414: Right to Remain Silent

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And in our show today, we have two stories that have a lot in common, but to explain the many things they have in common right here and now would reveal so many spoilers that I'm going to say very little. Rather than do the kind of introduction I usually do right here, all I'm going to say is that each of these stories centers around some guy, and the guy in each story has the right to remain silent, and he does not exercise that right. Like they say in the movies, he could take the easy way, or he could take the hard way. And each of these guys goes way out of his way to take the hard way, not totally realizing what he's getting into. And let's just get right to it.

Ira Glass

Act One. First Rule of the Apple Store: Don't Talk About the Apple Store. At some point or another, you've probably known somebody like this, somebody who can't resist the urge to talk back. Not out of principle, but out of sheer chemical instinct. It's built into his personality. That's the guy in this first story. Ben Calhoun's the reporter.

Ben Calhoun

The guy in this story, and he'd tell you this himself, he's a sarcastic jerk. He's honest that way. He'll say he has no filter, he has foot in mouth disease, he's a loud mouth, a big mouth. Like, this is how he described getting kicked out of Catholic high school during his sophomore year.

Ben Calhoun

The mouthy guy is a guy named Joe Lipari. And I should probably say, this part of Joe's personality-- it doesn't always play badly for Joe. Like when he was in the army, Joe talked back to a drill sergeant who was telling him to cut off his sideburns. Joe recited the military regulations on sideburn length from memory, which made the sergeant mad, but won over his battalion commander, who became a friend and mentor for Joe. Joe also does stand-up comedy, where mouthiness is encouraged. But those things, the good things-- that's not why we're here. This thing that happened to Joe, it started in September of 2009 when Joe needed a new cell phone.

Ben Calhoun

So Joe made an appointment and went to the Apple Store. The staff did something they said should fixed the problem. And if it didn't, they said, look, just bring it back and we'll give you a totally new phone. The next day, the phone crashed on him again.

Ben Calhoun

So 30 minutes go by. 45 minutes. An hour. Finally, 90 minutes.

Ben Calhoun

Joe hopped the subway home to Queens, and the whole way back, even after he got home, he couldn't stop thinking about it.

Ben Calhoun

So Joe's on his couch-- a big puffy boat of a couch that presumably used to be white. Joe has his laptop. He's distracting himself by looking at Facebook, and like he said, he's watching Fight Club.

Ben Calhoun

Joe's status on Facebook.

Ben Calhoun

Just so you know, I did ask Joe about his use of the word fruity here. And he told me that no, it was not homophobic. He was just trying to describe the guy's demeanor.

Ben Calhoun

In any case, he types this thing into Facebook and he posts it. And that's that. For like an hour, he just sits there, feet on the coffee table.

Ben Calhoun

Joe jumps up, goes to the front door.

Ben Calhoun

These weren't regular, uniformed cops. They were the guys in street clothes, the guys with black bulletproof vests. One of them had a machine gun.

Ben Calhoun

It's worth stopping here. There was a perfectly good explanation for why Joe could identify the officer's machine gun, something called an MP5. Remember, Joe was in the military. He was a marksman in the army. And he could've said that. He probably should have said it. But of course, he didn't.

Ben Calhoun

What the officers did do then was searched Joe's apartment. And they were asking him all kinds of confusing questions, like about explosives. And Joe, he was trying to figure out why they were there in the first place.

Ben Calhoun

Also remember, while all this is going on, Joe is high. Cops with machine guns are all over his apartment, pulling out drawers and tearing things apart. He has no idea why, and he's totally stoned.

Ben Calhoun

The cops escorted Joe downstairs and he saw that they weren't alone. They'd actually brought back up. There were two extra police cars with officers waiting, in case the guys with the bulletproof vests and the machine gun needed help. They took Joe to a station in Queens and threw him into an interrogation room.

Ben Calhoun

Joe was sure once he explained the situation, they'd see it was a mistake and everything would shake out. It wasn't until four months later that Joe understood he was in serious trouble. I brought a copy of the court records to our interview.

Ben Calhoun

Since then, Joe's been to court more than half a dozen times over this. And from the sound of it, he hasn't been making things any easier for himself. By his own account, he's given one or two speeches about the Constitution and about how the terrorists have won. Not exactly one to dress for court, Joe recently got scolded for wearing Hawaiian shorts in the courtroom. Joe pointed to the guy next to him and said, that guy's wearing sweatpants. This brings us to what might actually be the most remarkable thing about Joe's whole story, which is this. Most of us learn at some point in our lives that we shouldn't always say whatever impulsive thing we feel like saying. And if we didn't learn that lesson, by getting in trouble in school or making someone cry, the day the cops showed up at our door with machine guns, or the day we had to stand up in court and face felony terrorism charges over a broken cell phone-- those things would be a red light, where we would stop and reevaluate. But has Joe reevaluated, considered whether his life would be easier if he changed?

Ben Calhoun

In the last few months, the District Attorney's office offered Joe a number of plea deals. Some of them were pretty good. Most recently, a misdemeanor with some community service. Joe rejected all of them. He wanted a jury trial. He was sure no jury would convict him. Finally, Joe went back to court again. And it seems he kind of won. He's got what's called an adjournment and contemplation of dismissal, which essentially means his case is on ice for the next six months. And then, the prosecutors will drop the charges against him. There is, of course, one hitch to all that, one thing that could ruin this and put Joe right back on the hook. During the next six months, Joe's got to stay out of trouble.

[MUSIC - "RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT" BY THE SILVER JEWS]

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our show. Coming up, another guy who's got no problem standing up to the police though in his case it's because he is the police. That's in a minute. From Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our show today-- Right to Remain Silent. We have two stories of people who very much do not choose to remain silent. We've arrived at act two of our show. Act Two. Is That a Tape Recorder in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Unhappy to See Me? Adrian Schoolcraft is a New York City policeman who decided to secretly record himself and his fellow officers on the job-- all day, every workday, he says for 17 months. Including lots of days when he was ordered to do all kinds of things cops are not supposed to do. It's led to a small scandal, Several people removed from their jobs, and four investigations of the New York Police Department. Though Adrian insists he didn't get into this looking for trouble.

Ira Glass

This is the reporter who broke the story in The Village Voice about Adrian and what he recorded those 17 months, a reporter named Graham Rayman. When I asked Graham what Adrian, the person at the center of this scandal, is like, the first thing out of his mouth is--

Ira Glass

Adrian Schoolcraft was working in Brooklyn-- precinct 81, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a rough neighborhood, mostly black, that was slowly gentrifying. The precinct is just seven blocks wide and 20 blocks long, roughly, and had 13 murders last year, which is a third of what it used to be. Adrian's kind of an electronics buff, and he bought himself one of those tiny digital recorders, tucked it in his breast pocket, and started recording-- as he walked his beat, when he talked to other cops--

Ira Glass

--morning roll calls.

Ira Glass

This is Adrian.

Ira Glass

The atmosphere at the 81st precinct was set by its commander, Stephen Mauriello. When Mauriello showed up, Adrian Schoolcraft says, things changed. Offices were told to write more tickets, do more stop-and-frisks, arrest more people for low level offenses that they might otherwise let go-- get their numbers up.

Ira Glass

Now, it's perfectly legal for police to be told-- like anybody in any job-- here's the amount of work that we expect you to do, number of tickets and arrests that are normal for somebody in your job in this neighborhood. But what's not allowed is to penalize police officers who do not make those targets. We don't want police officers under such pressure to deliver numbers that they make stops and arrests and write summons with no valid reason, just to get their goals. Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Ira Glass

On November 1, 2008, one sergeant declares at a roll call, quote "they are looking at these numbers and people are going to be moved. They can make your job real uncomfortable, and we all know what that means." On December 8, 2008, the sergeant tells the officers that if they don't get their activity up, quote, "there's some people here that may not be here come next month."

Ira Glass

Because officially the NYPD doesn't allow numeric quotas to be tied to job performance, you hear the supervisors in the recording sometimes get into real verbal contortions to get the point across. Like in this excerpt from a roll call the first month that Schoolcraft was recording, June 2008.

Ira Glass

Adrian Schoolcraft says he isn't exactly sure when, but at some point he had decided that it was important to document the orders that he was given that he thought were out of line. He recorded roll calls where officers were constantly being told to do more stop-and-frisks, even though it's illegal to stop a random person on the street and frisk them without reasonable suspicion. In December 2008, a sergeant tells officers to stop-and-frisk quote, "anybody walking around, no matter what the explanation is." He recorded Stephen Mauriello, the commander the 81st precinct-- and the person Adrian Schoolcraft says really brought the hammer down for higher numbers-- ordering the officers to arrest everyone they see. This happens in a couple of recordings, like this one from Halloween 2008.

Ira Glass

Again, Graham Rayman. He says the problem with that is--

Ira Glass

That's John Eterno, a former New York City cop, who went up the ranks from officer to sergeant, to lieutenant, to captain. He now chairs the Department of Criminal Justice at Molloy College and researches and writes about police practices with Professor Eli Silverman. And he says that some of the things that Adrian Schoolcraft documented on his recordings were no surprise to anybody-- like sergeants hounding officers to get their numbers up. That's been happening in every precinct for a long time, he says. But for commanders to tell cops, just lock people up and figure it out later-- Eterno says the word for that is kidnapping.

Ira Glass

Andre Wade has lived in the neighborhood for over twenty years. He's a commercial driver. One day, he and two friends were picking up his brother to go to work together. They were standing on the sidewalk, and a police officer came over, and said they were trespassing. When his brother came down and confirmed, no, no they were there to pick them up, Andre says the officer wouldn't listen.

Ira Glass

The citation that the police gave Wade lists his name, the day that he's supposed to appear in court, but in the spot where it's supposed to specify his crime--

Ira Glass

One of the producers of our radio show lives in the 81st precinct. And she says that it's one of those neighborhoods where everybody has stories of ridiculous tickets. One of her neighbors was bringing his aunt home from the hospital, and he double parked. Two officers told him to move his car, and when he didn't, he was handcuffed, forced to lie down in the street, and tasered twice-- all in front of a crowd of people, including her, who live on the block and heard him calling for help. One common citation is for having an open container of alcohol. One neighbor says he was walking home from church with his six year old daughter, drinking a small carton of Tropicana orange juice, and he got a ticket for that. Others got tickets for water and Gatorade that was being given away at the park. George Walker has lived on the same block for over 40 years and says older guys like him get a lot of tickets. He thinks maybe they're targeted because they don't give the cops any fuss. He says he's gotten a dozen tickets this past year, nearly all for open container, even though he says he wasn't drinking alcohol.

Ira Glass

But we still haven't gotten to the most disturbing thing documented by Adrian Schoolcraft and his recordings. Schoolcraft shows, over and over, that sometimes when real crimes would happen, serious crimes, the 81st precinct would reclassify them as lesser crimes-- or simply not put them in the system at all-- to make it look like the precinct was doing a better job driving down crime rates than it really was. Again reporter Graham Rayman.

Ira Glass

In the end, this cop tells Adrian, their supervisor, Stephen Mauriello, told him to file the case as an unauthorized driver.

Ira Glass

Then when the officer tried to file it that way, because he didn't have a name for the unauthorized driver, he couldn't file it at all. So the robbery went unreported. Rules go into effect in the 81st precinct that make it harder to report serious crimes. Officers are told that if there's a robbery, one of their supervisors has to come out to the scene themselves. And robbery victims are told that if they don't come into the police station, no crime report will be filed at all. After Graham Rayman started publishing these stories about Adrian Schoolcraft, retired cops and some on-duty cops started contacting him with their own anecdotes about crimes being downgraded from serious to much less serious-- the most shocking of these from a high ranking detective name Harold Hernandez.

Ira Glass

Normally, Graham says, that a case like this-- serial rapist-- they'd try to get some press. But the misclassifications of the crimes would have made the NYPD look bad. No one was ever disciplined for what happened, for downgrading. The precinct commander was promoted twice by Commissioner Kelly.

Ira Glass

The New York Police Department declined our request to come onto the radio or to have the officers who supervised Adrian Schoolcraft, and who are heard on his recordings, to be interviewed about their side of all this. But the pressure on police commanders to get better numbers really goes back to 1994, when New York started tracking crimes with a system called CompStat. CompStat, for the first time, gave commanders timely, accurate data once a week on what crimes are happening, so they could send more cops to deal with it. Chances are you've heard of all this. It became one of the best known successes in modern policing. Serious crime has dropped an astonishing 77% in New York City since CompStat began in 1994. Other cities very quickly started imitating it-- DC, Philly, LA. Baltimore's version of CompStat ended up in a recurring plot line on the TV show The Wire, where street cops are told by the bosses to do anything to pump up their numbers. And the problem with CompStat, says Professor Eli Silverman, who studies the way police forces use numbers, is that the early success of CompStat created the expectation that numbers must get better every single year, no matter what.

Ira Glass

As apparently the one person in the 81st precinct who was not obsessed by the numbers, Adrian Schoolcraft, by January 2009, had so displeased his bosses that they gave him a failing job evaluation that covered the entire year of 2008-- which meant one thing, Schoolcraft says.

Ira Glass

He hired a lawyer and appealed the evaluation, but started feeling more pressure than ever to go out and do what his bosses wanted. He began to get stomach pains and tightness in his chest. He had trouble sleeping. Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Ira Glass

Schoolcraft began to feel that he was being retaliated against. He got written up for taking a bathroom break without putting it in his log. Another officer was written up for talking to him. When he went to the duty captain, he was told yes, he was being monitored.

Ira Glass

If there's a bunch of kids on a stoop and you're walking past, the duty captain asks him, and then named some addresses where that might happen, you just go on your merry way, because you don't see anything going on? Schoolcraft tells him he wouldn't just create fake charges. That's a common practice here, he says. Captain asks him what he means, and says in 19 years, he's never seen anybody create charges. Then he asks Schoolcraft the question again.

Ira Glass

Schoolcraft says that around this time, the recordings became about trying to keep his job. Somebody tells him that one of his bosses wants to force him out on psychiatric grounds.

Ira Glass

Schoolcraft says he laid it all out for the doctor-- his bad performance evaluation, the numbers he was asked to hit, and also more personal disputes with his bosses about whether his evaluation was falsified, was the precinct doing training it claimed it was doing. And the police department doctor referred Schoolcraft to see a police department psychologist for an evaluation. And when Schoolcraft tells the psychologist the same things that he told the doctor, she asked him to turn in his gun and shield.

Ira Glass

He doesn't tell them that he has recordings. In fact, as you can hear, he secretly records this three hour meeting with them. But he does give them documentation-- real evidence to back up his charges. And what happens next to Adrian Schoolcraft is very, very strange. Just a few weeks after his meetings with Internal Affairs and QAD, he shows up to work. It's the end of October.

Ira Glass

How he left is in dispute. Schoolcraft says that he told a sergeant that he was feeling sick and went home an hour early. The police say the sergeant never said yes to this request. In any case, Schoolcraft went home and went to bed.

Ira Glass

Adrian has no idea what they want, but he knows the situation is bad, so he starts recording.

Ira Glass

That voice you just heard in Adrian's bedroom is a man of much higher rank than anybody in any of the recordings to this point. He's the number two commander for the NYPD for all of Brooklyn North, Michael Marino. Stephen Mauriello, the head of the 81st precinct, the commander that Adrian contends had been putting pressure on all the officers to deliver better numbers, is also there in the bedroom. He talks next.

Ira Glass

Adrian knows the rules and he asks if he's under arrest. He's not under arrest. But the number two commander for Brooklyn North, Michael Marino, tells him he's giving him an order.

Ira Glass

If this seems like an extreme response to you, reporter Graham Rayman confirms, it is.

Ira Glass

An officer asks Adrian if he wants medical aid-- an EMT to come check him out. Adrian's blood pressure turns out to be sky high. They offer to take him to a hospital, but not his local hospital-- to one that he's never heard of. And he doesn't get what they're up to, and he refuses medical attention. Under the law, they should leave him alone. But for some reason, they will not take no for an answer.

Ira Glass

Again, this is Deputy Chief Marino, from Brooklyn North.

Ira Glass

During the struggle, as they cuff Adrian, the little recorder falls out of his pocket. Deputy Chief Marino spots it.

Ira Glass

Now that Deputy Chief Marino has labeled Schoolcraft EDP, the police take Schoolcraft and commit him to a psychiatric ward, saying he was a danger to himself. Schoolcraft, who had spent months documenting his bosses telling cops to lock people up on contrived pretenses, now found himself locked up on contrived pretenses.

Ira Glass

Schoolcraft's father, the last person Schoolcraft talked to, is unable to find him for days. The last he heard, his son was in an apartment surrounded by police, the next, he just vanished. His father says he called Internal Affairs, the FBI, the press. Finally he located him by calling around the hospitals all over Queens.

Ira Glass

Again, reporter Graham Rayman.

Ira Glass

At the time that he led the raid on Schoolcraft's apartment, Deputy Chief Michael Marino was already under a microscope. It was just a month after he had been put on trial inside the department after a sting named him as one of 27 cops who illegally bought human growth hormone, or steroids. Marino claimed that he used the human growth hormone for a medical condition. And back in 2006, an arbitrator found that Marino was in violation of New York labor laws for a very similar situation to the one that Schoolcraft was documenting. The arbitrator ruled that Marino had set up an illegal quota for police officers of four parking tickets, three moving violations, three quality of life summons, and two stop-and-frisk per month and then penalized the officers when they didn't make the quota.

Ira Glass

Adrian Schoolcraft says that in the end, none of this worked out the way he thought it would during all those months of recording.

Ira Glass

That's the question, of course. And there's really no way to know how typical the 81st precinct is. Reporter Graham Rayman has heard from retired cops who say the same things happened where they worked. And he's found a policeman who was secretly recording in the Bronx at the same time as Schoolcraft finding the same things. The guys who study the way CompStat is used by the police, John Eterno and Eli Silverman, say manipulating stats to get better numbers seems to happen in a lot of places where CompStat is used.

Ira Glass

Having failed to reach any results working inside the department, Schoolcraft finally went to the press. And Graham's five-part series in The Village Voice has been, Adrian says, like a meteor hitting the 81st precinct. The police commissioner transferred Commander Stephen Mauriello, and some of the other senior-level supervisors, out of the precinct. Though he only did that after several weeks of pressure from politicians and clergy. There's now one police investigation into Schoolcraft's allegations, there's another investigation of Deputy Chief Marino's order to put Schoolcraft into a psych ward, another into the charge that serious crimes were downgraded to lesser ones, and a fourth that is just about the misclassification of crimes in Detective Hernandez's sexual assault case. Schoolcraft's recordings will be used in two class action lawsuits, one about stop-and-frisks, one about quotas. Schoolcraft himself is suing the department for $50 million. Two officers have come forward to back up his charges. A website, schoolcraftjustice.com has been set up looking for more. Schoolcraft himself is suspended without pay, living with his dad, 350 miles away, in upstate New York-- where, he says, a dozen times city police have shown up and pounded on his door, yelling, "NYPD, we know you're in there. Open up." [KNOCKING] Of course, he recorded it.

Ira Glass

Schoolcraft assumes that he'll never again work as a police officer anywhere.

Ira Glass

And finally, with the 81st precinct under new supervision, the numbers on serious crime have risen by 10-15%. Are the crimes going up, or that's closer to the true amount of crime that was already there, only now being recorded? [MUSIC - "OFFICER" BY THE PHARCYDE] Well, our program today was produced by me and Sarah Koenig, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feeltes, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Robin Semien, and Alissa Shipp and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon's our office manager. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Production help from Shawn Wen. [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS] This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight of our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who's got no problem with the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Seriously.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.