NYPD still trying to hide corruption & bury Schoolcraft

[weemadando]

http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-03-07/ ... confirmed/

It's an obscenely long in depth article, so I won't post it here, but I'll share some highlights:

The Voice has obtained that 95-page report, and it shows that the NYPD confirmed Schoolcraft's allegations. In other words, at the same time that police officials were attacking Schoolcraft's credibility, refusing to pay him, and serving him with administrative charges, the NYPD was sitting on a document that thoroughly vindicated his claims.

Kelly's aides have also sought to marginalize Schoolcraft—to, in effect, kill the messenger. And the department has succeeded in making his life extremely uncomfortable. Schoolcraft has been suspended without pay for 27 months, he faces department charges, he was placed under surveillance for a time, and the city even blocked his application for unemployment benefits.

After a woman reported a knifepoint robbery, another precinct sergeant told cops, "If no surveillance cameras show her getting robbed, she's going to be locked up." In essence, cops were pressuring her not to file the complaint. The victim got frustrated, and no report was filed.

Roy Richter, the president of the Captains Endowment Association, says that despite the broad allegations contained in the report, Mauriello is only charged with obstructing the taking of a single auto-theft report.

"It's important to note that Mauriello was not charged in any administrative action related to the broad conclusions that are contained in the report," Richter says. "Prior to the investigation, his command was rated very highly in previous crime-statistics audits. We will challenge the charges against him. We feel he's been wrongly charged."

Mauriello is on full duty in the Bronx Transit command as an executive officer. During his time at the 81st Precinct, his command won a coveted unit citation for outstanding performance, and he was promoted.

So, two years on, the NYPD is still trying to bury the whistleblower who exposed the wholesale fraud in their ranks, the city has gotten on board with trying to shut him down too and in an Abu Ghraib level bit of "shit rolling downhill", the commander of the precinct at the centre of it all remains uneffected in any real terms while most of lower ranks have had a variety of penalties applied to them as a result of the investigations.

[SpaceMarine93]

Can't the US just go ICAC on this problem?

The ICAC is Hong Kong's solution to corruption in the police department and in other parts of society. Back in the 1970s, when Hong Kong was still a colony of Britain, the Hong Kong police force was wrecked by similar corruption. A landmark incident occurred when Peter Fitzroy Godber, a senior officer stationed at Wanchai police station and later at Kai Tak Airport police station, was discovered to had amassed no less than 4.3 million Hong Kong Dollars (approximately 600,000 US Dollars) in overseas bank accounts.

When the police's Anti-Corruption Branch investigated his mysterious wealth and ordered him to explain his source of income, he nearly got away with it just by arranging for his wife to leave the colony, then he used his police airport pass to bypass Immigration and Passport checks and walked onto a plane for London.

Godber's escape led to a large public outcry over the integrity and quality of the police's self-investigation and called for reforms in the government's anti-corruption efforts. Godber was later extradicted back to HK to face trial and convicted.

The ICAC is a government department which is independent of the Hong Kong Civil Service. The Basic Law of Hong Kong stipulates that the ICAC shall function independently and be accountable to the Chief Executive. Previous appointments were made by the Governor of Hong Kong and the same office to which the agency reported to.

It was so effective in its operation against corruption in the police force that in its early years, an entire army of corrupt cops had at one point stormed its headquarters at Central District in protest, desperately trying to save themselves. Now it is one of the most powerful law enforcement organizations in Hong Kong, uncovering and battling corruption in every part of Hong Kong society with the zeal of an Inquisition. Hong Kong police department and the society had been turned from one of the most corrupted and dirty in Asia to one of the cleanest.

I had been to Hong Kong, they keep telling me the amount of corruption in the police force is non-existent, and even very small cases of fraud, corruption, whistleblowing are considered rare and presented as big news on TV, where as in US there would be so many nobody would know most of them. Its a near-perfect system, as far as I can tell.

Can't the US just copy the methods used by ICAC? I mean, I know the FBI had been at it for years, but it seemed it can't do jack about the NYPD and other places' police corruption problem for almost forever.

[Edi]

You assume that the US authorities actually want to do anything about it. They don't.

They would much rather that all these inconvenient whistleblowers kept their mouths shut and will thus collude in attempts to hound them into silence and destroy their lives. It's the same at the federal, state and local level in many cases. Just look up Thomas Drake and several other cases as well as all the war crimes coverups like Abu Ghraib.

[Sriad]

This American Life did a lengthy feature on this a few years ago, with actual tape excerpts. Everything claimed against the NYPD 81st is disgustingly obvious from them.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a ... ain-silent

[K. A. Pital]

Oh, the ICAC isn't perfect by any means. However, this case seems to be revealing a systemic disease inside the law enforcement ranks. Nothing surprising, though, since police corruption is one of the most natural cases of corruption and police starts being corrupt sometimes way before the rot gets into higher echelons of power.

Considering the US higher echelons are notoriously corrupt for decades (if not a whole century), police should be more, not less corrupt.

[Raj Ahten]

The only thing that might change the NYPD's ways on this matter is public pressure. Everyone in the department and the politicians above them benefit from the current system where they collude to keep crime statistics down. Why the hell would any city official want the crime rate to rise on their watch? Because they care about actually results over appearances for their next reelection bid? Good luck with that.

Too many entrenched power interests benefit for any of them to want to change anything. I suppose you could invite the feds in, but what laws have been broken? This isn't the police working for the mob as hitmen or systematic bribery. It is police officials breaking internal policy rules and being rewarded by their masters for doing so.

[SpaceMarine93]

Oh, the ICAC isn't perfect by any means. However, this case seems to be revealing a systemic disease inside the law enforcement ranks. Nothing surprising, though, since police corruption is one of the most natural cases of corruption and police starts being corrupt sometimes way before the rot gets into higher echelons of power.

Considering the US higher echelons are notoriously corrupt for decades (if not a whole century), police should be more, not less corrupt.

The ICAC isn't perfect, at least it works. Hong Kong Police force and the higher echelons of power that manages them had been clean for decades.

For the American situation, you're right, I don't see a way out for this. This is an extremely unconventional problem, and it requires an extremely unconventional solution. Just how far and how low is anyone who could do something about it willing to sink in order to solve this corruption problem.

[weemadando]

It's not an unconventional situation.

It exists in every bureaucracy and wherever KPIs or similar "abstract" metrics exist, there'll be ways to game them and the people who's pay and promotions count on having good stats will make sure that they have good stats, even if it means being a lying cunt who destroys the capabilities, morale and reputation of their organisation and staff.

But hey, they got a promotion because it all looked good on paper.

[Simon_Jester]

It's also been a problem in education, complete with occasional cheating/corruption scandals. No Child Left Behind basically demands that every school's test scores improve every year, and that schools reach 100% "proficiency" by 2014 on their own state tests. Predictably, this leads to dumbing down of the definition of "proficient," and a lot of pointless cramming and teaching to the test and exclusion of whatever won't be on the test. It does not lead to students being taught more of, say, history or political thinking.

If you've ever gotten a feeling that recent high school graduates in the United States are getting dumber, this may have something to do with it.

And this isn't even because the teachers are stupid or unaccountable or whatever, it can just be because they don't want their schools to be disbanded for not being able to arbitrarily increase their score quotas on demand every year.

[Straha]

You assume that the US authorities actually want to do anything about it. They don't.

This isn't so much a national problem (*) as a local problem. The City has a wide degree of autonomy over how it handles its own law enforcement and prosecution, and the City gets to set its own internal protocols and regulations. The previous mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was elected to deal with rampant crime in the city and had cut his teeth in city politics by being an aggressive District Attorney (criminal prosecutor). The main way that Giuliani dealt with crime was by beefing up the police, prioritizing small crimes like turnstile jumping and vandalism over felonies, and by letting police off-the-leash with a number of internal regulations. This worked very well in reducing crime figures across the board.

The larger issue, with Schoolcraft, comes largely from his successor, Bloomberg. When he came in he continued a number of Giuliani's policies but also put an emphasis on statistical reduction of crime across the board. The result was that precincts were now being measured by how much they reduced crime from quarter to quarter putting them in a double-bind. If they were actually effective in stopping crime (as they often were) the number of arrests would decline significantly while criminal activity would remain the same and result in the precinct being punished, whereas if they were ineffective at stopping crimes (that is steady or rising arrest rate, but rising crime rate) they would suffer mass sanctions and personal shifts. The result has been the worst of both worlds, precincts do whatever they can to raise their arrest total through jumped up charges while also exerting all the pressure they can on people not to report incidents as crime, which leaves everyone unhappy.

To tie this back to your point, the organ inside the city responsible for policing the police is Internal Affairs. Most of these cops tend to have a wide array of experience as beat cops so they're loyal to the force and they know that the system is structured to punish precincts that try to be honest. The result is Internal Affairs doesn't view incidents like the Schoolcraft affair as a problem but more as a necessity forced onto them via the politicians in charge. The politicians have no interest in trying to engage in structural reform because any reform would only make it seem like crime rates were on the rise punishing them. Which means we have a neat and tidy little web of self-serving corruption that the voters tolerate because the police department is also mostly effective at stopping crime from effecting them.


The good news is my footnote from above. The FBI is actually taking an interest in the NYPD right now because the NYPD's counter-terrorism force, which I believe is the largest in the country after the FBI's, has decided to spy on mosques in New Jersey and upstate New York. A violation of both civil rights and the jurisdictional boundaries that police forces have to recognize. After this came to light a number of FBI officials have reprimanded the NYPD for this and there's talk about a wide spread investigation into the NYPD's activities of late.

[The Yosemite Bear]

ok maybe we need an army of Serpicos but while we are on police curruption doesn't NO deerve more investigation?