Reply All - #128 The Crime Machine, Part II

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

New York City cops are in a fight against their own police department. They say it’s under the control of a broken computer system that punishes cops who refuse to engage in racist, corrupt policing. The story of their fight, and the story of the grouchy idealist who originally built the machine they’re fighting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, before you start this episode, first of all, this is part two of a two-part story, so make sure you've listened to part one. Also, as you said at the top of the last episode, there's a couple of vivid descriptions of sexual violence in this. If you don't want to hear that, you should just skip this one. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, and PJ Vote. I should probably sit next to you just for my goodness. Last March, I drove out to Malloy College on Long Island to meet with this guy named John Oterno. Oh, that's for my master. I'm a little busy this time of year.

You should see our office. This is not a mess. Okay. John was a cop back in the Jack Maple Comstead era, and he remembers being really excited about Comstead. It was like, for the first time, new ideas were actually circulating in the police department. He remembers this one meeting where somebody came in,

and they were like, guys, we found this new way to identify robbery suspects. We used a yearbook. And they found the guy showing the yearbooks to the person who was robbed. And they go, oh, yeah, that's him right there. And they ended up arresting him, and then the whole department started using yearbooks.

You know, they said, hey, you know what? That's a great idea. Let's go get the yearbooks. So these new things went through the department like wildfire. John is a crime nerd. He was a crime nerd when he joined the police department in 1983. He was a crime nerd when he retired in 2004. He was a crime nerd when he immediately jumped into an academic career in criminology. And as a crime nerd, the thing that was amazing to him about Comstat was how year after year he just watched the crime rate.

Watch as it just went down and down and down. He started to notice it always went down. We've seen it go down for 25 years without even a blip. You've got to look at that and say, well, wait a minute. You know, there isn't one year where crime just bumps up a little bit. That in and of itself gets you to think, well, wait a minute, is there something going on here? There was. It turned out the pressure to keep the crime going down and down and down.

It started to have some severe unintended consequences. this. So, so I guess like just, first thing, can you just say your name? Like, just introduce yourself. My name is Richie Baez. I'm a 14-year veteran of the New York Police Department. Richie was working during that era that John was puzzling over. The era where the crime rate just kept going down and down and down. And he told me a story about what that was like. This story about a thing that happened one night when he was working late in the Bronx. Uh, let me see, it was in the fall, I think 2011 or 2012. I'm in this fixed post. I mean, partner, one four nine and third. Richie and his partner have been told to just stand on this one street

corner all night. It's this intersection in a commercial part of town. So it's all these retail stores, but it's midnight. So all the stores are closed. It's the kind of assignment where most nights you just stand there and nothing happens until the sun comes up. But that night, this guy runs up to them and says, hey, something really bad is going on. You got to help. She says, listen, I see a guy dragging the lady into a vacant lot. I think it's going to rape her. So we got in the car. We drive, and I hear a lady screaming. Help, help, help. So I see him on top of her.

He's punching her, and he's raping her. So I flashed my light. I told him, stop. He stopped. And that tone, both of them come towards me. They both starts walking. So she has a black guy, both have their pants down. The victim starts to tell Ritchie what happened.

And he says, thinking back now, the thing that still stands out to him is just how precise she was in the way she described it. She says, he raped me. I know I'm a prostitute, but no money was exchanged. He assaulted me, and he inserted his penis inside my vagina while my consent while he was assaulted me. So she basically broke down definition of rape textbook. So Richie calls the crime in over the radio, and his boss shows up at the scene.

And basically, he tried to question her. The way he was questioning her, the question the victim several times, and try to see if you changed his story slightly. Richie knew exactly what his boss was up to. His boss did not want to enter this victim's crime into Comstat. And so what he was doing was he was questioning her over and over again, trying to find some hole in her story that would give him an excuse to treat the crime as something less than rape. He was trying to downgrade her crime. What's the kind of change that would allow a downgrade?

Well, they always try to make it as a death of service. Death of service. Yeah. Prostitution is not legal in the state of New York. It's also just somebody. calling somebody who's a rape victim, saying it's left of service because their prostitute just feels?

Is dehumanizing, is degrading, is making that person feel less than zero. So that same sergeant, after he questioned her several times, and she didn't change. So she was standing her ground? She was standing her ground. Did you get the sense that she knew

why he was asking the questions he was asking? Yes, she said that previously, it happened to her and they shaked it. So she said that detective that was there said next time this happens to you have to say it this way.

The detective had told her here's what you have to say so that your crime counts. Yes. So eventually Richie's boss actually gave up. He was like, wow. So the sergeant

and he was like Richie, use type up the report. Rape. If they say anything, tell them, I told you. I said, okay. So Richie went back to station and he did it. He put the crime into the system. It would count. And he said as soon as he put

that report into the system, somebody must have gotten a notification. Five minutes after I finished writing it up, they came to the room while I was that. Who told you to do that? Who's they? Who came in? You had the commanding officer and his two lieutenants. He was like, who told you to do that? You know, I said the sergeant told me. So they left them alone because now it's in the system. There's no way they can explain their way. Richie's bosses had been so afraid to add a dot to their crime map that they were willing to let a rapist go. But because Richie got his way,

the guy would be charged with the actual crime that he committed. Not only that, they took a DNA sample from the rapist and it linked to two other rape victims in Manhattan. If it had been written as theft of services, would they have done the DNA test? No. Because it's not DNA qualifying crime. Ritchie said crime downgrading happened all the time

because of Comstead. What Comstad did is basically turning NYPD from not being expert in finding crime, but being expert on how to downgrade crimes in order for commanding officers to go to the next level. When Jack had designed Comstatt, he'd overrelipped something very important. So he'd set up these terrifying Comstet meetings and he told people, you are responsible for the crime in your neighborhood. If your crime numbers are going in the wrong direction, you are going to be in trouble. But some of these chiefs started to figure out, wait a minute, the person who's in charge of actually keeping track of the crime in my neighborhood is me.

And so if they couldn't make crime go down, they just would stop reporting crime. And they found all these different ways to do it. You could refuse to take crime reports from victims. You could write down different things than what had actually happened. You could literally just throw paperwork away. And so that guy would survive that ComST meeting. He'd get his promotion. And then when the next guy showed up, the number that he had to beat was the number that he had to beat was the,

the number that a cheater had set. And so he had to cheat a little bit more. The way John Turner described it, it was like pretty soon nobody had a choice anymore. The chiefs felt like they were keeping the crime rate down for the commissioner. The commissioner felt like he was keeping the crime right down for the mayor. And the mayor, the mayor had to keep the crime right down because otherwise real estate prices would crash, Taurus would go away. It was like the crime rate itself became the boss. I think it's a political imperative at this time. We've seen crime go down for 25 years. When you see crime go down for 25 years, it's difficult. called to be the mayor or anyone where crime starts going up.

How does it shape enforcement when, if the whole idea of cops that is that it's helping prioritize, like, where to put cops and what to tell them to look for, what happens in this version where the numbers have been kind of hoodwinked? You're basically just fighting numbers. You're not fighting real crime, and that's what's going on. the the real crime that's occurring unfortunately I do think it's down don't misunderstand me but a lot of these things are slipping through the cracks where officers and detectives could be developing patterns and other types of things to make sure that these rapes aren't occurring

these types of things are not happening now because the reports are not being properly kept. So you're basically fighting a battle without the intelligence that you need. So the final effect of all this pressure was that the very crimes Jack cared the most about. Those were the ones that were actually being hidden because of ComStat. John surveyed a bunch of retired cops, and he saw how this pressure had built over time. He said crime report manipulation had skyrocketed in 1995 towards the end of Jack's time in the NYPD. In 2008, he found that 75% of the NYPD officers he surveyed ranked captain in a were aware of downgrading.

There was so much fraud that it finally occurred to John to just ask the police officers. At this point, do you even believe in the crime rate? Do you believe that crime is down 80%? Because that's what the claim is by the New York City Police Department. The crime is down 80%. Their own officers, on average, suggested that crime is only down 40% in the city. So two decades later, what Comsa had done is it had taken the most basic measurement for whether the city was safe or not and made it unreliable.

The crime rate itself was a lie. But the pressure took this other damaging direction, this sort of opposite contradictory direction at the same time. So the same cops who were being told, the crime rate has to go down, the crime has to go down, there has to be less crime in your neighborhood. This thing started to happen where they were being told, your activity needs to go up.

We want to see that you are doing something. And so year after year, these chiefs were going to Comstat, and they had to prove that their cops were arresting more people, We're summonsing more people, we're doing more stop and frisks than the people in the neighborhood the year before. So remember Pedro Serrano, the guy from the first episode, the cop who was being put in a van and told a driver in the neighborhood writing summonses. You know, we were just shaking our heads. Like, what did you give them blocking possession traffic?

And they'd start laughing. I'm like, oh, wow. The reason this was happening was because of that pressure for activity. And over the years, that pressure just got higher and higher. Pedro said it had gone from what felt like a sort of soft unofficial quota to like a hard quota, like a number that he was given every month or even at the beginning of every shift for the amount of summonses and arrests he had to come back with. Officially, the New York City Police Department says they do not have a quota system.

They say they do have performance goals. Also, they did not return requests for comment for this story. Anyway, in 2009, Pager made a decision. He was going to start bringing a tape recorder to work and recording some of the things his bosses were telling him. And at this one roll call, he turns it on. That last night today, they had really good turnout. They had no problem getting summons. It's probably the same thing tonight.

I'm looking for five. Pager's boss is giving them their quota for the night. They have to go out and get five summons. I don't think it's going to be a problem. If there's a problem, switch it up. You can go into any of the zones. Just make sure you're in the zone. Don't write activity outside the zone.

Somebody asks, can we hit the park at least? St. Mary's Park. Go crazy in there. Go crazy. I don't care. If we get every single summons in sick marriage, I don't know. It's in his own. All right.

So what Pedro is hearing his boss say is you can get every summons you need in the park. That's fine. But he knows the other thing that she's not explicitly saying, which is that for those summonses to count, they'll have to be of young black men. And the reason for that is also directly coming from Comstat. The reason this roll call was happening was because there had been a crime pattern in the neighborhood. At a nearby intersection, there had been a string of robberies,

and witnesses had identified the suspects as black men between the ages of 14 and 21. So his boss wanted to be safe at ComSat. Wanted to be able to say, our cops are being very active. And so she was telling them, you don't even have to go to the intersection. Go to the nearby park, write a bunch of summonses. As long as they're for young black men, it's fine. And they start targeting.

They called it the impact zones. And they would flood that area. And everyone in the impact zone, whether you were just a regular guy or a criminal would get hit. Because you got so many police officers, they all need activity. Well, and so this is one of the things that I'm really confused by. Does the activity, the things that summons are being written for, does it need to be related to the crime that's being committed? No. What's happening is, in theory, it's supposed to be.

But they just care about the number. They go to Comstead and say, hey, I made 20 arrests. They were black and Hispanic. Made 20 arrests. This is what we're doing to stop crime in that neighborhood. We're doing something about crime. They are not. It was this intensely broken version of the kind of policing that Jack had pushed for.

You weren't actually targeting the people committing crimes. You were just targeting people who were the same race and age as them. And Pedro said even if you happened to get the right people in one of these sweeps, you're going to catch tons of other innocent people along with them. And that's what was happening. Across the neighborhood, young black and Latino men were constantly being swept up, stopped for anything and everything, and ticketed for stuff that had nothing to do with the crime patterns

that the cops were supposed to be addressing. There's only put a set a number of people in that community. So after you exhausted all the bad guys, you have to hit the next level, which is the average guy. So now it starts to leak into another part of the community, the older generation, even the younger generation, and you start hitting them. Then after that, when you exhausted everyone,

You just have to do everybody. And the thing that really made Pedro angry is that sometimes he would get a weekend assignment to a different neighborhood. Like a neighborhood that was rich and white, and he would see that this whole kind of policing, it didn't happen there at all. I remember in the 5-0 precinct,

there's certain summonses that you can't write in a certain area. People in the cops tell me that, oh, I can't go to Riverdale and write summonses because of the type of people that live there. Like, okay. And what if somebody, like, what if somebody kind of didn't get the memo first day of work, they see somebody, they see like a 35-year-old white architect on a bicycle on a sidewalk in Central Park, and they write a summons.

Well, that architect might have a lawyer. He might have friends. A simple phone call, another phone call. It reaches the commanding officer. He tells the lieutenant, the sergeant, the sergeant comes up to you, don't do it or else. That quick. Within a day, where is the summons? I submitted it. No problem. That summons gone. Gone. So what happened? Like, how did the machine Jack Maple built turn into this? A lot of people trace it to this one fight between Jack and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. And the whole fight starts with a newspaper article. So Mayor Giuliani reads this article in the paper about how some other city, not New York, had been making a lot of gun arrests.

And he's mad. And so he calls Jack into his office furious. He's like, why are the cops over there arresting more people for guns than the cops here? And Jack tells him, oh, actually this is good news. Like, the reason we're making fewer gun arrests is because we've actually reduced gun crime. Like, there's fewer people for us to get. And Giuliani tells him, no, crime goes down, arrests go up. Jack said, no.

What, you crazy? Crime goes down, arrests go down. And they went back and forth, back and forth. And Jack said, that's what happened. Again, Jack's friend Mike Daley. The problem, what happened to this city is that, the people who started running Comstead didn't understand the inspiring principle. So what did they say?

They started using it as a management tool. And what was it supposed to be? It was supposed to be treat every crime seriously. It was supposed to be, if that was your mother, what would you do to get the guy that did that to her? It's not supposed to be, you know, summonses, activity, numbers. And in the years after Jack had left the police department, when people would ask Giuliani, why are you having the police just aggressively arrest people for little things when the city's gotten so much safer? He had an answer.

The answer that dominated every discussion we ever got to have about policing for the next two decades. Broken Windows policing. So according to Rudolph Giuliani, Broken Windows was a theory that meant that all you had to do was aggressively police low-level crime. Like misdemeanors and summons stuff, stuff like people drinking on the street. and if you did that, there would just be this general sense of order that meant that the violent crime never happened. And because he believed in this, he could keep pushing people harder and harder, even as the city got safer. Jack did not believe in the idea of broken windows policing. He did do a lot of quality of life enforcement, but the way he explained it, it was a tool you could use in a really specific way.

Like, if you knew that somebody was a drug dealer and you didn't have another way to stop them, you could use the fact that they were also drinking a beer on the street as a pretext. He said it was like catching crooks when they were off. duty. But he also said that if all you did was quality of life enforcement, you'd end up with a net that caught dolphins instead of sharks. And that wasn't the point. Just quality of life, without the warrants, without the debris, just the straight quality of life stuff, that is like giving a facelift to a cancer patient. All right? If you only have quality of life enforcement, right, you will be living in a full paradise. And that was a situation Pedro found himself in two decades later, in a neighborhood where there was plenty of serious crime

that he felt like he should be pursuing, but where he's being told instead to just go after people for the little things. And by 2012, he had really just had enough. He started to push back. He would fight with his bosses, he would refuse to meet the quota, and they started punishing him. He gets sent to punishment posts in far away, desolate places, or be put on forced overtime. When he wanted to see his kids, instead he'd be out there being told you have to make a quota before you can come home. His relationship with his wife started to fall apart. When you're working all the time, when you're forced overtime and you don't get to spend time

with them and you're stressed out and you bring that stress home and it's hard to get rid of it, the person you're not the same person, you're going to get back. One day when he's out on patrol, Pedro runs into a commanding officer and he gets this firsthand demonstration of how his boss has actually think he should be doing his job. The thing Pedro sees is horrifying. There's a guy standing on the corner and the commanding officer stops him and proceeds to do a search of this guy that is completely illegal. Right there, out on the street, he pulls the man's pants down, he pulls his underwear down, and then grabs his genitals with his hands looking for drugs. Pedro's looking at the guy who was completely terrified.

How was he reacting? It was cold. The guy was shaking. The commanding officer went into his genitalia and asked him, why are you shaking? and he says, your hands are on my balls. Now, my partner, I are shocked. First time we saw this with this person, he went in there and you can see the guy physically shaken.

And I'm like, man, what's going to happen? Is he going to give me this arrest? And if he gives me this arrest, he's going to want me to reword things. Because if I put it the way I saw it, he might go to jail. Someone's going to go to jail. And if someone goes to jail, I'm a rat. If I'm a rat, I'm a target.

So I fear for my life by telling someone what I saw. And at the same time, you know, I'm supposed to report it. Pedro decides to report the guy to internal affairs. He submits the report, and nothing happens. So then Pedro decides to do something much riskier. He hears about this lawsuit. A bunch of New Yorkers are suing the city over Stop and Frisk, saying it's being applied in a racist unfair way.

and Pedro decides he is going to testify against the police department. When it gets out that Pedro is doing this, his boss suddenly tells him, hey, you know that meeting we were supposed to have where we discussed your low performance scores? Let's have it right now. And so Pedro walks in with his tape recorder, hoping to get evidence of this system that he's been fighting the whole time. This is very important to understand. Okay. Because it's the right people, the right time.

I'm not going to do that. This is about stopping the right people, the right place, the right location. Okay. Again, taking mind here when we had the most problems. The problem was, what, male blacks, and I told me the road code, and I had no problem telling you this. Male blacks 14 to 20, 21, and I said this at roll call. So what am I supposed to do? Male black 14 or 20 wearing dark clothing.

What do you want me to do? This is a lot. Hold on, hold on. You should be fair, if this is becoming insubordinated. Look, I have been... You're very commotion. All right. All right.

It's fight of flight at this point. I'm being attacked by this man. He's trying to push me against a wall, mentally and emotionally trying to push me against that wall. I'm not backing down. I don't care about his rank. I don't care about who he is. To me, he's a punk. He's a bully, and I'm not going to let you bully me.

After the break, Pedro fights back. Welcome back to the show. So Pedro takes the recording of the conversation he had with his boss, and he gives it to the lawyers who are fighting the city. And as soon as people find out about that, it's not just his boss who's coming after him anymore. It's other cops. Because in the eyes of a lot of other police officers, Pedro's now a rat. When he gets to work, his locker's covered in rat stickers.

There's a rat trap on the lock. And when he opens his locker, he realizes the contents have been vandalized. I had weird people following me. I had to stop and get out my car. What is your problem? And the guy drives away. Did you recognize the guy?

No. There are believers within the police department that believe that this is the right way to go. We have to attack black people, and if you're defending them, you're against us. Over and over, Pedro keeps picturing these scenes in his head. He thinks about Frank Serpico, a whistleblower from the 70s who got shot in the face on a drug raid. Serpico always believed that the cops he was with left him to die.

He thinks about Adrian Schoolcraft, this whistleblower from just a few years ago, who recorded a bunch of roll calls. Cops dragged him out of his house and forced him into a psych ward for six days. Pedro starts to notice how when he calls for backup, fewer people show up. Now, if they set you up for death, whoever's around you could die. If they follow you home, if they know what you live and they throw gasoline bottles through your window just to hurt you, my kid sleeps the next room. If they do drive-bys and blame it on somebody else, my kid is a target because they're next to me. Pedro says the more he feels like he's in danger, the more he just cocoons himself.

So I have to basically to keep my mind sane, I had to be by myself because everyone was a target. they could basically hurt my kid, so I had to push my kid away from me because I can't really talk about my kid. But anyway, when it comes to that, I had to just be by myself so that I would only be a target. In 2013, Pedro Ced actually won the stop-in-first trial.

A federal judge told the city, you can't use stop-in-first the way you're using it. And the stops went way, way, way down. But for Pedro, like nothing really changed because the machine itself was still there. No more stopping frisk? Okay. That pressure just moved over and now what it wanted was just more criminal summonses. The same people were being harassed just with a slightly different justification. Every time I read a story about police in America now, I look for the machine and more times

than not I see it. In Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot by police, the city has issued three warrants for every household. We are non-civilian. You need to get out of the street. Nearly 25,000 warrants in a city of 21,000 people. Ferguson's second highest source of revenue in 2013 was just municipal court fees and fines, the money you make from summonses and arrests. Or I see it in Chicago, where in 2014, there was a homicide downgrading scandal.

Murders were being disappeared, hidden, filed as non-criminal death investigations. When I see stories about cities where police brutality is high, or where violent crimes don't actually get solved, I know that some of that is the pressure from these two numbers, the need to always have a low crime rate and high police activity. And those numbers don't measure the kind of policing that Pedro values. They don't measure all the times the situation gets de-escalated without anyone being arrested.

They don't measure whether a white teenager and a black teenager are equally likely to get thrown up against a wall by a cop. They don't even measure how safe the people in a community feel. So how do you redirect the pressure? How do you create a machine that cares about more than just those two numbers? Pedro doesn't know. A lot of times figuring out how that would work feels impossible. But after the stop and first trial, one thing did change,

which is that it turned out the same attention that got Pedro in so much trouble. It was also like a bat signal to all these different cops in New York City who had the exact same problems with the machine that he did. And in the aftermath, a bunch of them started to come forward. There was a bunch of us that thought the same way. That's how we basically met over time. We started to meet after the day was over and meet at a local McDonald's or a diner or whatever,

and just talk about the day and how can we fix it. And then the meetings got bigger and bigger. We all came together from different boroughs, from housing, from transit, patrol, and we all say the same thing. And a lot of these cops had their own recordings from all over the city. The quota, the thing the police department said didn't exist, you could hear their bosses pushing them to make it in tape after tape after tape.

I want a ghost town. I want to be able to echo from one end of the street to the other. You understand? That's what I want in the perfect world. So that's your mission. Guys need cows, need activity. There you go. You got to give you move.

You realize you have the worst activity in the control. You need to catch up with everybody. I don't. You can continue to fight them, which I don't. to go with it. It's a field. If we do that, everyone chips in. It's fine. It's really non-negotiable business. If you don't do it now, then I have you work with a force to make sure it happen. So you only saw two male blacks in the person? If you're saying that's what's in front of you, then yes, that's all I saw.

There's two male blacks for the whole year jumping in terms of. That's what you're saying is in front of you. When it comes to numbers, I'm not the lowest. Even though we're not supposed to care about numbers, I'm still not the lowest. So why all this extra effort with me? You really want me to tell you what I think it is? You really want me to say nothing with this? Because I need to understand this. You're a young black man, we're dreads.

Very smart. I have a, I would call a loud say, meaning their words is loud. Okay. You understand what I'm saying by that? Yeah. That last recording is of Edwin Raymond. He's the other guy from the beginning of the story.

The one who couldn't understand why a 16-year-old girl was in jail for jumping in turn style. Edwin said that watching the stop-in-first trial, he noticed this thing that gave him an idea for how to fight. the whole system. He said watching that trial, he realized because so many of the stops the police department was making were not constitutional, they didn't really have a way to defend themselves in court. They couldn't justify it. He said there was one specific moment where this became crystal clear to him. Some of the most active cops, the guys who had written the most stop and frisk,

were put on the stand, and they were asked a really simple question. The number one justification that police officers gave in the 600,000 stop and frist they did in 2011 was that the person they stopped had displayed furtive movements. And the lawyers just asked these cops, what's furtive mean? I think it was 19 cops. All 19 of them, one by one, had to give the definition of vertive. Not one of them could define the word. What did they say?

They didn't know what to say. They could not, and furtive is, it just means secret. But then how do you, what is a secret movement? What is this? That is so ambiguous. A secret movement. You know, so then the question was, how could this be the number one reason that New Yorkers were stopping for us? And the cops that wrote the most can't even give the definition.

How can you say this is constitutional? What is the department going to say to that? It was embarrassing. And that's when it hit me like, huh, all we got to do is get the trial. All we got to do is get the trial. Truly explosive allegations in an I-Team exclusive interview. They're coming from police officers who are part of what's being called the NYPD 12. 12 cops who filed a class action lawsuit in federal court.

They claim the NYPD is breaking the law by pressuring officers to meet quotas for arrests and summonses and punishing those who don't do it. On August 31st, 2015, Edwin files his class action lawsuit, Raymond versus the city of New York. It's him, Pedro, Richie, and nine other cops. I've been a cop for eight years, and in the last eight years, I've unfortunately witnessed this quota destroy lives. Edwin wants federal oversight over the New York City Police Department. He doesn't want to get rid of ComSet, but he wants the government to come in and essentially fix it. Stop the quota system, stop the arbitrary pressure for stops and summonses. 25 years ago, Jack Maple, did something impossible.

He forced the NYPD, this completely immovable, monolithic institution, to change. He bent it in the direction that he thought was fair. See, the great thing about being a cop is When you're right and what you do No one can tell you not to do it When you're a stock boy Right And they say don't put the stock the shelves like that

Do it like this Even though it's screwed up you got to do it But when you're a policeman And they're telling you to do something that is not morally right to do, you can say no, I'm not doing it. Because this is the right thing. And I don't care who you call in to make me do it, right? They're all afraid of the press.

They're afraid that if you're that strong and you're saying, no, who else are you going to tell? The NYPD 12 is not fighting the same fight that Jack fought. They don't have a friend at the top of the department. They're getting death threats. And all of the NYPD 12 are people of color trying to change a, department that is still extremely white. If they're able to accomplish what they want to accomplish, it's going to be much harder. The judge in Edwin-Raman v. City of New York ruled against the NYPD-12. Their case was essentially thrown out. Since then, there have been some bright spots. The city

lost a big lawsuit over summons his last year. A federal judge said that they were giving them out without probable cause. The city agreed to pay out as much as $75 million. But the main thing the NYPD-12 wants, the end of the quota, there hasn't been much progress. there. I talked to Pedro a few weeks ago. He said, that's all right. We always lose the first round of these cases. We're actually in the process of filing an appeal. How are you feeling in general right now? Like, how is it going? How is it going? It's, um, the way I feel they're, they're a very big and strong machine. And they can withstand almost anything. But because of reaching out so far and it's going so deep into the community, you know, I think something,

can happen. And a lot of people in high positions are starting to make noise. Even Chiefs, you know, the other search that actually reached out to us. Really? And said, hey, keep going. Yeah. I didn't expect you to sound so hopeful. I am hopeful now. You know, I think something can happen. I think that we are moving in it to change. I think we might get something. Reply is hosted by me, PJ Vote, now is Goldman. Shows produced by Truthy Pinnameney, Fia Bannon, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, Simone Pallanan, Jessica Young, and Caitlin Roberts. The show is edited by Tim Howard. Our intern is Heather Schroering.

More editing helped this week from Alex Bloomberg, Sarah Saracen, Wallace Mack, and Saki Canafo. We were mixed by Rick Kwan and Kate Balinski, fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Also, there's a new documentary out called Crime and Punishment that follows Edwin and Pedro and the rest of NYPD-12. It's really good. You should go check it out. It's on the Hulu. Special thanks this week to David Auerlick, Julio Diaz, Krista Ripple, and Chris Mitchell. Our theme song is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Original music is this episode from the extremely brilliant Tim Howard and Breakmester Cylinder. Thanks for our additional musicians, Anya Krieger on flute, and Michael Brownell on upright bass.

Recording help from Mark Lewis. Matt Lieber is a walk in the woods. You invite more episodes of the show on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.