Lawyers for whistleblower cop Adrian Schoolcraft today served Queens District Attorney Richard Brown with a subpoena demanding that he give a videotaped deposition and turn over all documents related to Brown's finding that there was no criminal conduct when Schoolcraft was forcibly removed from his home by police commanders in October, 2009, the Voice has learned.

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Chad Griffith

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown's announcement last week that neither the police nor Jamaica Hospital committed any crimes when NYPD Tapes whistleblower Adrian Schoolcraft was dragged from his apartment by police and involuntarily held in a psych ward raises a whole lot more questions than it answers.

Schoolcraft's father, Larry, and their lawyer blasted the announcement as "a violation of the public trust," and "deeply disappointing."

Schoolcraft, a police officer assigned to Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct, is known for secretly recording his colleagues over two years in an effort to build evidence of misconduct. (See the Voice's award-winning NYPD Tapes series.) On Oct. 31, 2009, a deputy chief and a dozen police forced him out of his apartment in handcuffs and put him in the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days--three weeks after he had made misconduct allegations against his bosses. In 2010, he filed a federal lawsuit alleging that police had retaliated against him for making those allegations.

While the NYPD painted Schoolcraft as a malcontent with psychological issues, and therefore, unreliable, an internal police investigation proved most of his claims. The NYPD buried that blockbuster report for more than 18 months. Its conclusions finally surfaced exclusively in the Voice.

Brown concludes in a terse one-page statement on his investigation, which he called "comprehensive": "After thoroughly reviewing all of the available evidence and considering all applicable provisions of law we have concluded that there is no credible evidence to support the filing of criminal charges in this matter."

In an interview with the Voice, Larry Schoolcraft, Adrian's father, said this: "Brown and his staff, Jack Ryan, Jim Liander, and Michelle Cort have done nothing more than take the public's money with one hand and betray the public trust with the other. Brown and his office have violated their oath to the citizens of Queens."

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In a surprising turn of events, a federal appeals court this week reinstated Police Officer Craig Matthews' free speech lawsuit over the police department's quota system that had been dismissed in district court.

Matthews, by the way, was one of the officers who fired the fatal shots in taking down a deranged man who had just murdered a co-worker near the Empire State Building in August.

The decision could pave the way for a series of challenges over quotas by other police officers. While the city has denied the existence of quotas--calling them "performance goals" or "activity"--a number of officers have stepped forward with evidence of their existence.

One of those--Adrian Schoolcraft--was the subject of the Voice's award-winning series "The NYPD Tapes." Schoolcraft recorded precinct bosses actually saying what number of arrests, stop and frisks, and summonses per month they expected, along with numerous examples of commanders haranguing patrol officers to write more tickets.

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On the eve of a big council hearing on a raft of bills aimed at reeling in the NYPD's stop and frisk campaign, an explosive audiotape comes out of two officers threatening to break the arm of an East Harlem teen merely for asking questions.

When the teen asks why they are threatening to arrest him after they very questionably stopped him, they say "for being a fucking mutt."

The recording was made in June, 2011 by Alvin, now 17, whose last name is being withheld by Ross Tuttle and Erin Schneider, the authors of an article about the incident which first appeared yesterday in the Nation magazine website.

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In a move that must have irritated Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the Bronx District Attorney has said it will no longer prosecute folks arrested for trespassing in public housing based on a stop and frisk unless arresting officers sit down and explain the details of the bust.

Jeanette Rucker, the prosecutor in charge of arraignments for Bronx DA Robert Johnson, said as much in a letter to the NYPD at the end of July. Rucker said she had been receiving repeated complaints for defense lawyers about innocent people being busted for trespassing. She looked into it further and found many were either tenants or invited guests. Kelly replied, saying Rucker was overstating the problem.

So, from now on, police can't just file paperwork for a trespassing arrest following a stop. They have to debrief prosecutors about it. That requirement will likely reduce the number of such trespassing arrests.

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City Councilman Peter Vallone offered an interesting claim in yesterday's tab. He said a stop-and-frisk bill being considered by the council could cost the city $1 billion a year. We think he might be overstating things.

Vallone, the chair of the council's public safety committee, did not offer any basis for this estimate, according to the article in the New York Post. But he claimed the bill will make it easier for New Yorkers to sue over stop and frisk will "bankrupt the city."

"This is the most dangerous and irresponsible bill ever to be considered by the city council," he told the Post.

The comment was immediately assaulted by Joo-Hyun Kang, a spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform. Kang said stop and frisk is already costing the city millions a year, and said the legislation will "help protect New Yorkers from abusive policing and the city from paying out millions of dollars a year due to discriminatory and unlawful policing."

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Accounts of police downgrading crime reports surfaced again on Sunday in a New York Times article, which compared descriptions of crimes in police reports versus the charges eventually brought by prosecutors.

The article's author Joseph Goldstein examined more than 100 police reports, and found a number of instances where after police charged misdemeanors, prosecutors upgraded them to felonies.

Police manipulation of the crime statistics has been a significant issue over the past three years, after Police Officer Adrian Schoolcraft and several other officers went public with examples of downgrading by commanders under pressure to report ever lower crime numbers.

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Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has issued a new "command level instructor's guide" to performing stop and frisks, in his latest move to blunt criticism of the strategy.

The news here is that this new training has been given to police officers in every command, rather than only academy cadets, as it was in the past, according to police sources. There is also supplementary training on stop and frisk for police at Rodman's Neck, the NYPD's shooting range, the sources say.

"In every street encounter, it is imperative that uniformed members of the service respect the Constitutional rights of the public," according to a copy of the guide obtained by the Voice. Police "must ensure their contact with the subject is not based on personal prejudice or bias, such as the subject's race or hair length."

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Lawyers for the National Press Photographers Association have asked the NYPD's top spokesman to return $18,000 worth of cameras and press credentials seized from a New York Times freelance photographer who was body slammed by police in the Bronx on Saturday night and arrested under spurious charges.

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Responding to a recent Voice article on violence in the jails, the city Correction Department had claimed that they had done away with "the program," in which correction officers on their own condoned or encouraged gang-affiliated inmates to beat up inmates to keep order. In 2008, 17-year-old Christopher Robinson was murdered in the Robert N. Davoren Center or RNDC as a result of "the program."

Now, comes a new allegation that "the program" continued to exist at least though the end of last year, despite those claims. In a lawsuit filed today, former RNDC inmate Dwaine Taylor charges he suffered two vicious "program" beatings in May and November, 2011--three years after Robinson's death.

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