulate. But it could also indicate there’s a problem there.

  On the other h
and, is the cop a guy who used to make a dozen arrests a month and now makes zero? For a cop, an arrest usually means overtime pay, time-and-a-half, especially if he makes the collar near the end of his shift, because it takes hours, even a full day, to process a perp into the system. It’s what’s known in the NYPD as “collars for dollars.” Some cops don’t need or want the overtime, so they let their partners take the collars, but when a former hard-charger suddenly stops making arrests, it might mean something. It might mean he’s got a new girlfriend who requires his attention. It might mean he’s studying for the sergeant’s exam and he just doesn’t have the time, or it could be that he’s taken a part-time moonlighting job for some extra income. Or maybe, just maybe, it means he doesn’t need the arrest overtime because he’s suddenly found an alternate method of increasing his income.

  If there’s a credible allegation against a cop you can also do a financial check. Does he have an off-duty job or side business, maybe a barbershop or a car repair place, that’s in a high-crime or corruption-prone area? (All NYPD cops are required to register off-duty jobs or side businesses with the Department.) You can’t get the guy’s bank and credit card statements without a court order, and you aren’t going to get a court order based solely on suspicions. But you can check public records. Does he drive a brand-new BMW or a ten-year-old Dodge Caravan? Does he have a nice house in Westchester, and a mountain cabin in the Catskills, and a beach place on Long Island? Well, maybe his parents are rich, or his wife is, but one thing’s for certain: He’s not paying for all that just on a cop’s salary.

  Depending on the case, maybe we’ll also quietly reach out to the accused cop’s CO, or to people we trust who used to work with him, or to the anonymous IAB field associate in the unit. (Field associates are regular cops recruited out of the Academy by IAB to let us know if they see or hear of corruption or serious misconduct problems within their units.) We ask them, what kind of cop is this guy? What’s his reputation? Do other cops not like to work with him? Who’s he tight with, and what kind of cops are they? What do the other cops call him? Does he have a nickname? Believe it or not, sometimes a cop’s nickname can tell us a lot.