they're favorite thing. the left's philosophy is based solely and completely at this point on the idea that they stand up for victimized groups. everything else they do is to stand up on victimized minorities, blags, jews, gaysings women. if you're a minority, they stand up for you. if we oppose policies, by necessity, logic is we hate blacks, jews, gay, and women. that is sort of the philosophy theyed trod -- trod out. >> in-depth, taking calls and comments for three hours live at noon eastern, and looking ahead, john louis is october's guest.

>> thank you, all. thanks a lot for coming. i rial appreciate it. i've been covering the police department for almost 20 # year, and this is a crazyist story i came across in my entire period.

the book is about a police officer secretly recorded liz police commander's ordered various types of misconduct in the first briefing. the backdrop is the nypd's crime fighting strategy. this is the strategy where statistics are used to identify crime hot spots and officers are stent to respond to the hot spots. that strategy is credited with the sharp crime drop in the city over the last 20 years, but it had weaknesses that became more and more apparent as time went on, and that strategy had problems because it inspired commanders to come up with the ways to make crime look better without actually, you know, ways

to make crime look like it was going down without actually doing the work, manipulating the statistics. a lot of the evers raised in the book are now discussed as part of the mayor race. quotas, downgrading ever crime, civil rights violations, stop and frisking all things that have been sort of a part of this mayor race. my journey through the story begins in march 2010 when i got a cryptic e-mail from the police officer. his name was schoolcraft, just one paragraph, and then there was a audio file attached to it with -- and i clicked on the file, and it was a sergeant telling the police officers not to take crime reports under certain circumstances. not to take robbery reports under certain circumstances, and

that was amazing to me because we'd always talked about reporters this going on, but just to have a commander actually saying that on tape was amazing, you know? i was intrigue. i called him, and i said, can i see you? expecting to go to brooklyn or queens, but he was in upstate new york. i drove up there. it was a town that was run down, a rust belt town that manufactured leather, but a lot of the factories were closed. they were living in a nondiscrypt, also run-down apartment complex, with his father in a one-bedroom apartment. i knocked on the door, and they lot me in, and i was -- i didn't know what to expect. turnedded out, he was a huge guy, and he was very kind of soft spoken, and he looked like

he could have walked through a wall, but soft spoken. his father, on the other hand, was a smaller guy, but very loud and very talkative, probably the most talkative person i ever met, and before long, we started with mayor bloomberg and ray kelly, and we ended up talking about the jfk assassination and, you know, various conspiracy theory, and then we had to go in the other room to get him to stop talking because he went on for, like, 25 minutes, and so he was living -- his bedroom was completely undecorated, just a computer and a desk and mattress on the floor. i said, so, hiewch tape do you have? he goes, oh, about 1200 hours. for a reporter, this is a big deal. it turned out he had recorded secretly in the precincts for

two years. the only way he could do this was because the digital recorder technology was there where they were just about this big, and he bought two or three. one was a watch recorder. i didn't know there was such a thing. it was like a normal watch, normal digital watch, other than there was a microphone on it. the other one he put in his shirt pocket. he wore it. turned it on at the beginning of the tour, and turned it off at the end of the tour, went home, and down loaded that on the computer. he could cut, you know, he could pick out certain things he thought were interesting, and so -- a lot was just street chatter and locker room banter, stuff like that. it was not useful. but what he did get me was the roll calls, the meetings at the beginning of each tour where police commanders tell officers what to focus on for that day. he gave he 1 # 17 # --

117 roll calls and now had a day-to-day record of what officers are ordered to do over a long period of time. you got a sense of the priorities in the precinct. the main priority was getting numbers. the police commander was absolutely obsessed with getting numbers, with getting hire summons, higher stop and frisks, and lower crime numbers. there was a constant drum beat every day in the roll calls. get more summons. get more summons. to the point where the officers really had no discretion at all. i mean, they were just -- the quota was the main thing. get your numbers, get the numbers. this, again, is a product of con cements. it's -- it started in the early 1990s under commissioner brad,

and it was very successful in driving down crime, but as time went on, it became harder and harder to drive crime down by the same percentage that it had in the beginning; right? what -- at the same time, success in commanders met promotion. those two things combined to create incredible incentives for police commanders to come up with innovative, quote-on-quote, innovative ways to make numbers look better. what they would do is have what would be directive summons units where you go to the corner and write every summons you find no matter what, everything. instead of, you know, in the past, there was discretion to say, you know, all right, i'm going to let you off with a warning, but now because they had to get the numbers, that kind of discretion was gone.

he came from texas, a registered republican, which a lot of people find surprising given what he did. his dad was a police officer. he was an outsider in terms of the police department culture. he didn't grow up in bay ridge or jamaica or south bronx. he was on the outside. he didn't have any ties here. he didn't want to be a police officer. he had been in the navy as a coreman, got out, and worked for motorolla on software chips and only moved back to new york because his mother got sick. she was very sick. she said to him -- there was an ad for police department for police recruiting ad after 9/11 said try to be a police officer. he said, oh, i don't want to do that. she finally convinced him, and

he took the test, did very well, they called him immediately, and he found himself standing there in the police academy, and for the first couple years, he went along with the program. the first thing you do as a police officer is go to impact where you are sent to a high crime precinct as a rookie, and for eight months, told to write tickets. you're not given a lot of supervision, and because you're a rookie officer, they fire you for everything so there's rookies obligated to do what they are told or else they are fired. after that, he went to the precinct in bedsty, the precinct where frank started. his career, if anyone remembers who frank is. he was the central figure in a major corruption uncovering corruption in the early 70s.

for the first couple years, they went with the program, got the quotas, called him the hammer. he was so rough he was six-foot-two, 230 pounds, a big guy, and as time went on, he became discontented and disenchanted with this constant quota pressure, and he started ob jeblghting, and one of the people who likes to write letters, objected to the amount of overtime, and wrote a letter to the police commander, which is -- i mean, of course, that didn't go anywhere. it was ignored, but it just gives you a fact of who it was. this is a letter, this is outrageous, and there were a couple other things he complained about.

the first commander was tolerant because he was smart and out on the street, trying to do his job, but he left, and the next commander came in, and he was very much a com stat commander interested in numbers, all about numbers, not discretion or community policing or, you know, it was about getting numbers, make the precinct and himself look good. the atmosphere changed when he came in, and he was a target because they were looking at their spread sheets saying, well, you know, so and so has 30 summons for the month, and you only have three. why is that? you know, so and so has 18 stop and frisks, and you only have six. well, you know, he said, well, i was out there doing my job, you know, just seeing what's happening and responding to it. there's a wonderful exchange between the xo executive officer

and him over two con -- conflicting theories. i'm going to respond to the crimes i see, respond to the misconduct that i see, but i'm not going to get a number just for the number's sake, and exktive officer says, you're going to get the numbers or else we're going to find some way to get rid of you, get transferred, get -- so they immediately -- they identified him as a problem, and they started squeezing him, and by "squeezing," they gave him bad assignments, out of the car, a foot post in the most dangerous areas in the predistinct by himself for the night shift. the night shift is 3:30 to 11:30, there's three shifts in a typical day in a police department. they would send him out there all the time to do -- stand on the corner in midtown,

manhattan. a big problem with the police department right now is -- has been for years -- that the numbers are way down, and at the same time, cops are pulled out of precincts in the outer burroughs and put into high tourist areas like midtown, manhattan, lower manhattan, around ground zero, police headquarters, city hall, and the effect of that is, of course, you know why they do it, to make sure nothing happens to embarrass the city in the tourist heavy areas, but the objective is that the outer burrough precincts are short staffed, and there's stuff in the book about that, you know, at one point, the -- there's only one car for the whole -- for, like, half the precinct, one car for half the sector precinct. he starts objecting. they squeeze him, give him bad assignments, and he starts taping because he's concerned,

you know, he wants to build evidence of what's going on in the precinct and he wants to protect himself. he does this in consultation with his father. his father is a real driving force. you'll see it in the book. he's the behind the scenes kind of egging him on to do this stuff, and, you know, he has this very strong sense of right and wrong, and so he's -- he thinks if you build evidence with the tape recording, you know, he'll be able to protect himself. ..

that's the perception of you know -- can you imagine if the perception of the community is that can you imagine what the relationship is between the precinct and you? there is another quote. the adrian is talking with another officer who is telling him a story about how the police commander downgraded this one particular crime. a guy reported as stolen car and the precinct commander responded to the scene which is unusual and also telling. he was so obsessed with getting his crime numbers down that he was responding to individual crime scenes to check on the reports. that is something that never would have happened to teen or 20 years ago. this was a routine stolen car report. the precinct commander responded and he says have you been in prison at all? the guy goes yeah well when i was young and i did a couple of years.

the precinct commander says maybe karma stole your car. meaning he was getting paid back that report ended up not being taken. the guy tried and so there is an example they tried to report a crime and it ended up going into the circular file. there was another incident where a woman had had her cell phone robbed on the subway and the commander responded again. he told her, well what do you want me to do about it? [laughter] he said you're not going to get it back. do you want me to drive you home? so that report also was taken. these aren't homicides. these are routine low-level incidences but those are the kinds of incidents is that copes first -- cops respond to the most. it's happening like that in one

precinct it's logical to guess that it's happening in other precincts come cover i? there's another role call where the commander comes in and the commander would make -- they would have these wonderful long speeches about how important it was to keep the numbers down and at this time is talking to a school about his own numbers. he is in a meeting where they are trying to pressure them into getting their quotas. he said with these numbers the chief of go through the roof. his head will come to the top of wilson avenue. wilson avenue is the borough headquarters. so the significance there is that here you have the achieved in the new york city police department worried about one officer and one of 10 precincts that he oversees. that get you a sense of just how crazy the strategy got.

it was now -- there were only 30 chiefs in the department he was worried about one of 30 and the number of traffic tickets he had written. then there is a lot of little kind of vignettes about what it's like to be a patrol officer which is the lowliest of all. there is a sergeant who says in one of the roll calls listen if you are watching a dead guy's apartment don't sit in his chair. don't watches tv and don't be back his food out of the refrigerator. here is another -- i think it's the same roll call where he is talking about how the officers were defacing the precinct with graffiti which i thought was funny given that the amount of resources the department puts into eradicating graffiti

outside of the precinct. so adrian finally decides he can't go anywhere inside the precinct. no one is going to listen to him so he goes to an investigative unit called the quality assurance division. the cops were refusing to take crime reports and they sit for two hours and they promised to investigate it and after that adrian starts getting calls from the internal affairs bureau at the precinct. the internal affairs bureau at the precinct which is like telling the precinct commander he is gone to investigators about the precinct. it's a huge breach in to this day i'm not sure why they did it. three weeks after he did -- went to the investigators and this was hollowing of 2009, he is feeling intimidated by one of

his lieutenants because his lieutenant has found his memo book and adrian had been keeping looks in his memo book about the misconduct of the precincts of the lieutenant takes the memo book copies it and then comes out and starts walking around adrian in a threatening manner. adrian goes home an hour early and he said i am sick. when he gets home he calls internal affairs and makes a complaint and they dutifully take it but that's clear that nothing is going to happen from it. that night, the -- in the meantime there some kind of controversy at the precinct about adrian leaving early so that night they go to his house and basically they send emergency services which is the heavily armed swat unit in the police department and a deputy chief goes. he is one of the most senior people in the departmendepartmen t. the precinct commander of the executive officer and a bunch of

other people. they go to his house and they say listen you left early. you have to come back to the precinct and adrian is kind of stubborn and he says no. you are in my apartment. they get into his apartment by getting a key from the landlord and his apartment is the size of this platform. imagine you have 12 police officers a lot of them and tactical gear standing in this tiny space. it's kind of intimidating and he says -- adrian says as stubborn as he is he says i'm not going. i'm not going. so the chief comes in. the chief gets angry and he says you were not going? you are refusing an order from the deputy chief of the police department? adrian says no, i'm not going. all of a sudden adrian becomes in edp. edp is the department acronym for emotionally disturbed person it's basically saying he is crazy and when to identify someone as an edp you basically can take them to the hospital and you can force them to go to

the hospital and they lose their rights. they got into the apartment without a warrant. warrant. there is no crime. now they have labeled him as crazy and now he has basically surrendered his civil rights. he refuses to go with them. they throw him on the floor. they put a foot on his chest. they roughed him up and in the book this whole sequence is in there and much more detail. they put them in a chair and basically strap him down and take him to the jamaica hospital psychiatric ward. now, the department said this was fully justified however adrian recorded the whole thing. [laughter] is completely unjustified. he is basically calm throughout and he doesn't raise his voice until the point where they tackle him and throw him off the boat -- bed and you would too if

you are being tackled and thrown off the bed. he is basically in control and he's saying look if you guys want me to come back i'm not coming back to the precinct today. i will come back tomorrow. you can discipline me for leaving work early and that's it but they wouldn't let it go and this is where it all kind of comes together. why would they do that? they knew that he had gone to investigators. they knew that he had this evidence. why would they push it so hard? if i go home from work early without telling my voice he -- bossi's going to call me up and yell at me and that's going to be at. they pushed to the point where he was taken off to the psych ward. so he's sitting in the psych ward and watching tv. there is a woman who keeps repeatedly forcing herself sit

sit next to him. he is watching and all of a sudden greg kelly comes on. greg kelly is the police commissioner son who has a morning show on fox. greg kelly is talking about beating a parking ticket. here is adrian the police officer sitting in the psych ward watching the police commissioner son on how to beat a speeding ticket. he called the fbi and the mayor's office and the police commissioner's office calls internal affairs and he says no one listens. that's the other piece of the this story that is amazing. all of the oversight agencies ignore the whole thing. this overwrites violations and the things who is talking about. it's enough to make you really cynical about the whole process.

so he finally gets out andy starts talking to the press a little bit. larry and his father flee to the small apartment in upstate new york and hole up in their. two fugitives even though they are not. the department start sending people outside the city up there to bang on the door to get them to come out. and so what takes place is this cat and mouse game were adrian and larry are sitting inside the apartment saying i don't know what to do. what should we do? the cops are outside going bam, bam. this guy knocks 186 times on the door. he is pounding on the door and saying adrian come out we want to talk to you. so then the department sends up surveillance these black suvs that are doing surveillance and so you have this hilarious thing where it adrian and larry are

peeking out of the curtains and there is these two surveillance suv sitting in a drive. there is no crime committed here. the police officers were completely outside of their jurisdiction. they are sitting there surveilling a wayward police officer who is maybe a little bit eccentric. so i was able for this book i was able to obtain the notes of that surveillance and i just wanted to read a couple of sentences. in the meantime they are videotaping the house. they are videotaping everything are recording it and these are lieutenants and sergeants making over $100,000 a year sitting up there all day. one of the notes is light from possible fish tank has been turned on. [laughter] another is sergeant utilize binoculars. subject appeared to be wearing a white t-shirt and what appeared to be white sweatpants. that was the best they could do.

so eventually the police realize that adrian was not going to cooperate and he -- they kind of backed off. another thing they did after that was they conducted this investigation and they did everything they could to discredit him including when he tried to up life for food stamps they blocked his application because they said he was still technically a police officer even though he was not being paid. i thought that was really a vindictive thing to do. and then they produce these internal reports which are in the book which have never been written about or seen in terms of -- in which they completely ignore the tape recording. they ignore all of the documentary evidence that they have and they just believe what the police officers with the police bosses said. there is a tape that has an

entire incident documented and these internal affairs reports completely ignore them and reject all of schoolcraft's allegations and believe that the commander said. it's amazing. but the one thing that was going in his favor was the quality assurance division. they did their jobs and they were able to show that adrian was telling the truth. they checked out every one of his -- every one of the cases and he brought 13 cases and they were able to substantiate every one of them. that report was completed in june of 2010. the department put in and to a safe and locks the safe and didn't see the light of day and wouldn't have seen the light of day if i hadn't been able to get it through a source 18 months after was finished. during that 18 months i asked for this report in the department kept saying, we don't

know what you are talking about. the report is not done. i kept getting stonewalled and it was clear that they just didn't want to release it because it made -- it confirmed a lot of what adrian was saying. so the only -- he had gone to the oversight agencies and the only thing he had left to do was to sue. for three years or two and a half years he filed a lawsuit in 2010 in august and basically it's been rambling on since. that's interesting also the strategy that the city took in this case and what happened with adrian and his lawyers and his father and the incredible stress and tension that comes when you are trying to fight. remember these are little guys. they are a father and his a son and they don't have any money.

they are fighting against the 4 billion-dollar law enforcement agency with unlimited legal resources. the commissioners probably the most prominent law enforcement in the city. they are worried about their legacies and here is adrian schoolcraft's giving a completely different narrative to the last eight years in the police department. and i just wanted to mention adrian's work has been very significant. not in terms of him getting people indicted for how he was treated but in terms of affecting the dialogue in the city and the best example of that is that his tapes were played in the landmark stop interest files floyd versus new york. floyd versus the city of new york and the judge in that case described the tapes as smoking

gun evidence of civil rights violations. i am told that there is going to be a decision in the case on in this week which might result for the first in memory of federal monitor being appointed to oversee the police department and that is a historic thing. in that respect he has had some success. just a couple of things and other characters in the book. there is another character in the book who went through a very similar thing in the bronx. he was one of these guys who grew up in washington heights during the period when washington heights was at dangerous area. he saw his career crash on the shoals of his numbers driven strategy and at some point he got sick of stopping and frisking black and hispanic men for no reason. he started objecting to that and they squeezed him just like they squeezed adrian.

also in the book there is detective -- who eight years ago and i will just tell his story row quickly. the guy gets arrested for a knifepoint -- attempted knifepoint rape in an apartment and hernandez comes in the morning and sits with him in the interview and he looks at him and he says you have done this before haven't you? the guy says yeah and eventually he shows up at the locations and it turns out he had done six previous attempted knifepoint rapes but they all have been classified as misdemeanors so the sex crimes unit was never notified in the precinct commander wanted so badly to keep his numbers down that these very serious crimes were downgraded to misdemeanors and thus a rapist was able to continue to work with impunity for a period of months.

i talked to one of his victims and she said that for the next three years after that she would never -- she could never relax in the hallway or a vestibule or an elevator. she actually lived -- left the city and lived in a small town. so that is the real real-world effect of this downgrading of crimes and refusing to take reports. that is all i have. does anyone have any questions? yes, sir? >> this is downgrading things and -- [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] what is your perception and i hope i can talk to you afterwards because i would like to meet you. what's your perception aside from what mr. schoolcraft was going to do as to the vehicle which to get. there is the ccr be which is run by the mayor and then there is this other unit. aside from court what do you see as a viable way for a citizen. to deal with police corruption

threats and violence etc. which granted is 120 which is a horrible precinct. >> question is how do you report corruption as a civilian? document it. document everything. most people don't. most people haven't experienced with the police. all right, sir. thank you. document everything and most people don't document. if you have an encounter with the police get a report number and get a receipt. write down the names of the officers you are dealing with. let's talk about it after. it's a very complicated question you are asking. yes, sir? >> why has schoolcraft gone through so many attorneys and why did lawrenceburg drop the case? where his glee sin and is it

true as a blogger said that he disappeared and he can't be found? we don't know where he is? >> the question is why is adrian had trouble with his lawyers and where is he now? is that fair wax well, it's in the book. they fired lawrenceburg. they didn't feel lawrenceburg was aggressive enough and let me just kind of put this in context for everyone. the schoolcraft's are difficult people to deal with and most whistleblowers are difficult to deal with. i don't know if you have seen the insiders and jeffrey white camp with the tobacco industry. they are under tremendous amount of pressure and they have no money and no -- except for larry's disability from the army and the police department in texas and so they wanted

lawrence to be more aggressive and they fired the other two that lawrence was working with and then there was more conflict with the next batch. i think now they have nat smith and john -- a prosecutor who i think they will stick with. i i think they have learned their lesson about firing lawyers. it displays your case even more. that is one of the reasons why we haven't had a trial yet because no depositions have been taken in three years. that is why this thing is going to go on for another year at least. yes, sir? [inaudible] >> adrian is unique in the history of the police department. he has been suspended without pay since october 31, 2009. once he refused to report the department could have fired him within five days but they decided not to and you can guess why they didn't fire him. it would have looked bad. it would have looked like they were retaliating against him.

he is just in limbo. [inaudible] >> he has hearing rights. that's a good question. >> judge ordered that he not be fired. >> i am getting to that, sir. he has hearing rights but the department has the option of whether or not to use them. he'd can't force it. they control the system. yes, sir lamp? >> when he was put in the psych ward and he mentioned getting a report from the police. oftentimes they don't give reports. you can call them and they will come out but they will not give your report. you can't prove anything if they don't have the report. i'm just concerned.

i got a question from the newspaper that he had -- of the police academy but you were saying he had been a police officer for a few years. i would like to know how long was he he in office before he was put into the psych ward? >> he started in 2002 so he was an officer for about six years. he has come from and? >> the movie about the whistleblower who was supposed to stop the sex trade and they were involved in it. she lost her job and they were transferred to another unit. this kind of thing is happening. things like this are happening all the time. i think she had evidence also.

[inaudible] >> she had evidence also. [inaudible] >> the question is does this kind of thing happen in? no, i mean there are different factors. i have come to learn it's really more of a series of people fighting desperately to rise against ambitious affections so there's a lot of politics in terms of transfer is, promotions, assignments and people get mad and retaliate against each other so it happens. yes, sir lamp? [inaudible]

>> yeah. have they received any negative feedback from the story? yeah. i got a mix. there is a bulletin board called the rant. i don't know. it's just composed of police officers and retired police officers and i call it the greek chorus in the book. it kind of gives you a sense of how things are. back in roman times if the army like teal they would raise their spears and if they didn't like you they would roll them a cross their shields. that is kind of with what the rant is and yeah adrian schoolcraft is a rat and the village voice has an agenda but there was also a lot of positive stuff. a lot of police officers wrote to me or called me and said this is right on the money. what adrian is saying is right

on the money and this is what we are dealing with. yes, sir? [inaudible] do you remember me, zach? >> that, we will talk later. [inaudible] did they talk to the local sheriff or anyone else? >> yes. the department sent a fax at the beginning of the sequence which was in november of 2009. they sent a fax to the johnstown police department and said can you go over and knock on his door? that was the first visit and johnstown basically took a backseat and let them do it. if they wanted to as happened in the muslim case you were mentioning one of the jersey law enforcement agencies that you can do that here. that didn't happen in this case. johnstown just let them go. yeah.

it's the nypd company you no? they do whatever they want. >> i was wondering if the police refused to -- [inaudible] >> okay, all right in a second. you have to raise a stink about it on the spot. you can't let it go. you have to say i want to see a supervisor. it depends on the context whether you're out on the street or in the precinct. you have to raise his think in demand records and follow up. it's really owe you can do and you can go to the quality assurance division. no one knows they exist and so very few civilians end up there. it's called the quality assurance division in brooklyn. it's a very small unit. that is their job to audit. you can go to court, kosher. yeah. any other questions?

>> i just wanted to know what your hope was with this book? >> i will just tell you the story about another agency. it's called the commission combat police -- the scandal was in the early 90s. it was about cops robbing drug dealers and nader giuliani created this organization through an executive order and made a big deal out of it and said hey this agency is going to stop corruption. and then he proceeded to -- for the rest of his term and mayor bloomberg led the front and ended up -- it still exists. it has a budget of less than $1 million is completely ineffective. no one writesbo