The judge in the stop-and-frisk trial Friday offered an interesting explanation of her view on the case, and a key element of the city's defense. It came at a point where in questioning a plaintiff's expert, a city lawyer was trying to make the point that the tactic is an effective crime strategy.

Judge Shira Scheindlin blocked the line of questioning, saying her role is not to weight the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk, but whether the tactic as used by the NYPD is constitutional. "Whether this is good or bad is of no interest," she said from the bench. "What I mean by that is there are effective police tactics that might be good for reducing crime but that are unconstitutional. The Court's interest is only with the constitution, not with the effectiveness."

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At times combative, the former commander of Brooklyn's 81st Precinct testified yesterday in the stop-and-frisk class-action lawsuit that he never approved of quotas, even when confronted with recordings of him and his supervisors ordering officers to make certain numbers.

Deputy Inspector Steven Mauriello testified after a second batch of the recordings, made by Officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2008 and 2009, were played in court. The recordings were the basis for the Village Voice's 2010 "The NYPD Tapes" series.

Questioned by Jonathan Moore, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York, Mauriello, cutting a fine line, insisted he never ordered cops to hit a specific number, but there are what he called "productivity standards" and officers could be disciplined for failing to meet them. At other times, he insisted there was no punishment for failure to make the "goals." "There are no quotas," he said, adding, "We want activity. So it's not about numbers. It's about the officer working. If there is a crime happening, I expect him to make an arrest."

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State Sen. Eric Adams, a retired NYPD captain, testified yesterday that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told him that he ordered his commanders to "target young black and Hispanic men to instill fear in them that any time they leave their homes they could be targeted by police."

Adams, often a critic of NYPD policies over the past decade, was testifying in the stop-and-frisk class action trial in federal court in Manhattan. The case is titled Floyd v. City of New York.

Adams claims that Kelly made the statement during a July, 2010 meeting with politicos. Adams testified that he was "shocked" by the remark, and told Kelly that was illegal and not what stop-and-frisk was supposed to be."

"How else are we going to get rid of guns?" Kelly replied, according to Adams.

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When then-NYPD Capt. Michael Marino arrived as a commander in the tough section of Brooklyn known as East New York, he was appalled at what the 400 officers in the command considered to be work.

"They were doing five [summonses] a month, which was just not enough to address the problem," he testified, about the onset of his tenure in the 75th Precinct back in 2002. "It was almost malfeasance. ... The level of activity they were performing was so low that it was a detriment to the community, in one of the most crime-ridden precincts in the city."

Now a deputy chief, one of the top-ranking commanders in the department, Marino testified Friday in the landmark legal challenge to the city's stop-and-frisk campaign. An interesting character in the NYPD landscape, the Flatbush native rose from street cop to the second-in-command in Brooklyn North via a bullish persona, a matching physique, and a devotion to the tenets of the NYPD's numbers-driven CompStat strategy.

He is also the man who ordered police to forcibly commit Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft to a psych ward back in October 2009, three weeks after Schoolcraft reported misconduct in Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct to police investigators.

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Police Officer Pedro Serrano recorded his commanding officer in a Bronx precinct just last month bringing a racial component into his orders to perform more stop and frisks, according to testimony and audio played in day four of the landmark challenge to one of the NYPD's signature strategies.

Meanwhile, recordings made by a second police officer, Adrian Schoolcraft, in the 81st Precinct in Bed-Stuy and first obtained by the Village Voice echoed inside the courtroom three years after they were made.

The remarkable exchange captured in February, 2013 by Serrano goes to the heart of plaintiff's contention in Floyd v. City of New York that the vast rise in stop and frisks were racially biased. The city has countered that the number of stops correspond to crime trends.

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A second police officer took the witness stand today to testify that illegal quotas for arrests, summons and stop and frisks drove his precinct's crime strategy.

Pedro Serrano worked in the same Bronx precinct as Officer Adhyl Polanco, who testified on Tuesday in the class action lawsuit challenging the city's stop and frisk campaign. The plaintiffs allege the campaign violated the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. The city counters that stop follow crime trends.

Serrano spoke about his fear that the NYPD will retaliate against him for stepping forward and saying under oath what he has said in the precinct: that he rebelled against the quota policy for six years. He said stickers of rats have been placed on his locker.

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In the second day of the historic stop and frisk trial in federal court in Manhattan yesterday, there was the start of testimony from Adyhl Polanco, an eight-year veteran of the NYPD who has made the highly unusual and courageous choice to testify against the city's campaign. Meanwhile, as you can read further down, the city's strategy is emerging with great and disturbing clarity.

Polanco, who first told his story to the Voice back in 2010 for our "NYPD Tapes" series, talked about his period in the 41st Precinct in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, and how his views of policing evolved away from the constant quota pressure.

Polanco talked movingly about how a police officer's job ranges way beyond just making arrests, doing stop and frisks and writing summonses in service of quotas. "Every radio call brings something different," he said. "Our job is to help the needs of the community. We are referees. We are in between moms fighting for their daughters."

As for police policy, he says, "What's on paper, the written policies, is way different from what actually goes on out there. It was all about 'productivity,' it had nothing to do with what we do every day."

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In the overflow room set up for the much anticipated trial over the city's stop and frisk campaign, we came across two unexpected courtroom observers: a mom from Harlem and her 14-year-old son.

Iusaset Bakr tells the Voice that she took her Jaihdow Kwantu out of school for the day and brought him to the opening of the trial in Floyd v. City of New York to educate him about police tactics in minority neighborhoods.

Read More: Bloomberg's Sneaky Fix For All Those Stop-and-Frisk Lawsuits

"I made a decision so that he could be equipped with the information," she says. "I wanted him to witness it for himself because he needs to be aware of what's happening and of what his rights are. This is happening so much that the children seem to think it's okay, when it's not okay."

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In on our article this week on the five-year surge in civil rights lawsuits, we pointed out that the city does little to analyze the causes of those claims in an effort to identify problem officers or troubling trends that can be corrected.

City Comptroller John Liu also knows there's a problem, according to his claims report which was released in late December. "The City must carefully examine the trend of more claims filed against the NYPD," he writes. "Although there are no easy ways to reverse the trend, clearly more must be done."

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Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has served the city for 11 years. Mayor Bloomberg is in the final year of his third term. Next week, the legacies of both men will be tested in a major trial starting Monday over the city's stop and frisk campaign.

The case is a class action lawsuit filed in 2008 called Floyd vs. the City of New York, which alleges that the NYPD's stop and frisk campaign violated the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

Central to the plaintiff's case will be digital recordings made by Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft in Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct on 2008 and 2009, and first revealed in the Voice's award-winning 2010 series "The NYPD Tapes." And two surprise witnesses from the Schoolcraft saga are expected to testify as hostile witnesses.

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