its -- i completely agree with barbara that we, that what we have brought to it as women has been incredibly important. and what we bring to it as booksellers is that we have a well-chosen selection of books, we know our customers well, we know what we like to sell. it's fun to shop at politics & prose. barbara and i have created what david calls a community space. when people come to politics & prose, they don't come just to shop, but to have a pleasant time, meet friends, rest a bit with a cup of coffee, hear a brilliant lecture about a new book, join with others to discuss a book. we perform a myriad of tasks, mostly gracefully. we give good, prompt service. we have two people who spend all their time ordering books for customers. we have 25 mostly full-time staff helping customers. of we have 12 people making

coffee and sandwiches and many other staff behind the scenes bringing books in and out, working on pup publications, setting up special be events, and most important, paying bills. we never sit still, and that's, i think, really what barbara and i have brought to this equation. we're always working on a new angle, a new way of selling books. right now we're designing a questionnaire to give to our customers and also to find noncustomers who are potential customers and find out why they don't shop at politics and prose. when we're asked what we've learned from our years in the book business, though, we seldom talk about books. the biggest challenge for barbara and me has been management of our ever-expanding staff. we are of that generation of women who were not trained to manage others. and the things that we've learned, the greatest learning

for us has been in the area of management. we've learned that change makes people anxious, that our staff has to be prepared for change and reassured and brought along, that problems arise when there's change. growth in staff particularly is threatening and unsettling, and we think that we should be able to anticipate this, but we sometimes fail to do that. we've learned about delegation, that you need to stand back and let people do things and make their mistakes. both of us have had a hard time delegating and following up, and it's been a constant learning for us. we know that you have to give constant feedback, especially praise, that although we pay better than other bookstores, it's still not a great salary, and there has to be the compensation for people of knowing that they're doing a great job.

management has been our greatest challenge and a part of the job where we've learned the most and changed the most. the rest has been pure fun. be my mother will -- my mother will tell you that there could not be a more perfect job for me than being paid to read books. [laughter] not only reading, but also giving my opinion. [laughter] telling other people what to read. what a combination. to have been able to turn a passion into a vocation is great good fortune. [applause] >> politics & prose was named the 1999 bookstore of the year by publishers weekly. p and p was sold to bradley graham in 2011 of after the late carla cohen and barbara meade decided to retire. as we celebrate booktv's anniversary on c-span2, we look

back at our first 15 years on the air. you can see this presentation and all of the programs we've covered over the years online at booktv.org. now on booktv, graham rayman tells the story of new york city police department whistleblower adrian schoolcraft who revealed that the nypd has been manipulating crime data, implementing illegal quotas and making wrongful arrests to make it appear that crime is declining in the city. after he was found be out, mr. schoolcraft's superiors had him involuntarily commit today a psych ward for six days claiming that he was emotionally disturbed. this is about 45 minutes. >> thank you all. thanks a lot for coming. i really appreciate it. i've been covering the police department for almost 20 years,

and this is the craziest story that i ever came across in my entire, in my entire period. the book, again, the book is about a police officer who secretly recorded his police commander's ordering various types of misconduct in bedford stuyvesant's 81st precinct. the backdrop is the nypd's crime-fighting strategy. this is a strategy where statistics are used to identify crime hot spots and then officers are sent to respond to those hot spots. that strategy is credited with the sharp crime drop in the city over the last 20 years. but it had some weaknesses that became more and more apart as time went -- apparent as time went on. and that sort of numbers-oriented strategy had some problems because it inspired commanders to come up

with 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. and a lot of the issues that are raised in the book are now being discussed as part of the mayoral race; quotas, downgrading of crime, civil rights violations, stop and frisk. these are all things that have been sort of a pass of this mayoral race. my journey through this story began in march of 2010 when i got a cryptic e-mail from the police officer, his name was adrian schoolcraft. there was just one paragraph, and there was an audio file attached to it with, and i clicked on the audio 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 had always talked about this going on, but just to have a commander actually saying that on tape was amazing, you know? so i was intrigued. so i called him, and i said can i come see you, and i was expecting to go to brooklyn or queens. turns out, he was in this tiny little town in upstate new york north of albany. so i drove up there. the town was kind of run down, kind of a rust belt town that used to manufacture leather products, but a lot of the factories had closed. they were living, adrian was living in a nondescript, also kind of rundown apartment complex with his father in a one-bedroom apartment. and so i knocked on the door, and they let me in, and i was -- i didn't know what to expect. turned out adrian was this huge

guy, but he was very kind of soft spoken and relate sent, you know? -- reticent. his father, on the other hand, was this much smaller guy and probably the most talkative person i ever met. and before long we were, we started with mayor bloomberg and ray kelly, and we ended up talking about the jfk assassination and, you know, various conspiracy be theories. and then adrian and i had to go in the other room to get him to stop talking because he had gone on for like 25 minutes. and so adrian was live, his bedroom was completely undecorated. it just had a bed and a desk and a mattress on the floor. and i said so how much, how much tape do you have? and he goes, oh, about 1200 hours. for a reporter, this is like, this is a big deal.

and so it turned out that he had been recording secretly in his precinct for two years. he -- and the only way he could do this was because the digital recorder technology had gotten to the point where they're just about this big. and he had bought two or three of them. one of them was a watch recorder. i didn't even know there was such a thing. it just looked like a normal digital watch except it had a microphone on it. and the other one he just put in his shirt pocket and wore it. turned it on at beginning of his tour and turned it off at the end and went home and downloaded it onto his computer. and then, of course, he could cut, he could pick out certain things that he thought were interesting. and so, but a lot of it was just street chatter and locker room banter and stuff like that. it wasn't really useful. but what he did give me was the roll calls. the roll calls are the meeting at the beginning of each tour where police commanders tell the

officers what to focus on for that day. and so he ghei -- he gave me 117 roll calls. so now i had a day-to-day record of exactly what the officers are being ordered to do, you know, over a long period of time. you can really get a sense of what the priorities were in the precinct. and the main priority was getting numbers. the police commander was absolutely obsessed with getting numbers, with getting higher summons, higher stop and frisks and lower crime numbers. and this was this constant drum beat every day in the roll calls, get more summons to the point where the officers really had no discretion at all. i mean, they were just, they were -- the quota was the main thing. just get your numbers, get your numbers. and this, again, is a product of

comstat. it started in the early '90s under commissioner bratton, 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 percentages that it had in the beginning, right? so -- and at the same time success in comstat for precinct commanders meant promotion. so those two things combined to create an incredible incentive for police commanders to come up with innovative, quote-unquote, innovative ways to make their numbers look better. so some of the things they would do is have directed summons unit where you just go to a corner and you write every summons you can find be no matter what, everything. in the past cops had the discretion to say, all right, i'm going to let you off with a warning, but now because they had to get their numbers, that kind of discretion was done

gone. so adrian came from texas. actually a registered republican which a lot of people find surprising given what he did. his tad was a police officer -- his dad was a police officer. so he was really an outsider in terms of the police department culture. he didn't grow up in bay ridge or in jamaica or in the south bronx. he was from the outside, so he didn't really have any ties here. he also didn't even really want to become a police officer. he had been in the navy as a corpsman, and he had got out, and he worked for motorola many texas on soft -- in texas on software, software chips and only moved back to new york because his mother got sick. she was very sick, and she said to him she saw an ad for a police department, a police recruiting ad. this was after 9/11.

and she said, well, why don't you try to apply to be a police officer? he said, oh, i don't want to do that. and she finally convinced him, and he took the test. they called him immediately, and he found himself standing there in the police academy. and for the first couple year, he went along with the program. the first thing you do is go into something called impact where you're sent to a high-crime precinct as a rookie for about eight months and just told to write tickets. and you're not really given a hot of supervision. -- a lot of supervision. and because you're a rookie officer, they can fire you for everything. so there's, the rookies are basically obligated to do exactly as they're told or else they're going to get fired. so after that he went to the 81st precinct which, coincidentally, the place where frank certain coe started his

career. he was the central figure in major corruption, uncovering major corruption in the police department in the early '70s. so for the first couple of years, adrian, you know, went along with the program, got his quotas. they called him the hammer. he's so rough. he's about 6-2, 230 pounds. he's a big guy. and, but as time went on, he became discop tented, disenchanted with this constant quota pressure and started objecting, and adrian is one of these people who likes to write letters. so he was objecting to the amount of overtime he was getting, and he wrote a notarized letter to his police commander. which is -- [laughter] of course, that didn't go anywhere. it was pretty much ugh mothered. buttive -- ignored. it give you a sense of who he was. and there were a couple of other

things that he complained about. his first precinct commander was actually tolerant of adrian because adrian was smart, and he was out on the street, and he was trying to do his job. but he left, and the next commander came in, a guy named steven morriello, and he was pretty much a comstat commander. he was interested in numbers. it was all about numbers. it wasn't about discretion or community policing or, you know, it was about getting the numbers, make the precinct look good, make himself look good. and the whole atmosphere changed when he came in. and adrian immediately became a target because they were looking at their spread sheets, and they were selling, well, you know, so and so has 30 summons for the month, and you only have three. why is that? so and so has 18 stop and san francisco things, and you only -- stop and frisks, and you only have six. well, you know, and adrian said, well, i was out there doing my job, you know? i'm just seeing what's happening

and responding to it. there's a wonderful exchange between the xo, executive officer in the precinct, and adrian over these two conflicting theories of policing. adrian's theory is i'm going to respond to the crimes that i see, i'm going to respond to the misconduct that i see, but i'm not going to get a number just for the number's sake. and the executive officer is saying you're going to get the numbers or else. we're going to find some way to get rid of you, you're going to get transferred. so they immediately identified him as a problem, and they started squeezing him. and i mean they started giving him bad assignments. they took him out of a car and put him on a foot post in one of the most dangerous areas of the precinct by himself for the night shift. the night shift is 3:30 to 11:30. there are three shifts in a typical day in the police

department. they would send him out of the precinct all the time to do, to stand on the corner in midtown manhattan. one of the big problems with the police department right now is, and it has been for years, is that the numbers are way down, and at the same time cops are being pulled out of precincts mostly mt. outer boroughs and put into high tourist areas like midtown manhattan, around ground zero, police headquarters, city hall. and the effect of that, you know, of course, you can see why they're doing it, to make sure nothing happens to embarrass the city in these tourist-heavy areas. but the effect of it is that the outer borough precincts are often badly short staffed. and there's stuff in the book about that, you know? at one point there's only one car for the whole, for like half the precinct. one sector car for half the precinct. and so he starts objecting, they

start squeezing him, giving him bad assignments. he starts taping because he's concerned, you know, he wants to build evidence of what's going on in the precinct, and he also wants to protect himself. so he goes out -- he does in this consultation with his father. his father's a real driving force. you'll see it in the book. he's like behind the scenes kind of egging him on to do this stuff, and, you know, and adrian has this very strong sense of right and wrong. so he's, he thinks if he builds evidence with his tape recording, you know, he'll be able to protect himself. and so things get worse and worse. and i just want to read you just a few quotes from the tapes which i think are really kind of interesting and amusing at the same time. there's one point where a sergeant in one of the roll calls says, listen, this isn't man hat san, this is --

manhattan. it gives you a sense. that's the perception of, you know, can you imagine, you know, if the perception of the community is that, you know, you can imagine what the relationship is like between the precinct and the community. there's another quote. adrian is talking with another officer who's telling him the story of how the precinct commander downgraded this one particular crime. a guy had reported a 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. and that's unheard of, you know? that's something that would never have happened 15, 20 years ago unless it was a very major crime. precinct commander responded, and he's talking to the guy, and he says did you, have you been in prison at all? and the guy goes, yeah, well, when i was young, i had, i did a

couple years. and the precinct commander says, well, maybe karma stole your car, meaning that he was getting paid back. that report ended up not being taken. the guy tried -- and so there's an example. the guy tried to report a crime, and it ended up just going down into the circular file. there was another incident where a woman had had her cell phone robbed on a subway, and the commander responded again. and he told her, well, what do you want me to do about it? [laughter] he said you're not going to get it back. i don't know, do you want me the drive you home? so that report also never got taken. and, you know, these are, these are -- these aren't homicides, you know? these are routine, low-level inincidences. these are the kinds that cops respond to most. so if it's happening like that in one precinct, you know, you

have to -- it's logical to guess that it's happening in other precincts, right? there's another roll call where the commander comes in, the commander would make, would have these wonderful, like, long speeches about how important it was to keep the numbers down. and this time he's talking to schoolcraft about his own numbers. it's in a meeting where they're trying to pressure schoolcraft into hitting his quotas. and he says with these numbers, the chief will go through the roof. his head will come through the top of wilson avenue. wilson avenue is the borough headquarters. so the significance there is that here you have a chief in the new york city police department which has over 30,000 officers worried about one officer in one of the ten precincts that he -- worried about the numbers of one officer in one of the ten precincts that he oversees. and that a gives you a sense of just how crazy this

number-driven strategy got, that it was now just -- there's only about 30 be chiefs in the department. worried about one of 30,000 officers and his number of summons, traffic ticket that is he's written. and then there's a lot of great little kind of quotes or vignettes about what it's like to be a patrol officer which is the lowliest of all. and there's a sergeant who says in one of the roll calls, listen, if you're watching a dead guy's apartment, don't sit in his chair, don't watch his tv and don't eat his food out of the refrigerator. [laughter] here's another, here's another -- i think it's the same roll call where he's talking about how the officers were defacing the precinct with graffiti which i thought was funny given the amount of resources the department puts into eradicating graffiti

outside the precinct. so adrian finally decides he can't go anywhere with his -- inside the precinct. to one's going to listen to him. so he goes to the quality assurance division with allegations and documentation of downgrading of times and cops refusing to take crime reports. and they sit for two hours, and they promise to investigate it. and after that adrian starts getting calls from is the internal affairs bureau at the precinct. the internal affairs bureau is leaving messages for him at the precinct which is kind of like telling the precinct commander that he's gone to investigators about what's going on in the precinct. it's a huge breach, and to this today i'm not sure why they did it. i think it was incredibly stupid. but three weeks after he went to the investigators -- and this is halloween 2009 -- he's feeling intimidated by one of his

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

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

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

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

vomit sitting next to him. and he looks at -- he's watching tv, and all of a sudden greg kelly comes on, the police commissioner's son, who has a morning show on fox. and greg kelly's talking about beating a parking ticket. [laughter] is here's adrian schoolcraft, the police officer, sitting in the psych ward for no reason. watching the prison commissioner's son talk about beating a park ticket. i thought that was wonderful. meanwhile, his father is calling everyone he can to try to get him out of the psych ward. he calls the fbi, the the mayor's office, the police commissioner's office, internal affairs, etc. he can't get anyone, no one listens, and that's another peat piece of the story that's amazing. all of the oversight agencies ignore this whole thing, the civil rights violations, the things that he was talking about. it's enough to make you really cynical about the whole process.

all right. so he finally gets out, and he finally starts talking to the press a little bit. larry and his father flee up to that small apartment and hole up in there like two fumingtives, each though they're not -- fugitives. and the d. starts sending people outside the city up there to bang on their door to get them to come out. and so what takes place is this cat and mouse game where adrian and larry are sitting inside the apartment going i don't know what to do. and the cops are outside going bam, bam, bam. there's one guy where the -- one time where the guy knocks 186 times on the door. and he's saying, adrian, come out. we want to talk to you. so then the department sends up surveillance, these black suvs that are basically doing surveillance, and they're -- and so you have this hilarious thing where adrian and larry are

peeking out the curtains, and these two surveillance sufficients in the -- just remember, there's no crime being committed here. the police officers are completely outside their jurisdiction, and their basically sitting there surveilling a wayward police officer who's maybe a little bit eccentric. i was able to obtain the notes of that surveillance, and i just wanted to read a couple of sentences. in the meantime, they're videotaping the house, okay? they're videotaping everything, they're recording it, you know, this is -- these are lieutenants and sergeants who are making over $100,000 a year doing, sitting up there all today. ..

including when he tried to apply for food stamps, they blocked his application because they said he was still technically a police officer, even though he wasn't getting paid. then they produced internal reports of the book, which has never been written about or seen, which i was able to get in which they completely ignore the tape recording. to ignore all the documentaries they have and they just believe that the police officers, with

the police buses that. there is a tape that has the entire and that documented in its internal affairs reports completely ignore them and reject old-school cross allegations and believe that the commanders that. it's amazing. but the one thing that is going in his favor with the quality assurance division unit he went through. they did their jobs were able to show he was right about downgrading. a check that everyone has the cases he brought. he brought her to cases and his e.g. everyone then. that report was completed in june of 2010. the department put it into a safe and a lot save. it didn't see the light day. and it wouldn't have seen the light of day if i had got it to resource months of your spanish.

during that 18 months have been asking for the report and the department kept saying, we don't know what you're talking about. i kept getting stonewalled. it was clear they didn't want to release it because it confirmed a lot of what they were saying. so the only -- you'd got to the oversight each of me. the only thing he has got to do was suit. that's where it is now, for three years -- two and half years he filed a lawsuit and 2010 in august of basically every sense. also this strategy that the city took and what happened with adrian and his lawyers and incredible stress and tension that comes when you're trying to fight. these are the guys.

father, son don't have any money. they are fighting against the $4 billion law-enforcement agency with unlimited legal resources, probably the most law-enforcement official in the country. they are worried about their legacies. here's injured schoolcraft, 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 the adding people indicted for how he was treated, but in terms of effect and the dialogue. the best example of that is that his tapes are played in the floyd versus new york and the

judge is not case distracted a smoking gun evidence of civil rights violations. i'm sure there's going to be a decision on the case this week, which might result the first time in memory, federal monitor appointed to oversee the police department. so in that respect, he's had some success. just a couple things. other characters in the book. there's another copy of the book with three very similar thing in the bronx. it doubtless one of these guys who grew up in washington heights during a period when washington had this very dangerous and was able to get through that and became an officer in on this number driven strategy. as some point he says they can stop being an frisking young black and hispanic man for no

reason. he squeezed him just like they squeezed adrienne. also in the book, harold fernandez, eight years ago -- i'll just tell the story really quickly that a guy gets arrested for attempted knifepoint raid in an apartment and hernandez comes in the morning and since attending the excitement of as he done this before, haven't you? the guy says you. eventually he shows in the location and turns out he had done six previous attempted knifepoint raids, but they'd all been classified as meiners. the sex crams was never notified. the priest and commander wanted so bad he should keep his numbers down, very serious crimes were downgraded to misdemeanors and that's, a

rapist was able to work with impunity for a number of. i talked to one of his big guns and she said that for the next three years after that, she would never -- she could never relax in a hallway or elevator and she actually left the city and lives in a small town now. so it's kind of the real-world effect of this downgrading of crimes and refusing to take reports. @house. does anyone have any question? yes, sir. [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] on the imac

[inaudible] >> the question is how do you deal with -- how do you report corruption as a civilian? a document everything. most people don't. most people have an experience with police -- [inaudible] all right, sir. thank you. document everything and most people don't document, get a report, get a receipt, right down the names of the officers you are dealing with. i am back let's talk about it after. it's a very complicated, compound question you're asking. >> why has schoolcraft gone through so many -- [inaudible] and why did lawrenceburg drop

the case? and is it true that he disappeared, he can't be found? we don't know where schoolcraft is? >> the question is why he had trouble with his lawyers and where is he now. well, it's in the book. they fired lawrenceburg. they didn't feel he was aggressive enough. let me just kind of put this in context for everyone. the school crafts are difficult people to deal with. i don't know if anyone has seen the end tighter about jeffrey and the tobacco industry. jeffrey y y camp is not an easy guy to deal with. the schoolcraft are under a tremendous lot of pressure. they have no money, no real end comes except larry's disability from the army and the police department.

said they wanted him to be more aggressive than they fired him and they fired the two other lawyers he was working with. and then there was some more conflict with the next batch. i think now they have not met as a former federal prosecutor who i think i'll stick with. they learned their lesson about firing lawyers. it's a laser case even more. that's one of the reasons we haven't had a tryout yet because no deposition had been taken in three years. this thing is going to go on for another year at least. yes, sir. [inaudible] >> yes commissure. adrian is unique in history the police department. he has been suspended without pay since october 31st of 2009. plenty refuse to report to work on the department could've fired him within five days, but they decided not to. you can guess why they didn't fire him. it would've looked bad.

it would've looked like they were retaliating against him. so he is just in limbo. [inaudible] >> he has hearing rights, yet. that's a good wretched. the department doesn't -- [inaudible] >> and getting to that. i am getting to that, sir. he has hearing rights, but the department has the option of whether or not to use them. he can't force the hearing. they control the system. yes, sir. yes, ma'am. i imac [inaudible] you mentioned getting a report. they oftentimes don't give a reporter. you call them, they come out in the docket report. you can't prove anything if they

don't give you a report. i got the impression for the newspaper that he had just got out of the police academy when he was put in the psych ward. you were saying he had been a police officer for a few years. i would like to know how long was he an officer. >> the question was how long was he an officer? here is in 2002, so about six years. yes, ma'am. [inaudible] -- but the sex trade. and they were involved in it. she left her job and they were transferred. so what's happening all the time? i think she had evidence also.

on the imac [inaudible] >> you know, the police -- [inaudible] >> i've never come across a case like this. , with all of these different factors. but yeah, i mean, it is a big department and there's a lot of politics. when things about the police department is it is not a violent entity. it's really more of a series of factions that are fighting desperately to rise coming out, ambitious factions fighting desperately to write the name. and so, there's a lot of politics in terms of transverse comic emotions, assignment and people get off and retaliate against each other. so it happens. yes, ma'am.

eydie imac >> yeah, sure. have i received any negative feedback for writing the story? yeah. there's a bulletin board called the rant that i don't know -- it is just composed of police officers and retired police officers. 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 likes you, you know, they would raise their spears. if they didn't like you, they would roll across their shield. it is kind of what the brand is. yeah, there were some transcendent is a scumbag rat. the village voice has their agenda. but there was also a lot of politics. a lot of police officers wrote to mayor called me and said this is right on the money.

what adrian is saying is right on the money in the system if we are dealing with. yes, sir. [inaudible] >> hey, sir. >> it's not as ridiculous as surveilling muslims in new jersey. did they talk to the local sheriff or anybody else? >> yeah, the department sent a fax at the beginning of this sequence, which was then november. november 2009 they sent a fax to the john towns police department and said can you go over and knock on his door? and so, that was the first visit. johnstown basically took a backseat and let them do it. if they wanted to, as happened in the muslim case you were mentioning, the resident then for one of the jersey law enforcement agencies that you can't do that here. that didn't happen in this case.

johnstown just up and go. it's the n.y.p.d. economy and no? they can do whatever they want. yes, sir. i [inaudible] >> all right. okay, okay. you have to raise a stink about it on the spot. you can't let it go. it depends on the context of whether you are in the street for the precinct. you got to demand records and names that follow up. that's really all you can do. any good as a quality assurance division. no one knows they existed so few civilians actually end up there. the quality assurance division has some cool street in brooklyn. it's a small unit and their job is to audit the staff. [inaudible] >> you can go to court, sherry.

any other questions? >> i just want to know what your hope was dashed [inaudible] >> i will just tell you the story about another oversight the called the commission to combat police corruption after the scandals -- the scandalous in the early 90s about cops routing drug dealers. mayor giuliani created this organization or an executive order and made a big deal out of it and said i am going to -- this agency is going to stop corruption. and then he proceeded to bleed the fund for the rest of his term. bloomberg led funds and it still exists. they have less than a million dollars and is completely in

effect it and ignored. no one writes about it. [inaudible] >> now, that's the combat -- commission to combat police disruption. it could be a fact is. politics in the city -- demanded the police department to show good numbers, to show us going down. there is an inherent conflict here between those two agendas. yes, ma'am. [inaudible] >> on the other hand -- [inaudible]

>> it's a major segment. , robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny auto. [inaudible] >> yeah. the question is, the police commander is reaching downgrading of major crimes and also encouraging arrests were smaller kinds. yeah, that is exactly what they are doing. there is something called a sea sediments, which you know what it is. it's basically an arrest for open container, in public, some kind of minor crime. but you've got to go down to court at 346 broadway and they are encouraging those kinds of arrests. the thing is one of 50% are dismissed. so it is kind of an exercise in

bureaucratic, but it's part of the agenda. [inaudible] >> yes, sir. >> it's like you have to show crime is down while showing that they are doing something. no? >> yeah. he said like it -- [inaudible] >> so that's why if you report a crime they don't -- >> yeah, exactly. but it also has to do with promotion and ambition in careers. that's the other piece of it. one more question, sir. >> are any of these tapes actually available to listen to? >> yeah. the village voice website has found. we are working on a more

comprehensive date. if you want to see you later, we can talk about, if you're really interested. thank you very much. i really appreciate you guys coming. [applause] >> our ideas are best understood as >> means for which the most important consideration is not truth, but the depth of fitness is the best way to understand or social behavior by attacking the

selfish gene, the violence chain, the altruism gene, the compassion gene, the romance seem. these are real things, by the way. most import like, whether those neuroscientists are correct about this or not, what are the social and political consequences of believing they are correct or nearly so? so i would like to ask him in his interest to these popularizers up rocketeer is right into one end? they would like us to think that their only interest is the establishment of knowledge. but i will project is their claims are based upon assumptions come in many of which are dubious if not outright deluded and the kind of political culture there dilutions support is lamentable. i say is lamentable because it is too late to say dangerous. it is always here and well established. when dig safely say it is these ideas are not entirely new,

nevermind the cutting-edge of scientific knowledge. the truth is the fundamental scientific culture are part of the ideological baggage of them might not. here's famous lectures on the receiver manta system, isaiah berlin express is the ideology this way. they view as there is the nature of things such that if you know this nature that yourself in relationship to this nature and understand the relationship between everything that could pose as the universe, then your quote as well as facts about yourself must become clear to you about all these things, disagreement they occur, but there is such knowledge that is the foundation of the higher western tradition. the view is that of a jigsaw puzzle of which we misstated the frag of the secret treasure, which we must seek. the essence of this view is there's a body of fact to which we must admit.

science is submission. science is being guided by the nature of pain. scrupulous regard for what there is, not deviation from the fact understanding knowledge adaptation. my claim in this book is the message of neuroscience advocated much the same as that of a so-called atheists in the two should be considered together. the new atheist to speak on behalf of science, and the message of both camps is submitted. superiority of science and reason is not only to evangelical dissent. it is also sent to another historical adversary art, philosophy inhumanity. they are the direct or goes something like this. the human mind in human creations are not a consequence of something called the well for inspiration or communication with the news in the civil are they the result of genius.

all of that is nebulous. it is the weak minded religion of the public. the human mind is a machine or crash, there chemicals. daniel dennett calls says moist robots. you know, sometimes they think that scientists don't see that sense of humor. i don't think he's kidding. with enough money in computing power, a jigsaw puzzle of the brain will be completed and we will know what we are and how we should act. the problem is to know just who it is that continues to believe that resolve this and might story. is this what science says such things? or is it just a popular science thinks? or is this simply an abuse of science by people with social clinical agendas? i think a varied and unknowable decreases all three.

it is certainly historically with both scientists and their heart of hearts have thought and still paying. it is usually the fundamental assumption of popular science and science journalism and assert me an abuse of the real value of science is one of the great ongoing human endeavors. it is in this essence cites his ideology or science as it is often called. unfortunately, signed takes it to come to a place in the broader ideology of social implementation and economic exploitation, environmental destruction and for lack of a better word we still call capitalism. at the ideology of science meshes with the broader ideology of capitalism that he can distance interest of my investigation here. the only remaining question as to what degree western culture are some meaningful part of that culture can free itself from the dilutions on which the ideology

of science is based primary services to compose an alternative narrative about what it means to be human. i hope to show many of those resources are to be found in the poorly understood tradition of romanticism. it was that nebulous movement, the first challenge, scientist chick side view of the world and on what ground they did so in the name of a contrary ideas nature and humanity and ask it. all of that is mostly lost now. the romantic tradition certainly is not a puppet president that the rationalism presently enjoyed. they cannot organize the equivalent of the recent rally of 20,000 atheists in front of the washington monument. a more modest approach is to begin a process of remembering the more worthy movement of artists, philosophers and social revolutionaries in order to see what they might have to say to west nile.

i hope you will find they can still speak very powerfully to it. >> which book of your soul but most? be back one of my recent books. i wrote about it because my father was in the first world war unlike most british people, i am fascinated by the first world war, killed so many of our fellow citizens. but i wrote it simply because i

wanted to write it. i said to my publisher, well, i am afraid you won't sell very well in america. i have huge american leadership. so that was another important consideration. but i was quite wrong. is so tremendously well in the united states. it sold nearly 200,000 in the united states. i think there has developed -- i don't think he was there 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but there has developed and extort a chance in the first world war, in the united states. >> and