Episode Part 1

[Umbelina Baublitz]

PJJohn is a crime nerd. He was a crime nerd when he joined the police department in 1983, he was a crime nerd when he retired in 2004, he was a crime nerd when he immediately jumped into an academic career in criminology. And as a crime nerd, the thing that was amazing to him about CompStat was how year after year he could just watch the crime rate. Watch as it just went down and down and down. He started to notice it always went down.

PJ: Ritchie was working during that era that John was puzzling over. The era where the crime rate just kept going down and down and down. And he told me a story about what that was like. This story about a thing that happened one night when he was working late in the Bronx.

PJ: So Ritchie went back to the station and he did it. He put the crime into the system. It would count. And he said as soon as he put that report into the system, somebody must have gotten a notification.

The way John Eterno described it, it was like pretty soon nobody had a choice anymore. The chiefs felt like they were keeping the crime rate down for the commissioner. The commissioner felt like he was keeping the crime rate down for the mayor. And the mayor, the mayor had to keep the crime rate down because otherwise real estate prices would crash, tourists would go away. It was like the crime rate itself became the boss.

ETERNO: I think it's a political imperative at this time. We've seen crime go down for 25 years. When you see crime go down for 25 years, it's difficult to be the mayor or anyone where crime starts going up.

And so year after year, these chiefs were going to CompStat, and they had to prove that their cops were arresting more people, were summonsing more people, were doing most stop-and-frisks than the people in the neighborhood the year before.

PJ: The reason this was happening was because of that pressure for activity. And over the years, that pressure just got higher and higher. Pedro said it had gone from what felt like a sort of soft, unofficial quota to like a hard quota. Like a number that he was given every month or even at the beginning of every shift for the amount of summonses and arrests he had to come back with.

Anyway, in 2009, Pedro made a decision. He was going to start bringing a tape recorder to work and recording some of the things his bosses were telling him. And at this one roll call, he turns it on.

And the reason for that is also directly coming from CompStat. The reason this roll call is happening was because there had been a crime pattern in the neighborhood. At a nearby intersection, there had been a string of robberies, and witnesses had identified the suspects as young black men between the ages of 14 and 21.

PEDRO: And they start targeting. They called it the Impact Zones, and they would flood that area, and everyone in the Impact Zone, whether you were just a regular guy or a criminal, would get hit because you got so many police officers, they all need activity.

PJ: And what if somebody, like, what if somebody kind of didn't get the memo, first day of work, they see somebody, they see like a 35-year-old white architect on a bicycle on the sidewalk in Central Park and they write a summons.

DALY: It was supposed to be, treat every crime seriously. It was supposed to be -- if that was your mother, what would you do to get the guy that did that to her? It's not supposed to be, you know, summonses, activity, numbers.

JACK: Just quality of life, without the warrants, without the debriefs. Just the straight quality of life stuff. That is like giving a facelift to a cancer patient, alright? If you only have quality of life enforcement, right? You will be living in a fool's paradise.

And that was the situation Pedro found himself in two decades later. In a neighborhood where there was plenty of serious crime that he felt like he should be pursuing, but where he was being told instead to just go after people for the little things. And by 2012, he had really just had enough. He started to push back. He would fight with his bosses, he would refuse to meet the quota, and they started punishing him.

PEDRO: Now, if they set you up for death, whoever's around you could die. If they follow you home, if they know where you live and they throw gasoline bottles through your window just to hurt you. My kid sleeps in the next room. If they do drive-bys and blame it on somebody else, my kid is a target because they're next to me.

PJ: In 2013, Pedro's side actually won the stop-and-frisk trial. A federal judge told the city, "You can't use stop-and-frisk the way you're using it." And stops went way, way, way down. But for Pedro, like, nothing really changed because the machine itself was still there. No more stop-and-frisk? OK. That pressure just moved over and now what it wanted was just more criminal summonses. The same people were being harassed, just with a slightly different justification.

Every time I read a story about police in America now, I look for the machine. And more times than not, I see it. In Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot by police, the city has issued three warrants for every household.

But after the stop and frisk trial, one thing did change, which is that it turned out the same attention that got Pedro in so much trouble, it was also like a bat signal to all these different cops in New York City who had the exact same problems with the machine that he did. And in the aftermath, a bunch of them started to come forward.

PEDRO: You know, there was a bunch of us that thought the same way. That's how we basically met over time. We started to meet after, uh, the day was over and meet at a local McDonald's or a diner or whatever and just talk about the day and how can we fix it?

He said watching that trial, he realized because so many of the stops the police department was making were not constitutional, they didn't really have a way to defend themselves in court. They couldn't justify it. He said there was one specific moment where this became crystal clear to him.

EDWIN: But then how do you, what is a secret movement? What is this? That is so ambiguous. A secret movement. You know, so then the question was, how could this be the number one reason that New Yorkers were stop-and-frisked? And the cops that wrote the most can't even give the definition. How can you say this is constitutional? What is the department going to say to that? It was embarrassing. And that's when it hit me like, huh? All we got to do is get the trial. All we got to do is get the trial.

Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Original music in this episode from the extremely brilliant Tim Howard and Breakmaster Cylinder. Thanks to our additional musicians Anja Krieger on flute and Michael Brownell on upright bass. Recording help from Mark Lewis.

3a8082e126