Jammed Up

Bad Cops, Police Misconduct, and the New York City Police Department

Robert J. Kane, Michael D. White

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780814748411
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814770856
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

Drugs, bribes, falsifying evidence, unjustified force and kickbacks:
there are many opportunities for cops to act like criminals. Jammed Up is the definitive study of the nature and causes of police misconduct. While police departments are notoriously protective of their own—especially personnel and disciplinary information—Michael White and Robert Kane gained unprecedented, complete access to the confidential files of NYPD officers who committed serious offenses, examining the cases of more than 1,500 NYPD officers over a twenty year period that includes a fairly complete cycle of scandal and reform, in the largest, most visible police department in the United States. They explore both the factors that predict officer misconduct, and the police department’s responses

to that misconduct, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the issues. The conclusions they draw are important not just for what they can tell us about the NYPD but for how we are to understand the very nature of police misconduct.

ACTUAL MISCONDUCT CASES

»» An off-duty officer driving his private vehicle stops at a convenience store on Long Island, after having just worked a 10 hour shift in Brooklyn, to steal a six pack of beer at gun point. Is this police misconduct?


»» A police officer is disciplined no less than six times in three years for failing to comply with administrative standards and is finally dismissed from employment for losing his NYPD shield (badge). Is this police misconduct?


»» An officer was fired for abusing his sick time, but then further investigation showed that the officer was found not guilty in a criminal trial during which he was accused of using his position as a police officer to protect drug and prostitution enterprises. Which is the example of police misconduct?

Jammed Up

An Introduction

Mitchell Tisdale¹ was born and raised in Brooklyn. He lived in a two-parent household with three other siblings. His father worked in the service industry, and despite no criminal history in his family, Mitchell was arrested three times on juvenile delinquency charges prior to his eighteenth birthday. He earned his general equivalency diploma (GED) in lieu of a high school diploma, did not serve in the military, and worked at seven different service-industry jobs before joining the NYPD as a police officer at the age of 24. In addition to the juvenile delinquency findings, Mitchell had four moving violation summons and disciplinary problems in two previous jobs. Nevertheless, he had no financial troubles, he was making timely payments on his auto loan, and pursuant to his NYPD background check, investigators found no reason to recommend against his appointment to the department.

At the time of his appointment to the NYPD, Mitchell was married with one child while still residing in Brooklyn. In the police academy Mitchell earned acceptable ratings on all aspects of training (academic, physical fitness, tactics); upon graduation, he was assigned to a Brooklyn patrol precinct. In his fourth year of service, Mitchell received his first citizen complaint. It was for off-duty profit-motivated misconduct. Mitchell was allegedly involved in a drug-dealing enterprise to supplement his NYPD income. The complaint was unsustained, as NYPD investigators were unable to prove at an acceptable threshold Mitchell’s involvement in the drug ring.² Six months after the first complaint, Mitchell received his second complaint, this time for off-duty violence. As with the first case, the second complaint was adjudicated as unsustained.

Several months after his second disciplinary case, Mitchell was in a bar while off duty, where he met a woman, with whom he went to a hotel room to engage in a consensual sexual encounter (Mitchell was still married). At some point during their time together, a struggle over Mitchell’s off-duty firearm ensued, during which the woman was shot in the neck and killed. Mitchell dressed and fled the scene, leaving the woman’s body to be discovered by hotel staff. On his way home from the incident, Mitchell disposed of his off-duty firearm so that it could not be traced to the woman’s death. It took just a few days for the NYPD to link the deceased woman at the hotel to Mitchell; and despite initial (and repeated) denials of involvement, Mitchell finally confessed that it was his gun that killed the woman. Although no criminal charges were filed against Mitchell, he was subsequently dismissed from the NYPD for violating several administrative rules, such as “conduct unbecoming a member of service,” and “failure to safeguard a firearm.” He never made it past the rank of patrol officer.

In the same year that Mitchell Tisdale was hired, Paul Barrett was also hired by the NYPD. Paul, along with his four siblings, was born in Manhattan and raised there by his mother and father. Although Paul did not attend college, his father was a college graduate who worked in the professional sector of the economy. Nobody in his immediate family had ever been arrested, including Paul. Upon receiving his high school diploma, Paul joined the then-new NYPD Cadet Corps — essentially a paid internship within the NYPD that socialized pre-recruits into the administrative practices of the police department. During his time as a cadet, Paul also held three different outside jobs in the service economy; he was never disciplined in those jobs, and he never had a former employer make derogatory comments about his performance. By all official criteria, Paul was a model candidate for the position of police officer. After working three years as a cadet, he entered the police academy and was assigned to a Manhattan patrol precinct when he graduated. During his career with the NYPD, Paul moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, he never married or had children, and he never carried any bank debt. He received zero citizen complaints and took a career path with an upward trajectory: three different commands with a promotion to Detective, Third Grade in his tenth year of service.

At some point in his eleventh year of service, while investigating a deceased person incident in a Brooklyn apartment, Paul and his partner stole a stack of U.S. savings bonds worth several thousand dollars. He took the savings bonds to a local bank, and posing as the owner (i.e., the deceased person from the apartment), attempted to cash them. The suspicious bank teller stalled Paul while the manager called the NYPD. When officers arrived, they arrested Paul, who was subsequently brought up on federal charges. In the end, Paul was convicted in federal court of conspiracy, and he was dismissed from the NYPD for profit-motivated official corruption (an administrative violation).

Approximately 20 years later, the first author of this volume was sitting in an office on the first floor of Police Headquarters at 1 Police Plaza (1PP) in Manhattan. His task as a university researcher was to identify every police officer whose career had ended due to occupational misconduct from 1975 to 1996. While sorting through yellowed personnel documents from the 1970s that had been stored in file cabinets in various locations throughout 1PP, the researcher happened upon the following entry: “Mitchell Tisdale, dismissed for Failure to Safeguard a Weapon.” After scouring NYPD documents for months, and having seen the range of “normal” incidents for which officers were usually dismissed (e.g., corruption, abusing a citizen, perjury), the researcher asked himself, “Who gets fired for failing to safeguard a weapon?”

The Origins and Methodology of Jammed Up

This volume represents the culmination of perhaps the largest study of police misconduct ever conducted in the United States, with a study period spanning from 1975 through 1996. In 1996, the now-late James J. Fyfe offered his graduate student (the first author of this volume) an opportunity to help design and conduct this study of career-ending misconduct in the New York City Police Department. That study, known as Bad Cops,³ was ultimately funded by the National Institute of Justice and gave the research team unprecedented access to NYPD records and data. That study is the foundation for this book. Bad Cops sought to explore the nature and prevalence of police misconduct in the NYPD from 1975 to 1996, as well to identify relevant personal and career history characteristics most responsible for distinguishing between officers who engaged in career-ending misconduct and officers who did not. In the end, the research team collected information on more than 3,000 police officers (half of whom had been separated from the department due to misconduct), hired approximately 20 NYPD employees, who worked on the study in the evenings after their regular shifts ended at 1PP, and spent almost three years post-study assembling data at different units of analyses in order to tell the story of Bad Cops. Though we refer the reader to Fyfe and Kane’s NIJ final report for complete coverage of the study’s methodology, the sheer scope and breadth of the study’s design warrants some discussion here.

The first methodological step involved identifying the population of officers separated from the NYPD between 1975 and 1996 for reasons of misconduct. At the time of the study, the NYPD maintained no central file or database that provided information on employment separations, whether for misconduct or other reasons. Instead, usually one to three times per week, it published Personnel Orders and disseminated them to every departmental unit. These orders reported every change in status (e.g., appointment, promotion, transfer, change in designation, resignation, retirement, vesting, dismissal, termination, or death) of both sworn and non-sworn NYPD personnel. The authors gained access to all Personnel Orders, which were contained in multiple filing cabinets inside Police Headquarters. The Personnel Orders represented a starting point for the identification of separated officers.

In addition to reviewing the Personnel Orders described above, the authors accessed all other available NYPD record sources, most notably the personnel files held by the Personnel Records Unit (PRU). The most substantial part of the personnel file (known as the PA-15 in NYPD vernacular) was a lengthy application and information form completed by all police officer candidates and used as the basis for pre-employment investigations. Also from the PRU the authors accessed files containing officers’ performance appraisals during recruit training, annual job performance evaluations, reports of disciplinary actions, information concerning changes in marital status, educational achievement, assignments, sick leave, injuries, and various other noteworthy events (e.g., commendatory letters, departmental recognition, serious vehicle accidents, reports of line of duty injuries). Finally, the authors accessed and coded information from the Central Personnel Index (a computerized database that captures all critical career events), Management Information Systems Division, Internal Affairs Bureau, and the Department Advocate (the prosecutor in serious internal disciplinary actions). The only data that the authors could not gain access to included the results of testing and interviews conducted by the NYPD’s Psychological Services Unit — as these were protected by doctor/client confidentiality.

Review of the Personnel Orders produced an original pool of about 3,000 officers who had career-ending events that may have been related to misconduct. The authors then reviewed the personnel history of each of those 3,000 officers to determine whether the cause for separation was related to misconduct.⁴ We identified several categories of employment separation that met our criteria for inclusion in the study. First, “dismissal” is the term used to describe the firing of tenured civil servants in New York, including the police. Since dismissal is always a penalty for misconduct, all officers dismissed by the NYPD between 1975 and 1996 were included in the study. Second, the NYPD has traditionally followed a practice whereby it forced some officers to retire or resign under honorable conditions in return for their cooperation in investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing of which they had been a part. The authors reviewed the Personnel Orders as well as the personnel files of all officers whose resignation notices gave any indication that they had been in trouble when they left the department.⁵ The lead author questioned internal affairs and Trial Room personnel for their recollections of any such cases.

In addition to identifying categories of inclusion, we also identified several categories of separation that excluded officers from the study. First, any officer who had left the department in good standing — e.g., for employment with another police agency — was excluded from the study. Second, prior to the award of tenure, the NYPD typically does not dismiss officers, because this category of involuntary separation requires some due process, beginning with the specification of charges. Instead, probationary officers typically are “terminated,” a designation that only requires a statement from the Police Commissioner that an individual has shown to be an unsatisfactory probationer. Such terminations can occur because of misconduct or because of candidates’ failure to satisfactorily meet the police academy’s standards for performance in the academic, physical, or firearms and tactics training programs. If the termination occurred because of failures or inadequacies rather than misconduct, the officer was excluded from the study. Approximately 1,000 of the initial 3,000 cases were excluded because of performance failures. Probationary officers, however, whose terminations were obviously rooted in misconduct, including failure to abide by the police academy’s disciplinary rules or, quite often, failure to take or pass a drug test, were included in the study.⁶ The misconduct “screening” process produced a sample of 1,542 study officers.⁷

To generate a comparison group, the authors first identified the police academy classes to which all study officers belonged (based on start dates). Next, from police academy ledgers we obtained rosters for all relevant academy classes (classes ranged from 1948 to 1996) and then matched each study officer to a randomly selected academy classmate.⁸ Note that the matching process did not stratify comparison officers on the basis of static (e.g., race, age, etc.) or other characteristics. The matches were made strictly on the basis of academy class. This procedure allowed us to compare study and comparison officers who had been hired under the same screening requirements, similar social and political contexts, and who likely had similar entry-level experiences with the organization.⁹ In the end, the authors derived a sample of 1,543 control officers. These 3,085 officers — half of whom were jammed up — are the focus of this book.

What Does It Mean to Be Jammed Up?

Readers familiar with the TV show, NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993 – 2005) can likely recall any number of exchanges among the show’s main characters in which they made reference to getting “jammed up” — a ubiquitous shorthand term used to describe when the organization launches an investigation into alleged misconduct (administrative or criminal).¹⁰ Within the New York City Police Department (as with many others in the United States), officers can get jammed up by bosses (i.e., supervisors who represent the formal police organization), civilians (citizens who make complaints), and the CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board), which has the authority to initiate its own investigations. The previously described cases of Mitchell Tisdale and Paul Barrett illustrate the complexities of defining and studying what it means to be jammed up, particularly when using a retrospective design that requires researchers to work backwards to piece together officers’ personal and career histories, and when relying on official police department records to do so. The methodological discussion above highlights the challenges of such an approach. When we entered the NYPD in 1997 to begin the study on which this book is based, we thought we had a fairly valid and reliable a priori definition of police misconduct: behaviors proscribed by administrative policies and/or criminal law for which the offending officer(s) was/were dismissed from employment. We presumed that in order to label an incident as police misconduct, the officer(s) involved must have used their office in some way to gain access to the misconduct opportunity. Very shortly into the study, however, we were faced with a series of questions that challenged some of our most basic presumptions about how to characterize police misconduct. The following are examples of actual misconduct cases we encountered, which illustrate the difficulties of defining the police misconduct construct:

1. An off-duty officer driving his private vehicle stops at a convenience store on Long Island, after having just worked a ten-hour shift in Brooklyn, to steal a six-pack of beer at gun point. Is this police misconduct, or is this a robbery committed by someone who happens to be a police officer? The officer was still wearing his uniform pants and brandished his on-duty firearm to commit the crime. (In fact, it was precisely because the officer was wearing his uniform pants that the store clerk figured out that it was a police officer who had robbed him.)

2. A police officer is disciplined no less than six times in three years for failing to comply with administrative standards and is finally dismissed from employment for losing his NYPD shield (badge). Is this police misconduct? This officer never had been disciplined for official corruption or abuse of authority but while on duty did wear an unauthorized shield, which he purchased from a pawn shop to escape disciplinary charges. (At some point in his NYPD tenure, he lost the shield that was assigned to him.) A citizen then misidentified him to supervisors because of the false badge number, which the department used to terminate his employment.

3. The NYPD of the 1970s suspended officers for up to ten days for taking a free cup of coffee, but then fired different officers for the same behaviors in the 1990s. What does that say about the organization’s reliability in its patterns of adjudicating disciplinary cases over time? After all, the latter officers are included in this study, but the former officers are not. To what extent is career-ending police misconduct a moving target, and to what extent is the definition of career-ending misconduct conditioned by when the misconduct occurred?

4. An officer was fired for abusing his sick time, but then further investigation showed that the officer was found not guilty in a criminal trial during which he was accused of using his position as a police officer to protect drug and prostitution enterprises. Should this officer be classified as being dismissed for administrative rule violations (the sick-time abuse) or serious/illegal misconduct? Most officers charged with abusing sick time are not fired, they are suspended. It seemed clear in this case that NYPD administrators believed this officer was guilty of the criminal charges, and they sought to have his employment terminated.

As challenging as they are in their own right, these cases lead to a set of vexing conceptual quandaries: Do the theories that explain illegal police misconduct also explain administrative non-conformity? To what extent do changes in the value system of the organization over time influence, if not the prevalence of misconduct, then the distribution of misconduct over the study period? If the organization became more or less “strict” in the way it responded to certain types of misconduct over time, does this book represent a study of organizational responses to known police misconduct as much as it does a study of the correlates of police misconduct? We believe that the data collection experience described above gave us valuable insights into the complexity of studying police misconduct and allowed us to consider these difficult questions. It also shaped our discussion of prior research and conventional definitions of police misconduct (see chapter 2) and led to the development of our own classification system of misconduct (see chapter 4).

Selznick¹¹ wrote that by “institutionalizing” — or integrating — the informal personality orientations of its influential members, large formal organizations tend to define deviance in ways that represent the value systems of individuals, perhaps regardless of any public definitions of deviance. This reasoning suggests the difficulty of using organizational records to identify police misconduct, particularly if the definition by design needs to hold constant across multiple generations. Thus, Selznick presents us with two challenges: (1) the importance of looking “deeper” than official dispositions of “terminated” or “dismissed” to measure misconduct; and (2) the need to maintain a sense of the organization’s value system over time so ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: What Bad Cops Tell Us about Good Policing Candace McCoy
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Jammed Up: An Introduction
• 2. What We Know and Don’t Know about Police Misconduct
• 3. Setting the Stage: An Historical Look at the New York Police Department
• 4. Exploring Career-Ending Misconduct in the NYPD: Who, What, and How Often
• 5. Predicting Police Misconduct: How to Recognize the Bad Cops
• 6. The Department, the City, and Police Misconduct: Looking beyond the Bad Cop
• 7. Explaining Bad Behavior: Can Criminology Help Us Understand Police Misconduct?
• 8. What We Know about Being Jammed Up, and Transitioning to a Discourse on Good Policing
• Appendix: Analyses from Chapter 5
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors