It occurs to me upon listening to the story of Adrian Schoolcraft that he is the exact type of man (or woman) whom I would want working as a police officer in my neighborhood. It is the duty of all officers of the law to protect and serve the ordinary citizens of their specified jurisdiction. Officer Schoolcraft did precisely that. In fact, not only did he serve his community, but he also risked his own reputation and his career in the ultimate Catch-22; by serving those within his precinct and protecting them from broader police negligence and abuse, he found himself suspended from the very job he was performing.
It's rather shocking, downright frightening, to hear the audio recordings presented by Officer Schoolcraft as they prove that justice for the citizens of Brooklyn's 81st Precinct was not being upheld by those with whom that very responsibility had been entrusted. The accounts of people being ticketed or arrested for open container violations when they were merely drinking from clearly-marked water or Gatorade bottles would sound entirely unreal and unbelievable if it weren't for the proof of corruption provided by Schoolcraft's secret tapes.
Some might argue that what he did was in and of itself a violation of the law and, thus, makes him just as much a part of the problem that he was attempting to fix. However, some quick internet research shows that what Schoolcraft did was not likely a violation of any privacy laws as the recordings he made of his superiors were principally of conversations to a group of other officers or in any other situation where the parties involved should not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
That having been said, I would hope that those who were reasonably well versed in this story felt that sometimes two wrongs can make a right. Perhaps it was wrong of Officer Schoolcraft to surreptitiously record the conversations that he did, but it was certainly more wrong for the commanders of the 81st Precinct to try to operate in the vile way in which they did. At the end of the day, Schoolcraft did the one thing he felt he had to do in order to try to restore honor and integrity to his precinct, not for himself, but for the citizens of Bed-Stuy's 81st.
It's certainly one thing for the commanders of the Precinct to order their subordinates to increase the number of citations and arrests they made in a given time period (though as made clear in the story it's illegal to punish officers for not meeting such arbitrary quotas), but when the threats of repercussions against officers not meeting their numbers for the month enter the equation there is a serious issue at hand.
Sadly, the unwarranted arrests of ordinary people weren't the only symptoms of a corrupt police department. I think the most chilling revelation of Officer Schoolcraft's recordings was that officers of the 81st were at times writing up criminals for lesser charges than they'd actually been arrested for and, most chillingly, sometimes outright ignoring criminal complaints in the name of making the Precinct look better. The story of a serial rapist being utterly ignored for the sake of saving face within the precinct is the most devastating piece of this borderline-macabre puzzle. To think that the citizens of Bed-Stuy's 81st had been living under the assumption that their police department was keeping them safe when, in reality, it had allowed a serial rapist to prowl the streets of Brooklyn is disgusting at best and horrifying at worst.
Officer Schoolcraft did the right thing. That's all there is to it. The fact that his superiors persecuted him only goes to show why he had to do what he did. Sure, he could have gone to the papers and told some intrepid reporter his story, but without the proof that his recordings provided, who's to say he'd have been believed? There's no reason to even doubt that had Schoolcraft gone to the media with the story and without his tapes that the precinct wouldn't have simply swept the whole thing under the rug and allowed the extreme corruption to continue unabated.
No. Schoolcraft did the only thing he could do despite the risks to his reputation and career and for that I think he should be commemorated.
We all have rights as Americans and what the command of the 81st effectively did had the consequence of restricting and/or outright violating those rights. It's not unreasonable for the everyday person to expect to be able to walk down the street peaceably and not be hassled by the police.
So, when you are in a position to expose the police for corruption, for arresting, ticketing, stopping and frisking people without probable cause, or for endangering an entire neighborhood by simply ignoring those crimes which would have reflected poorly upon the precinct, then I feel that you have a responsibility to do precisely that: Expose them.
No comments:
Post a Comment