"I wasn't meeting their undocumented quota. The non-quota, quota," said Adrian Schoolcraft.
In his first television interview, officer Adrian Schoolcraft, an 8-year-veteran, spoke about how a top-down pressure to make summons quotas corrupted policing in the 81st precinct :
"I never accepted that as effective policing or as they call it "pro-active" be proactive," adds Schoolcraft. "They were just reacting when they grab bodies off the street, which the inspector refers to them as bodies, how many bodies do I have in the cells."
He says tapes he secretly recorded of his supervisors during roll call back his quota claims.
ROLL CALL: "They can make it real difficult for you, ship you off somewhere. Just keep the hounds off, a parker, a 250, you can stop someone walking down the street. You know what, I stopped an a@#hole once, I gave him a 250, what's the big deal,"
Schoolcraft says day in and day out, it was all about the numbers with little respect for a people's rights.
ROLL CALL: " I want a ghost town. I want to hear an echo from one end of the street to the other. You understand, that's what I want in a perfect world. So that's your mission. You guys need collars, you need activity, there you go, they got to be removed."
Schoolcraft says he often witnessed the down-grading of felonies to misdemeanors. When he went to internal affairs last fall to report it, the NYPD, he claims tried to discredit him by placing him in a psych ward against his will.
He's been suspended without pay since.
"I believe they couldn't afford to have someone expose behavior so bad so criminal it would threaten their careers and they reacted out of fear. They had to stop that threat," he said.
He now has a website, schoolcraftjustice.com that he says has been flooded with responses from other cops.
Last spring, Officer Adil Polanco made claims to Eyewitness News about illegal quotas in the 41st precinct. He too had provided us with recordings to back his allegations of a quota of one arrest and 20 summonses per month. ROLL CALL: "If you think 1 and 20 is breaking your balls, guess what, you're going to be doing? You're going to be doing a lot more."
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