Officer Pedro Serrano walked through the heavy wooden
doors of the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx and headed upstairs to the locker
room. For eight years he’d been working out of this 89-year-old station house,
with its broken fax machines and crummy computers. “We work in a shithole,” the
cops there would say, “but it’s our shithole.” Serrano, 43, had the day
off—he’d stopped by only to pick up some papers—but when he got close to his
locker, he noticed something strange. Someone had placed a dozen rat stickers
on the door.
There was a blue rat baring sharp teeth; a red rat
curled up tight; another rat posing next to the word dirty. And dangling from
his combination lock was a spring-loaded rat trap. A minute or two passed
before his initial shock subsided. “Now it begins,” he said to himself. “The
little game that’s going to start—it’s real now.”
Serrano snapped off the trap so he could open his
locker, but he decided the stickers should stay. “I don’t want to let these
people think that they won,” he told himself. If this display had been intended
to scare Serrano into silence, it had the opposite effect: The sight of all
those rats made him even more determined to testify in federal court against
the NYPD.
The 4-0—as its officers call it—is one of New York
City’s busiest police precincts. Not at all like the 5-0 in the North Bronx,
which the 4-0 cops like to deride as the “5-Slow.” Here, there’s nothing
unusual about an officer on the day shift getting multiple calls before 9 a.m.,
including a family dispute that ends with one relative stabbing another. The
4-0 includes Mott Haven, with its thirteen public-housing developments, which
means that though the precinct is small in size, it’s packed with people. The
cops patrolling the streets here don’t get a lot of passersby saying “Hello” or
“Hey, Officer, how are you?” And when responding to a call in the projects, 4-0
cops know to always look up. It’s the only way to avoid getting hit with
“airmail”: beer bottles, eggs, ice cubes, canned foods.
Before signing up with the NYPD, Serrano had spent a
decade working at the meat market in Hunts Point, doing everything from loading
trucks to bookkeeping to management. “Then I got to a certain age and I looked
at my life and I was like, I got to do something with it,” he says. “I was
making decent money. It was just dead-end.” He also had two young sons to
support.
Serrano applied to the NYPD, FDNY, and the Department
of Correction—places where he thought he’d find more opportunity. In the end,
it came down to a choice between being a cop or a jail guard. He polled
everyone he knew, and a Correction employee he met at the gym was the most
persuasive. “He said, ‘There are plenty of blacks and Hispanics in Corrections,’” Serrano recalls. “ ‘You need to go into the Police
Department.’”
Serrano enrolled in the NYPD academy in the summer of
2004. He was old for a rookie—at 34, he’d just made the age cutoff—and in
January 2005, he got his first assignment: the 40th Precinct. He had lived in
the Bronx since arriving from Puerto Rico when he was a year old. Just two
miles separated the 4-0’s station house from the apartment on Fox Street where
he’d lived as a child. And it helped that he spoke Spanish; almost
three-quarters of the 4-0’s residents are Latino.
No matter how well he knew the Bronx, leaving the
police academy and joining a precinct felt disorienting. “The minute you got
out of training—different world,” he says. “Ninety percent of the stuff they
taught you did not exist.” At the academy, for example, he’d been told never to
target anyone solely because of his skin color. The message seemed unambiguous:
“If you racial-profile, you’re going to get fired.”
Once he joined the 4-0, nothing seemed clear-cut.
“Every now and then, we would have to be put in a van and hunt, basically.
Drive around, and the sergeant or whoever would say: ‘That guy there—write
him.’ ‘That guy—write him.’”
Cops wrote summonses for all sorts of minor offenses:
“unreasonable noise,” “bicycle on sidewalk,” “unlawfully in park after hours.”
And when they saw someone they suspected of criminal activity—if they spied a
bulge in somebody’s pocket where a gun might be and saw that person touching
that spot—they stopped and frisked him. This blitz of activity was part of the
NYPD’s “hot spots” strategy: By flooding crime hot spots with cops—and ordering
them to give out summonses and perform stop-and-frisks—the NYPD could prevent
more serious crimes.
This was the theory, at least. But from Serrano’s
perspective, many of the summonses seemed to make no sense. “This happened to
me—they rolled up to this poor Mexican guy sitting on the stairs and said:
‘Write him.’ I’m looking at Sarge, like, ‘What am I writing him for?’” The sergeant said, “Blocking pedestrian traffic.”
Later, back at the precinct, Serrano read what
exactly constitutes “blocking pedestrian traffic.” “This guy was sitting on the
stairs, and there is room for someone to walk by,” he says. “If a person is
trying to enter the building and cannot because you’re blocking them, that’s
blocking pedestrian traffic. But he was not blocking pedestrian traffic.”
Sure, the guy would only have to pay a small fine,
but if he never went to court—if he forgot, or couldn’t scratch together the
money, or was an undocumented immigrant afraid to enter a courthouse—the court
would put out a warrant for his arrest. And the next time the police stopped
him, they’d take him to jail.
Every time Serrano handed out a summons to someone he
believed didn’t deserve it, he thought, I can’t do this. I got to do twenty
years of this? “It made me feel like crap.”
When he was in junior high school, Pedro Serrano
moved into the Bronx’s Little Italy with his mother and three siblings. He
formed a tight clique with several neighborhood kids, including Little Man
Ivan, Freckle-Faced Ivan, and Karate Pete. The shouts of “You spic!”; the kids
chasing him on his way to school; the unwritten rule that they couldn’t step
inside Ciccarone Park—it was all part of growing up Puerto Rican in this
Italian neighborhood. “We needed a group of people to count on just to
survive,” he says. “We didn’t belong in the neighborhood, and they made it
known.” Looking back on those years, Serrano describes having lived through a
“racial war.” And it was a war that Serrano felt he was fighting on two fronts,
against the neighborhood kids and the cops.
“The police would stop, come out of the car, frisk us
whenever they felt like it,” he says. “You were Hispanic or black in a
high-crime location—it happened every day, and you just got used to it. You
don’t question it. At first you get upset. But after they hit you or arrest you
or summons you, you get to know real quick: Just let them search you and
they’ll go away.”
Serrano has lost count of the number of times he was
stopped and frisked, but he estimates somewhere between 25 and 50. It happened
often enough that the mere sight of an NYPD car pulling up to the curb
triggered an almost Pavlovian response: Before the officers had even exited
their vehicle, Serrano and his friends would have their hands on the wall.
“Back then, it was a way of life,” he says. “It was like waking up and eating
breakfast.”
The encounters were brief, maybe only two or three
minutes, but their impact was more permanent. “I actually hated the police,”
Serrano says, “because of what they did to me.”
The trick to surviving in the NYPD, Serrano decided,
was to get assigned to a unit where he could use his discretion. For a while,
he thought he’d found that place in a unit known as “Summons Auto,” where he
was supposed to stop drivers for offenses like disobeying a no-turn sign or not
wearing a seat belt. As he recalls, he was told to give out ten summonses a
day, a number he found easy to meet.
“There were so many people doing stuff; I would stop
30 people a day and only give ten summonses,” he says. “The guy who had the
cell phone, looked at me, and kept going—I’d pull him over and make sure he
gets one … The woman who parked her car, had to drop the baby off at day care,
and ran in there and ran out. Why should I give her a summons? I give her a
little lecture.”
The more time Serrano had on the job, the more
outspoken he became; his fellow officers started calling him a “boss fighter.”
And he wasn’t the only one unhappy with how things were changing. Many of the
older guys in the 4-0 thought the rookies were being trained wrong. When it
comes to street stops, one of Serrano’s former co-workers says, “We can’t just
stop everybody. And that’s what they’re teaching the new guys to do: Just stop
everybody … Just to get the numbers. That’s it. Doesn’t matter: Just get the
numbers.”
Once, when Serrano’s supervisors didn’t think he’d
written enough summonses or UF-250s (the form cops are supposed to fill out for
every stop-and-frisk), a sergeant put him in a car and drove him around until
he found two guys standing by a wall.
According to Serrano, the sergeant said, “250 them.”
When Serrano resisted the order, the sergeant said, “Summons them.”
“For what?” Serrano asked.
“Blocking pedestrian traffic.”
Serrano did as he was told, but as he took the men’s
I.D.’s and wrote their tickets, he told them: “I’m violating your rights, and
you should take my name down. If you ever want to sue, you can use me as a
witness.”
Serrano and his fellow officers understood why their
bosses pressured them to write so many summonses and 250s. As one cop put it,
“The more 250s, the better it makes the commanding officer look.” They knew the
stress their bosses were under when they went to CompStat meetings, the way
they got screamed at by their own superiors when they didn’t have a good answer
to the question: “What steps have you taken to address your conditions?”
(That’s NYPD-speak for “crime conditions.”)
Once a commander returned to the station house, of
course, he passed down that pressure to everyone else: to the lieutenants, the
sergeants, down to the officers. For every crime hot spot, the precinct
commander had to show that he was on top of the situation, that his cops were
taking action. He had no way of counting exactly how many crimes he’d
prevented—how do you count robberies and shootings before they happen?—but he
could offer up the next best thing: high numbers of 250s and summonses.
Long before NYPD officers talked about 250s, the act
of an officer stopping a civilian on the street and patting him down was known
as a “Terry stop.” In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Terry v. Ohio that a
police officer could stop and frisk someone on the street even if he had no
probable cause to arrest him; all cops needed was “reasonable suspicion” of
criminal activity. In New York City, controversy over this police tactic
erupted in 1999 after four officers trying to stop a man in the Bronx wound up
firing at him 41 times. The killing of 23-year-old Amadou Diallo, an unarmed
immigrant from Guinea, transformed stop-and-frisk into a political issue.
In the years that followed, the number of street
stops made by NYPD officers grew at an astonishing rate from 97,296 stops a
year to 685,724 between 2002 and 2011. (The number dropped last year to
533,042.) Most stops happen in high-crime neighborhoods, places like East New
York or Brownsville or Mott Haven. In 2011, 87 percent of the people stopped
were African-American or Latino. And in the overwhelming majority of
stops—nearly 90 percent of them—police officers didn’t make an arrest or hand
out a summons.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly have insisted the policy is part of the reason the NYPD has been able to
keep down the crime rate. Kelly recently told The Wall Street Journal, “If you
don’t run the risk of being stopped, you start carrying your gun, and you do
things that people do with guns.” Critics of the policy insist these street
stops amount to racial profiling. Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia law professor who
has studied the NYPD’s numbers for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR),
criticizes stop-and-frisk’s low “hit rate”—for finding guns or making
arrests—pointing to a Supreme Court case in which cops at a checkpoint who
stopped motorists at random actually had a higher arrest rate.
Meanwhile, several mayoral candidates have seized on
the issue, promising reforms. Christine Quinn, the only Democratic candidate to
say she’d continue Kelly’s tenure as police commissioner, has attacked the
steep number of stops. “I just don’t believe stops at 700,000 are happening in
a constitutionally sound way,” she told Capital New York. “That is a number
that has torn police and communities apart.”
In the wake of Diallo’s death, the CCR filed a
class-action lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk
tactics used by the NYPD’s Street Crimes Unit. The CCR settled that case in
2003. The NYPD agreed to adopt a written policy banning racial profiling and to
audit officers to ensure that they stopped people only if they had “reasonable
suspicion” and that they documented every stop. In 2008, as the number of stops
continued climbing, the same legal organization filed another class-action
case: Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al. This time, the lead plaintiff
was David Floyd, a 34-year-old medical student, who was twice stopped and
searched in the Bronx, once in front of his apartment building while trying to
help a neighbor who was locked out.
One day in 2009, Officer Serrano clipped a video pen
to the front pocket of his uniform. An officer had given it to him, suggesting
it would protect Serrano on the job if he ever ran into serious trouble with
his bosses (he later began using an iPhone). At an overtime roll call on June
30, 2010, he recorded Lieutenant Stacy Barrett telling officers she was
“looking for five”—five summonses and/or UF-250s. “St. Mary’s Park, go crazy in
there,” Barrett said. The NYPD has long contended that it does not have quotas
for how many summonses or 250s a cop is supposed to write, but Serrano believed
his recording proved otherwise. One month later, he taped another lieutenant at
roll call talking about “five-five-five”—shorthand for five summonses, five
250s, and five “verticals” (sweeps of apartment buildings).
By this time, Serrano knew he wasn’t the only cop
secretly taping his superiors. Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had recorded a year
and a half of roll calls in Brooklyn’s 81st Precinct; excerpts appeared in The
Village Voice in the spring of 2010. That same year, a cop named Adhyl Polanco
in the precinct next to Serrano’s, the 41st, went public with recordings he’d
made, including one of a roll call in which cops were told to do “one and
twenty”—one arrest and twenty summonses—a month.
Serrano followed the officers’ stories in the media
and knew how both men had been treated by their bosses after they fought back.
Schoolcraft was suspended from his job, but not before officers had gone to his
apartment, cuffed him, and hauled him off to the psych ward at Jamaica
Hospital, where he was confined for six days. Polanco was transferred to the
viper Unit in Brooklyn and spent his shifts watching video monitors of
housing projects. No longer allowed to do real police work, he’d become, in
NYPD parlance, “a broken toy.”
Serrano didn’t know what he was going to do with his audio
files, but the more conversations he recorded, the more hours he spent on his
bed at home, headphones pressed to his ears, trying to parse exactly what had
been said. He took notes, writing down the timing of anything that seemed
especially revealing, and sometimes he’d play a snippet for his wife: “Listen
to this! Did you hear what he just said?”
She never seemed too interested. “She’d say, ‘Yeah, I
know, I know,’ and just pacify me.” The way he saw it: “My wife doesn’t
understand because, for the most part, females are not the ones who get
250-ed.”
When he wanted to talk to someone who he thought
would be more supportive, he called his two brothers, both of whom had left the
Bronx at a young age to join the Army. “They’ve been through it. They’ve also
been 250-ed. They know exactly what the police department does to civilians.”
How do you measure the performance of a cop? It was a
question that arose at the end of every year, when it was time for annual
evaluations.
Serrano now worked as a patrol officer, driving
around on the four-to-midnight shift (known as the 4-12), answering radio
calls, responding to ten or more jobs a night. The 4-0 was so busy that he
regularly started his shift with jobs already “stacked up”—911 calls that had
come in earlier and were still waiting for a response. Depending on the night,
he might be cracking down on a drag race on East 132nd Street; trying to break
up a fight between inebriated men outside the strip club Sin City; or
responding to a call from Lincoln Hospital about a guy who arrived at the ER,
bleeding from a bullet wound. Being a patrol officer carried less status than
working in a specialized unit, but Serrano liked the job, partly because he was
so busy that nobody seemed overly concerned with how many summonses or
stop-and-frisks he did.
That changed in late September 2011 when the 4-0 got
a new commanding officer, 38-year-old deputy inspector Christopher J.
McCormack. His nickname was “Red Rage”—his face would turn crimson when he
started hollering—and within the department he was considered to be a rising
star. His officers described him as being on the path to making chief one day.
At the end of 2011, Serrano received a three out of
five on his annual evaluation, down from a four the prior year. He wasn’t sure
why his score dropped, since all the written comments (albeit sprinkled with
typos) were positive:
PO Serrano adheres to the ethics of the department
and guidelines.
PO Serrano handles sensitive situation with a care
and empathy.
PO Serrano is competent police officer that has the
abitity to be leader.
When Serrano appealed his score, he met with the
4-0’s executive officer, Captain Martine Materasso. The meeting lasted no more
than five minutes. What was said is a matter of dispute. Serrano says she told
him half his score was based on his “enforcement activity”—his number of
arrests, 250s, and summonses. For all of 2011, he’d done only five arrests, two
summonses, and three 250 forms, fewer than he’d done the year before. Materasso
denies talking about specific numbers, later saying, “Did I believe that he was
every day out there serving the people of the 4-0 like he should be? I don’t
believe he was.”
Serrano disagreed. He answered more than 1,000 radio
calls in a typical year. Like the time he responded to a call about an
“EDP”—emotionally disturbed person—at an apartment on Trinity Avenue. As he
pulled up in front of the building, he saw five children huddled on the
second-floor fire escape, screaming about a stranger in their apartment.
Serrano told the oldest girl to drop the ladder, and
then he climbed up, squeezed in through the window, and pulled out his Smith
& Wesson. He found three more children inside, barricaded in a room, armed
with baseball bats. At the front of the apartment, a deranged man screamed and
slammed his fists against the locked front door so hard that his knuckles were
bleeding.
He reminded Serrano of the Rock—about five-eight,
enormous muscles, no neck—and he appeared to be high on PCP. When he heard the
crackle of Serrano’s police radio, he spun around. Seeing that he wasn’t armed,
Serrano put away his gun and, with three other officers, tackled the man to the
floor.
Later, he learned the backstory: The children’s
families had been preparing for a party; the adults had gone out to get the
food; this guy had stumbled into the wrong apartment and couldn’t figure out
how to get out. Minus a few details, it was the sort of crazy incident that
could happen any night of the week, would never make the newspapers, and would
do nothing to help his numbers.
Serrano and a handful of other officers from the 4-0
began meeting to talk about their jobs, always in restaurants where they could
be sure their supervisors wouldn’t walk in. In early 2012, four of them filed
affidavits with their union protesting quotas. When their efforts led nowhere,
Serrano started searching for an attorney. He estimates he spoke to about ten
before the day last December when he walked into the Center for Constitutional
Rights.
He met with Darius Charney, a lawyer for the CCR, and
Jonathan C. Moore, a partner at Beldock Levine & Hoffman, who was working
with him. They told Serrano about their lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s use of
stop-and-frisk and Moore asked if he would be willing to testify. Serrano wasn’t
sure. He hadn’t come here looking to be a witness in someone else’s lawsuit.
But unlike many of his fellow officers, he knew the issue from all sides. He
remembered how it felt to be that guy sprawled against the side of a building,
and he knew the toll it took on officers to perform so many of these stops. “A piece of you dies when you violate people—your humanity,”
he says. Right before the end-of-the-year deadline, the lawyers added
his name to the witness list.
On February 22, Serrano showed up at work to discover
that somebody had tipped over his locker, tossing the contents all over. It
was a standard NYPD retaliation move. Another time, somebody had flipped the
locker of an officer—also with the last name Serrano—by mistake and written
RAT next to his name on his door, prompting somebody else to scribble next to
it: WRONG SERRANO.
Serrano didn’t know who was targeting him, and that
was the hardest part. “It could be the friend who’s talking to you, the [union]
rep who’s supposed to be representing you,” he says.
So he stayed quiet, talking to no one, waiting for
others to approach him, trying to figure out which co-workers were still his
friends. There were several cops who seemed to be acting different, no longer
looking him in the eye, but they said nothing. As he later testified, “I felt
like I was in a shark tank and had multiple stab wounds and I was bleeding and
they were circling me.”
After someone left those rat stickers and rat trap on
his locker, Serrano decided to retaliate in his own way: He pulled out a marker
and drew mustaches on a few of the stickers.
Recently, his supervisors had assigned him to keep
watch at the school-bus drivers’ strike, a job usually reserved for less-senior
officers. To Serrano, it felt like punishment. He called the NYPD’s Internal
Affairs Bureau for help, but that didn’t seem to accomplish anything. The only
thing that gave him comfort was knowing that there was another officer one
precinct over who understood exactly how he felt.
On March 20, Officer Adhyl Polanco sat on the witness
stand in Courtroom 15C at the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Manhattan.
It was day three of the trial of Floyd v. City of New York, and Serrano
listened from the audience. “I grew up in Washington Heights; I know what it’s
like to grow up in the hood. Basically, that not everybody who lives in a
high-crime area is a criminal.” Polanco’s words sounded very familiar.
Despite Serrano’s initial worries about testifying,
when he got his turn on the stand later that day, he was surprisingly calm; it
felt good to share his experiences in a courtroom packed with lawyers and
reporters and spectators. Before, he’d been just another anonymous cop with a
stash of secret recordings and piles of typed notes. Now everyone was listening
to him.
His testimony stretched over two days. Serrano
explained to Judge Shira A. Scheindlin how, in his view, around 2007, the 4-0’s
bosses had ratcheted up the pressure, shifting from what he called a “soft
quota” to a hard quota, from a suggestion of how many summonses or
stop-and-frisks the cops should do—to a number that they had to hit, or else be
punished.
“It’s not good to tell cops: ‘Make sure you find it,’” he said. “Because if they don’t find it, what’s left? If
the bad guy is not there, who is left? The good people. And you got to hammer
them.”
The only time he became emotional was when his lawyer
asked him why he’d come to testify. “Well, Judge, it’s very simple,” he said.
“I have children. I try to be a decent person. You have got to excuse me. Whenever
I talk about my kids …” He paused for a moment, trying to blink back tears. “As
a Hispanic, walking in the Bronx, I have been stopped many times. It’s not a
good feeling. I promised as an officer I would respect everyone to the best of
my abilities. I just want to do the right thing. That’s all.”
To bolster their case, the plaintiffs’ lawyers
presented evidence Serrano had collected. They played the tape of Lieutenant
Barrett telling the cops she was “looking for five” summonses and/or 250s. They
flashed on a screen a text message Serrano had received from his sergeant a few
months earlier: “U need to do more 250.” And they played a recording Serrano
had made of a meeting he’d had with Deputy Inspector McCormack on February 14,
2013.
As precinct commander, McCormack oversaw some 235
officers. Though he’d been at the 4-0 for seventeen months, he’d never met
Serrano before this meeting; he recognized the name, but couldn’t remember ever
having a conversation with him. The meeting had been set up so Serrano could
appeal his latest job evaluation. The conversation, however, focused largely on
stop-and-frisk.
The prior year, Serrano recalled stopping five or six
people, but the NYPD’s records showed only two 250s. “To stop two people, you
know, to only see two things going on, that’s almost like you’re purposely not
doing your job at all,” McCormack said.
Serrano tried to defend himself, but McCormack
continued, “For the 4-12s in the 4-0, you know, I could see in Central Park
maybe that would be fine, but this ain’t Central Park.”
The longer the conversation continued, the more
heated both men became.
Serrano: “Mott Haven, full of blacks and Hispanics.
Okay … So what am I supposed to do? Is it stop every black and Hispanic?” He
repeated the question several times.
McCormack: “This is about stopping the right people,
the right place, the right location … Take Mott Haven, where we had the most
problems. And the most problems we had there were robberies and grand
larcenies.”
Serrano: “And who are those people robbing?”
McCormack: “The problem was, what, male blacks. And I
told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this: male blacks, 14
to 20, 21.”
In the courtroom, the plaintiffs’ lawyers pointed to
McCormack’s line about stopping “male blacks, 14 to 20, 21” as evidence that
the NYPD was racial-profiling. The next day, a story appeared on the front page
of the New York Times, presenting Serrano’s tape as something of a smoking gun:
“BRONX INSPECTOR, SECRETLY TAPED, SUGGESTS RACE IS A FACTOR IN STOPS.”
The story sparked a skirmish between the Times and
the NYPD. One week later, the Times’ public editor wrote a column in which she
criticized the paper’s story, saying that it had lacked sufficient context. The
NYPD’s spokesman insisted McCormack had been referring to suspects in a
specific pattern of crimes—not racial profiling—and referred to Serrano as a
“disgruntled, race-baiting cop.”
In the courtroom, when he’d heard the tape of his
conversation with McCormack, Serrano became enraged all over again. “You can
ask me whatever you want, but the one thing you can’t ask me is to go after a
specific race,” he said later. “Coming from a white man, it pissed me off. It
brought me back to being in Little Italy and this racist pressure you can’t
control … When he mentioned race, it felt like someone was suffocating me.”
The trial of Floyd v. City of New York continued
through the rest of March, all of April, and into May. To refute Serrano’s
testimony, the city’s lawyers put six supervisors on the witness stand.
Sergeant Stephen Monroe described him as a “mediocre” cop. Sergeant Eduardo
Silva said he was your “basic average officer.” Lieutenant Barrett, whom he’d
recorded at roll call telling officers she was “looking for five,” insisted
this was not a quota but a “performance goal.”
Deputy Inspector McCormack got his turn on the stand
on May 13. He disputed Serrano’s claim that he had been punished for not doing
enough summonses or stop-and-frisks. When asked whether he set quotas for his
officers, McCormack said, “Absolutely, positively not.” Asked why he told
Serrano to stop “male blacks 14 to 20, 21,” he explained there had been a rash
of robberies in and around the Mott Haven and Patterson housing projects, and
that he was referring to “the victims’ statements of who the perpetrators
were.”
Considering that the 4-0 is an “extremely violent
location”—10,000 crimes reported a year, 123 shootings in the past two years—he
said Serrano needed to be much more proactive. “I was very worried that, with
his actions, that he was not handling his conditions, and it was not fair to
the community.” Though Serrano had increased his numbers of arrests from five
to eight between 2011 and 2012, McCormack said that in such a violent precinct,
“it’s by far not enough.” He also insisted he only wanted “quality” summonses
that address the right “conditions.” “I don’t need numbers for numbers,”
McCormack said. “I don’t need old men stopped in parks for minor park
violations.”
On the website Thee Rant—formerly known as NYPD
Rant—commenters, mostly officers past and present, feasted on Serrano’s
testimony.
“You wear a wire, you are a rat. That’s its. [sic]
Men that disagree with their boss don’t record them. Fu-cking coward!”
“This guy needs to find his locker in the East
River.”
“The Cop is a fat slob do nothing … I hope other Cops
avoid him like the plague.”
A few who said they worked with McCormack weighed in,
too: “Chris is extremely gung ho, they don’t call him Red Rage for nothing … He
genuinely believes he is doing God’s work out there. When I was a crime
sergeant he would go out with us at least three times a week and would always
be the first one to jump out of the car to toss someone. He hates perps. The
other thing he hates is laziness. He will do anything for people who work. He
will also f*ck with people who refuse to work. And that’s what this is all
about.”
There were also those commenters who agreed with
Serrano. One wrote: “99 percent of 250s are utterly useless … Stopping the
wrong people just leads to hostility between the PD and the people.” Another
commenter wrote: “Sadly many cops don’t understand what a legit legal SQF
[stop, question, and frisk] is and think what they are doing is legal police
work. Bosses like McCormack want to keep it that way so cops keep writing …
McCormack could have explained during the recording after being asked a half a
dozen different ways who the ‘right people’ were. He could have simply said,
‘people that you have reasonable suspicion that they committed a crime or are
about to commit one.’ Of course he didn’t say that because if his cops actually
followed that legal standard his SQF numbers would take a nose dive.”
The trial’s closing arguments are scheduled for May
20, but both sides will have to wait for Judge Scheindlin’s decision, and no
date has been set for when she’ll hand it down. Depending on what she decides,
the NYPD could find itself answering to an independent court-appointed monitor
charged with overseeing the reform of stop-and-frisk—an outcome both the police
commissioner and mayor have been aggressively fighting.
Back at work at the 40th Precinct, Serrano felt as if
his head were on a swivel; he was hyperaware of everything, watching everybody
closely, trying to read everyone’s expressions. After he finished testifying, he
had traveled straight from the courthouse back to the station house to sign out
for the day. The moment McCormack saw him, he recalls, he started hollering:
“Make sure you sign out! Yesterday you didn’t sign out!” When Serrano tried to
explain that he actually had signed out the day before, he says, McCormack just
walked away.
As for his fellow cops at the 4-0, Serrano discovered
that they fell into three camps. One third supported him (“They were like: ‘We
get it, no problem’”); another third were furious
(“They think what I did is wrong”); and the rest were neutral (“They were like,
‘We don’t care either way; we just don’t like the bad stuff that’s coming
because he’s pissed off now’”).
Serrano had expected the anger and hostility. What
surprised him was how many cops went out of their way to speak to him. Not just
friends but even officers he didn’t get along with, and a few supervisors, too.
“Every time I was by myself, people would approach me and tell me the same
thing: ‘Listen, I can’t shake your hand, man, but good job.’”
After he testified and his name appeared in the
press, he began receiving calls from cops in other precincts asking for advice.
They told him they also had recordings of their bosses, and they wanted help
figuring out how to step forward with their own allegations. Serrano began
meeting with these cops in out-of-the-way diners. “I told them what to do, how
to do it,” he says. “We support each other. Any time they want they call me. We
text. We vent.”
On April 14, 24 days after his testimony ended,
Serrano learned that he’d been transferred. He was assigned to a precinct in
Manhattan North and put on the midnight shift. He knew he should not have been
surprised, but he was. He also knew this was a better outcome than many
others; at least they hadn’t sent him to Far Rockaway or Staten Island, where
his commute would be two hours. And there didn’t seem to be nearly as much
pressure to summons or stop and frisk people in his new precinct. “It’s just a
different world,” he said.
One morning not too long ago, Serrano drove through
the streets of the 4-0 on his day off, wearing jeans and sunglasses, a
deodorant tree hanging from his rearview mirror, baby car seat in the back.
(Fifteen months earlier, his wife had had a baby girl.) On a sidewalk ahead,
Serrano spotted two former co-workers standing watch.
“What’s up gentlemen?” he shouted. “Working hard?”
The officers went over to his window. “Coming back to
work?” one asked.
“I miss you guys,” Serrano said.
Nobody mentioned the trial or Serrano’s testimony.
Instead, the two officers told Serrano how McCormack had just come by and
screamed at them. They even sounded slightly envious talking to Serrano about
his transfer.
Serrano understood, but he had already discovered a
downside to his new precinct: The officers there didn’t seem nearly as
tight-knit as the cops at the 4-0, maybe because their jobs weren’t as tough.
“My family is gone, man,” Serrano said. “I don’t know
anybody.”
“You get to be home all day and see your kids,” one
officer said.
“I’m good with that,” Serrano said. “But I miss my
family.”
His former co-workers guffawed, then bid him
good-bye, everyone slapping palms. But as Serrano began to drive away, he
turned back one last time. “C’mon!” he shouted, leaning out the window. “I still
love y’all!”
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