The NYPD Tapes

A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-Ups, and Courage

Graham A. Rayman

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230342279
• eBook ISBN: 9781137381279
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the Pulitzer Prize–nominated reporter, an "account of a modern-day Serpico's battle with an all-powerful police department . . . somber and inspiring" ( Publishers Weekly).
In May 2010, NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft made national headlines when he released a series of secretly recorded audio tapes exposing corruption and abuse at the highest levels of the police department. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Schoolcraft against the City of New York, instead of admitting mistakes and pledging reform Schoolcraft's superiors forced him into a mental hospital in an effort to discredit the evidence.
In The NYPD Tapes, the reporter who first broke the Schoolcraft story brings his ongoing saga up to date, revealing the rampant abuses that continue in the NYPD today, including warrantless surveillance and systemic harassment. Through this lens, he tells the broader tale of how American law enforcement has for the past thirty years been distorted by a ruthless quest for numbers, in the form of CompStat, the vaunted data-driven accountability system first championed by New York police chief William Bratton and since implemented in police departments across the country. Forced to produce certain crime stats each quarter or face discipline, cops in New York and everywhere else fudged the numbers, robbing actual crime victims of justice and sweeping countless innocents into the police net. Rayman paints a terrifying picture of a system gone wild, and the pitiless fate of the whistleblower who tried to stop it.
"A tale of crime prevention turned upside down in the Bloomberg era. Rayman has invented a new genre: the police misprocedural." —Tom Robbins, New York Times–bestselling author

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• PROLOGUE   Halloween 2009: “What Is This, Russia?”
• 1   “I Will Faithfully Discharge the Duties”
• 2   “The Profit I Wanted to Deliver”
• 3   Bed-Stuy: Do or Die
• 4   “Play the Game”
• 5   The Hunts Point Digression
• 6   “You Gotta Pay the Rent”
• 7   Desk Duty
• 8   The Lengths People Will Go
• 9   Halloween Night
• 10   Patient No. 130381874
• 11   A Game of Cat and Mouse
• 12   The Schoolcraft Effect
• 13   The Washington Heights Digression
• 14   “We’re Not Going to Settle”
• 15   Smoking Guns and “Ham and Eggers”
• EPILOGUE OF A SORT   The Lightning Rod on the Building
• Index
• Copyright