Mayor Bloomberg And Commissioner Kelly May Go On Trial Just Yet

From the Daily News:

AN NYPD supervisor has lost his bid to countersue whistleblower cop Adrian Schoolcraft.

Deputy Inspector Steven Mauriello alleged that Schoolcraft — who has a pending $50 million lawsuit against the city — concocted bogus complaints about wrongdoing in a Brooklyn precinct in order to ruin his boss.

But Manhattan Federal Court Judge Robert Sweet has denied the deputy inspector, finding in part that the counterclaims would be unfair to Schoolcraft, who would have to “expend additional resources . . . preparing for trial.”

Schoolcraft claims the NYPD had him committed to a psych ward against his will because he said cops were using quotas and fudging crime stats.

He is suing the city, Mauriello, Jamaica Hospital and two doctors.

 

A commenter writes:

This guy Schoolcraft has them but good. Tapes that prove the quota system that was setup by Billionaireberg and Kelly. Kelly calls them productivity goals but are plain old quotas just with different wording. Also when Schoolcraft went to the IAB to report what he had on tape and what he was going to do with them the IAB told Mauriello who stormed Schoolcrafts home. In an attempt to find these tapes Schoolcraft was put in a psych ward so his home could be searched and wouldn't be released until Mauriello said it was ok. With Kelly and his boss Billionareberg gone soon I can't wait to see who Mauriello turns in to save his own skin.

Another commenter writes:

My good friend is an NYPD cop and I can tell you EVERYTHING this Schoolcraft guy said is true! He tells me that not only is the workload insane (Kelly has stood by his mantra of "Do More with less" which means that each cop is doing the work of the seven thousand less cops the NYPD now has, compared to years ago), but that the boss' torture them for their arrest and summons quotas. He said that there are severe punishments for cops who don't meet their numbers. I'm really surprised more cops don't snap under the stress. The reporter who broke this story wrote a great book about it. With the stuff that's in there you would think this cop worked in communist Russia or something! The NYPD is out to get it's own. Good cops who stand up to the system are tortured. For the good of the public, something has to change.

So far, Bloomberg and Kelly, along with a compliant corporate press, have kept the wraps on the criminality forced upon the cops from the NYPD brass and City Hall in order to meet their insane quotas.

But the Schoolcraft case may expose all of that and put the Bloomberg and Kelly crime stat miracle to the graveyard where myths go.

I have a friend who works in the system who tells me the crime stats are all phonied up - they arrest people just to make their monthly quotas, they refuse to take some criminal complaints, they downgrade felonies to misdemeanors.

Bloomberg gets feted in the press for making the city the safest it's been since the 1940's.

The truth is, none of the stats can be believed - nothing from the Bloomberg Era can be believed.

Bloomberg: There Can Be No Independent Monitor Of The NYPD

Because the king and his army must not be accountable to anybody:

Mayor Bloomberg blasted a plan to create an inspector general to monitor the NYPD as an election year ploy that will be disastrous for public safety.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn backed the proposal Tuesday, calling for an office within the city Department of Investigation that could subpoena police officials and documents.

Quinn is hoping to secure the mayor’s endorsement in her run for City Hall this year — but Bloomberg called the bill the latest in a pattern of politically-motivated attacks on the NYPD that could plunge New York back into the bad old days.

“We cannot afford to play election year politics with the safety of our city, and we cannot afford to roll back the progress of the past 20 years,” he said. “This bill jeopardizes that progress and will put the lives of New Yorkers and our police officers at risk.”

He said an inspector general with the power to oversee policy would undermine the police commissioner’s authority.

“I don’t think any rational person would say we need two competing police commissioners,” he said. “That kind of breakdown in the chain of command would be disastrous for public safety.”

Actually the point isn't to have two competing commissioners.

 

It's to have the currently unaccountable police commissioner who runs the police department like a paramilitary force and brags about having missiles to shoot down planes in the sky be called to account.

 

As Wayne Barrett pointed out here in 2011, the NYPD has been beset by scandal during Kelly's Reign of Terror:

 

There is now such an avalanche of scandal descending on the NYPD that even Kelly is threatened by it, depicted in a front-page New York Times story last week, and editorial this week, as an institutional captive of the department unable to independently investigate all the terrible things its members do. That recent list includes allegations, some already proven, of drug-planting, ticket-fixing, Muslim-spying, gunrunning, pepper-spraying, and “frying another nigger,” with the Times insisting that many of these revelations were uncovered by everyone but Kelly’s Internal Affairs Bureau, mostly because it’s too internal. In fact, the one scam IAB did help probe, the indictment of 16 cops for killing parking tickets and other favors, was compromised by an IAB lieutenant heard on one tape tipping off the perpetrators.

Barrett doesn't blame Kelly for these messes, he says the NYPD may be "a force unto itself, untamable, as dark sometimes as the streets it patrols...Could anyone do a better job of containing these excesses and outrages than Kelly has?"

 

I don't buy Barrett's argument.

 

If the NYPD is a "force unto itself", barely controllable, untamable, as dark as the streets it patrols - then maybe it's time for somebody outside the department who is independent of the department to police it.

 

Clearly Ray Kelly is not up to the task.  

 

Just ask the families of all the people of color shot by NYPD cops, ask the Occupy protesters bludgeoned by the NYPD whiteshirts, ask the victims of NYPD drug-planting in Queens, ask the people spied upon by Ray Kelly's CIA within the NYPD.

 

If any department in King Bloomberg's government needs an outside independent watchdog, it is certainly the NYPD.

 

No wonder Bloomberg doesn't want one.

 

For Bloomberg, accountability is for the little people, not for the mayor or his police commissioner.

Bloomberg's Restaurant Ratings Derided As Unfair And Arbitrary

The Mayor of Reductionism evaluates schools, teachers, and restaurants using letter grades - but the restaurants are starting to fight back:

A cheer went up the other night at James, a popular Brooklyn bistro, as a triumphant waiter marched into the retro-tinged dining room bearing the new gold star of the New York City restaurant trade: a framed, blue letter “A.”

As diners applauded, the waiter placed the letter grade in the restaurant’s front window — and removed the orange “B” that had been there for three worrying months.

Nineteen months after the Bloomberg administration began issuing letter grades to the city’s 24,000 restaurants, the bright “A,” “B” and “C” signs have become commonplace and polarizing presences, embraced by discerning customers but despised by restaurateurs who say the grades are handed out in unfair and inconsistent ways.

On Wednesday, the restaurant inspection program is to face its first full-fledged vetting by the City Council, whose members have expressed concern about the effects the grades have on small businesses and the increasing number of fines for sanitary violations issued by the health department.

Not to be upstaged, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg scheduled a news conference of his own on Tuesday to defend the inspection program, one of the more high-profile initiatives he has initiated in a rocky third term.

At Zero Otto Nove, a stalwart trattoria in the Bronx, Mr. Bloomberg sought to pre-empt criticism by citing statistics showing an uptick in restaurant revenue and a reduction in salmonella infections since the grading system began in 2010. He denounced critics as “people that complain because they don’t want to keep their restaurants clean.”

“They think it’s O.K. to have mice and roaches and dirt and not have people wash their hands before they come back from the bathroom,” the mayor said, his voice rising. “That’s just simply unacceptable, and their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears, I can tell you that. We’re not going to change."

Notice the mayor calls critics of this reductionist system filthy f%^&*ing pigs.

That's kinda how he treats critics of the school grading system and the new evaluation system too.

There are no legitimate complaints about Bloomberg - you either agree with him or your a filty f%^&*ing pig.

As for the rating system, there are plenty of problems with it.

First, not all "bad restaurants" are treated equally in Bloombergville:

For health officials, the Council’s hearing came at an inopportune moment. The New York Post reported over the weekend that Per Se, consistently rated among the city’s best restaurants, had avoided a “B” grade with a telephone call to a city official, in which the restaurant successfully argued that the inspection report had contained errors.

City Hall officials quickly pointed out that several dozen restaurants, of varying degrees of prestige, had taken the same route to contest alleged violations and avoid a protracted adjudication process. Mr. Bloomberg, at his news conference on Tuesday, referred to any suggestion of undue influence as “an outrage.”

“It’s just so unfair,” the mayor said. “No wonder sometimes it’s just so hard for everybody to keep working in this city and trying to do what’s right.”

Sure, it's unfair when people criticize the mayor for allowing this kind of fine-fixing to go on.

Except that's what he has done - both for restaurants and for tickets.

And it's unfair, too, that a restaurant can get a bad rating for a whole bunch of things that maybe they shouldn't get a bad rating for:

Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn agreed on Tuesday that the grading system provided diners with more access to information, but some restaurant owners argued that the grading system was far too blunt and was frequently based on relatively minor issues.

“It could be a cracked toilet cover; it could be a gap around a pipe,” said Peter Hansen, the director of operations at Benchmarc Restaurants, which owns several expensive dining establishments in the city.

“But,” Mr. Hansen added, “what your customer is thinking is: old tuna.”

Elizabeth Meltz, who oversees food safety at Mario Batali’s Italian restaurants, said that she supported a grading system and that it could improve public health.

But, echoing other restaurant workers, she said some city health inspectors seemed inconsistent in their standards, asking about certain elements of the kitchen on some visits and not on others. Sometimes, the inspectors appeared unfamiliar with complex dishes like terrine and kimchi, Ms. Meltz said, and on one occasion, she believed that an inspector was disrespectful to her because of her gender.

Nothing like getting a bad rating because the inspector isn't familiar with the dishes - or he had to sit on a cracked toilet seat.

It seems everybody in this city gets letter grades these days that have huge financial implications for them - except for Bloomberg, of course.

He is above letter grades.

And criticism.

And term limits.

NYPD Forces Grandmother Of Teen Murdered By Cops To Give Statement Against Her Will

OK, so the NYPD chases a kid with dope on him into his apartment and shoots and kills him as he's trying to flush the shit down the toilet.

The kid's grandmother and six year old brother are both home and witness the murder.

You would think Ray Kelly and the NYPD would apologize for this outrage and look to rectify it.

But you would be wrong.

Instead they took the grandmother into custody and held her for seven hours until she gave a forced statement about the incident:

After a police officer fatally shot an 18-year-old man in his Bronx apartment on Thursday, the man’s grandmother, a witness to the shooting, was taken into custody and held against her will for several hours, a friend of the family said on Saturday.

An officer confronted the man, Ramarley Graham, who was in the bathroom possibly trying to flush some marijuana down the toilet. A moment later, a shot rang out, killing the teenager.

While officers had trailed Mr. Graham to the apartment thinking he was armed, no gun was found, making the grandmother, Patricia Hartley, 58, a critical witness. The shooting is drawing the kind of close scrutiny reminiscent of the killing of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets in Queens in November 2006.

At this juncture little is known of precisely what Ms. Hartley saw and what of that she has told detectives.

But her treatment by the police in the hours after her grandson was killed could become a sticking point in an investigation that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said would be presented to a grand jury.

After Mr. Graham was killed, Ms. Hartley was taken to the 47th Precinct station house on Laconia Avenue and held for seven hours, according to Carlton Berkley, a friend of Ms. Hartley’s who said he had retired from the police force as a detective in the 30th Precinct in upper Manhattan. Mr. Berkley added that Ms. Hartley was forced to give a statement about what happened.

“She gave it against her will,” Mr. Berkley said. “She didn’t want to speak to the police.”

Mr. Berkley, speaking on Saturday outside the Graham family home on East 229th Street in Wakefield, said: “We’re going to fight that statement.”

This is just the latest outrage committed by Commissioner Ray Kelly and his NYPD goons, as the NY Times pointed out today:

Over the past year, two officers charged with raping a woman were fired after being acquitted of rape but found guilty of official misconduct. A broad ticket-fixing scandal flared in the Bronx; when the accused officers were arraigned, hundreds of officers massed in protest, some denouncing Mr. Kelly. Eight current and former officers were charged with smuggling illegal guns. Narcotics detectives were accused of planting drugs on innocent civilians. An inspector needlessly pepper-sprayed four Occupy Wall Street protesters, invoking memories of the scrutiny and mass arrests of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and giving the nascent movement its first real prime-time moment.

Civil rights advocates have assailed the department’s expanded stops of minorities on the streets. Several officers denigrated West Indians on Facebook. Muslims have denounced the monitoring of their lives, as Mr. Kelly has dispatched undercover officers and informants to find radicalized youth.

Let's not forget Kelly's voluntary appearance in a film that smears Muslims as terrorists, a film that was shown to cops as part of their training, and Kelly's bragging that he could shoot down a plane over New York City if he wanted to, he's just that powerful.

And let's also not forget that his son is currently under investigation for rape and the NYPD has been working overtime to discredit the alleged victim in the tabloids with anonymous quotes.

But this latest outrage, the murdered teen and the cops holding the grandmother until she gave the statement they wanted her to give, that goes beyond the pale.

It's time for this autocratic commissioner to go.

Frankly after the OWS crackdown, he belongs in jail sharing a cell with Bernie Kerik.

That won't happen, of course, which is a shame.

But even the cops who work for this creep want him gone.

The outrages are building, week after week.

It's time for Kelly to be gone.

Walcott, DOE Get NY Times To Shill For Them

This article in today's NY Times about the altercation NYC schools chancellor Dennis Walcott got into with two NYPD officers last week when a car he was riding in allegedly failed to use a turn signal is COMPLETELY from Walcott's side.

Clearly the Bloomberg administration must have been worried about the story that surfaced in yesterday's NY Post that had Walcott allegedly shouting "You have no right to stop us!" when the car he was riding in pulled was over by the officers.

Coupled with the NYPD ticket-fixing scandal, the Walcott: "You have no right to stop us!" story adds to a picture of a city where wheelers and dealers get off for infractions while you or I would be pulled into jail with a disorderly conduct arrest for similar behavior.

In addition, the story makes Walcott - who is trying to be the anti-Cathie Black as head of the NYCDOE - sound pretty much like Cathie Black.

Black - famed for mocking parents at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting and promoting birth control as a solution to school overcrowding - would also say something like "You have no right to stop me!" when pulled over by the cops.

After all, privilege has its perks.

The Bloomberg people know that and they are sensitive to the problems it causes.

That's why they got their side of the story out to the Times, saying Walcott was not "difficult" (as the Post article reported), Walcott never tried to pull rank and Walcott never tried to avoid a ticket.

Perhaps all of that is true.

But since it is NYCDOE Natalie Ravitz saying it, and not the two police officers who were there, we ought not to take ANY of this at face value.

Ravtiz lies for a living. That's her job. Whatever she says Walcott says happened in the incident is hearsay at best, jive at worst.

And since EVERYTHING in this article pertaining to the incident is from Walcott's side, I say EVERYTHING in the story is hearsay at best, jive at worst.

And given the track record of the Bloomberg administration in the last nine years, I would lean on the jive part.

Unfortunately, with the cops now being investigated by Internal Affairs and with the Bloomberg administration acting very aggressively to get out in front of this story, we may never get the truth of what happened that night.

You can be sure they will work extra hard to make sure the chancellor isn't tagged as a person of privilege who indignantly got into the faces of cops when they stopped him for failure to use a turn signal.

Especially when City Hall knows that if you or I acted the same way, we'd be spending the weekend in Rikers Island.

Walcott Pulls Strings To Avoid Ticket

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott got into a scuffle with the NYPD Thursday night when a car he was riding in was pulled over in Queens.

Walcott allegedly told the cops "You have no right to pull us over!" when the police stopped the car for what they say was a failure to use a turn signal.

Walcott identified himself as a former deputy mayor and current schools chancellor, asked for the badge numbers of the officers, then complained to NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly that the officers did not properly identify themselves.

The two police officers are now facing an Internal Affairs investigation for the incident.

For their part, officers say they did identify themselves when they pulled the car over and that Walcott was excessively difficult during the incident.

Couple of things here:

Heckuva way to start his schools stewardship as chancellor.

First he continues the PEP policies of shutting down schools, rubber stamping mayoral policies and NOT listening to students, parents, teachers or community members when they beg him to not close down their improving schools, then he gets stopped by the police for failure to use a turn signal, gets in the face of the cops, pulls rank to get out of a ticket and uses his power to retaliate against the cops who pulled him over.

But he says he's going to be a different kind of chancellor than Cathie Black - less about abusive power and privilege and more about responsiveness to the community.

Oh, please - this incident is emblematic of people in power in general ("You have no right to stop us!") and symbolic of the Bloomberg administration in particular.

Impunity for their behavior, a lack of civility when called on their shit and a vindictive need to retaliate against anybody who tries to hold them to the rules that the rest of us have to follow.

There needs to be an independent investigation of this incident - I do not trust Ray Kelly's Internal Affairs officers to fairly investigate an incident involving Mayor Bloomberg's high profile schools chancellor.

NYPD Ticket Fixing Scandal Grows

This looks more and more like it will turn into Bloomberg's Parking Violations Bureau scandal:

The growing NYPD ticket-fixing scandal is about to get worse.

Thirty cops were secretly recorded during the massive probe, and what was heard on thousands of hours of tape goes far beyond just making traffic violations disappear for family and friends. Sources tell me what's yet to come out is potentially criminal conduct:

• Several officers allegedly tried to deep-six domestic violence incidents involving off-duty cops before police headquarters found out.

• Others allegedly tried to quash drunk-driving incidents involving their brethren.

• And still others were allegedly overheard making arrangements for and paying prostitutes.

Evidence is being presented to a Bronx grand jury that's weighing criminal charges.

Two weeks ago, I disclosed that the NYPD has a list of at least 24 cops who cannot even think about retirement until the criminal cases are done and several hundred more officers, maybe as many as 500, who could face disciplinary action from the NYPD.

A source says they include officers in virtually every rank: a chief; one inspector; four deputy inspectors; four captains; 10 lieutenants; 25 detectives; 30 sergeants; and the rest are police officers, many of them union delegates.

...

As I reported last week, some cops are being probed for receiving money, free meals or booze for "favors." Others allegedly had renovations done to their homes or repairs made to their cars or choice seats at sporting events. An executive with the New York Yankees even got a speeding ticket fixed.

Investigators went to the locker of one police union delegate in Lower Manhattan. They recovered copies of 240 tickets covering all of 2010.

There are so many cases for the prosecutors to handle that they have set threshold levels regarding corruption and fixed tickets that will trigger possible criminal charges rather than disciplinary action by the NYPD.

"The number of arrests may be closer to 40 and the number of cases for the NYPD around 500," a source said.

Here is the borough breakdown of the numbers of cops touched by the probe are: 55 in Manhattan; 30 in queens; seven on Staten Island; 30 in Brooklyn; 380 in the Bronx.

Money, food, booze, or prostitutes in return for favors?

Domestic abuse and drunk driving cases quashed?

40-500 police involved?

Includes officers in every rank?

This is starting to sound like more than a ticket-fixing scandal for city luminaries (as has been asserted by the NYPD and the mayor.)

This is starting to sound like old-school police corruption, plain and simple.

And where oh where was the Mayor of Money with his vaunted accountability mechanisms and technology to root out this corruption?

Oh, right - he was on Bermuda.

As per the usual Bloombergian protocol, this will be somebody else's fault, he'll back Ray Kelly up to the max and blame the corruption on the union and low level cops who "betrayed" him.

But if this scandal is as wide as Murray Weiss in DNAinfo is saying it is, this is so much WIDER than anything involving the union - after all, inspectors, captains, lieutenants, and sergeants are involved too.

This corruption case ought to kick off a wider investigation of NYPD book-keeping itself.

There has already been some evidence that the vaunted NYPD crime fighting machine was cooking its books in some precincts in order to make the data-obsessed Bloomberg happy.

Just as test scores have to go up in schools or principals and assistant principals get fired, so crime stats must go down in police precincts all across the city or the brass are punished.

It stands to reason that if the 500 cops were getting away with fixing tickets and making domestic abuse and drunk driving cases go away in exchange for money, food, booze and hookers, there were also some cops who were making criminal cases COMPLETELY go away in order to cook the precinct books and make everybody in the brass and City Hall happy.

There needs to be an independent investigation into the NYPD books to see just how far down the rot goes into the system and how much the "data-driven" policies Bloomberg has promoted have played in it.

As a report from two academics found in August of last year:

Two academics at an FBI-sponsored conference Friday will accuse the NYPD of cooking the books to make the city appear safer.

The claims are contained in a survey of more than 309 police officers - most of whom have served as precinct commanders since the department started using the CompStat program in the mid-'90s.

More than half of the respondents admitted to fudging numbers, according to the study by John Eterno of Molloy College and Eli Silverman of John Jay College.

The pair of criminologists will also release recordings they obtained from several roll calls that they say capture supervisors telling officers not to take reports of robberies unless the victim is willing to go to the stationhouse.

The recordings also capture officers being told not to take reports if they think the district attorney will not prosecute.

"It's putting people in an unreasonable position," said Silverman, adding that there is growing pressure from top brass to keep the numbers down. "The public needs to understand that crime can fluctuate."

Silverman said the city needs to change how it views CompStat, a program that maps crime so that police can zero in on problem areas.

"It needs to be less number-driven," Silverman said. "You can't just measure [cities] by their crime rate."

The ticket-fixing scandal and the cooking the books scandal may or mey not be related, but as the ticket-fixing scandal grows, it is important that the cooking the books scandal get looked at too.

High Ranking City Officials Involved In NYPD Scandal

Is this NYPD ticket-fixing scandal Mayor Bloomberg's Parking Meter Bureau Waterloo?

It sounds like the NYPD ticket scandal, far from being a "union-issue," is reaching ever higher into the corridors of power -and maybe as far as City Hall:

NEW YORK -- Several high-ranking members of city government and a New York Yankees official are among those who had their traffic tickets fixed by police officers, a person familiar with a probe into the practice at the New York Police Department told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The person, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity, did not name the officials or say how many were involved. The person also confirmed an online news report that Yankees senior director of operations Douglas Behar had a traffic ticket fixed.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is the subject of a secret grand jury investigation. The Yankees didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The details shed light on the prevalence of the practice - undoing paperwork on traffic citations before they reach court as favors to officers' friends or relatives. The practice has been going on for years but came under fire recently after the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau stumbled across evidence of widespread fixing in Bronx precincts while investigating an officer suspected of wrongdoing in a drug case in 2009, law enforcement officials said. On a wiretap, authorities overheard talk of ticket fixing and decided to begin secretly recording other officers.

No criminal charges have been filed. But up to 40 officers are being eyed for possible official misconduct and criminal charges in the Bronx, and scores more could be disciplined administratively, law enforcement officials have said. The criminal cases could be brought as early as July, and the charges are expected to be misdemeanors, they said. Investigators also are probing whether any of the officers accepted money or gifts.

There are generally three ways the citations are fixed: They are voided by a ranking official, a copy is ripped up before it reaches court or the officer doesn't appear on the day of the summons.

...

A former commanding officer of the NYPD's movie and television unit in the 1990s, Milton Maldonado, said movie crews filming in the city would get dozens of summonses that would be taken to the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting to be voided.

"The movie industry understood that if anything happened during the time they were shooting, if they didn't show their permit or whatever and they were issued a summons, they'd flock to the mayor's office to get it fixed," said Maldonado, who retired in 1995.

Maldonado left years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg's tenure.

City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the practice existed.

The head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, has said the intensity and scope of an investigation that's relied heavily on wiretaps are overkill.

"I have been on the job for nearly three decades, and it was never deemed unusual to get calls from high-ranking department members when a summons was given to their family members," he said in a letter to members. "These phone calls were as much a part of the culture of the department as arresting criminals."

I am going to guess that the high ranking city officials and pols are current and former City Council members, and probably some members of the Bloomberg administration as well.

Any potential mayoral candidates on that list?

I would have to think that if de Blasio, Quinn, Liu, Weiner or any other potential 2013 mayoral candidate is tied to this scandal, that could be the end of their campaign.

But note too how the always free with words Bloomberg administration p.r. people refused to comment on whether the fixing of tickets for movie people continued under the Bloomberg administration.

Clearly the Bloomberg administration is up to their necks in this, which is why the Mayor of Money himself has taken pains to say that with the new electronic system in place for tickets, the ticket-fixing practice is effectively ended.

Ah, but how long has it been going on, who was involved in it and why didn't Bloomberg konw about it or do anything about it if he did know about it?