Brooklyn's Finest: Cop Tapes Cops

The Village Voice has exclusive access to secret recordings taken by a Brooklyn Cop. What he documented may or may not surprise you.

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Morris Chestnut Tells Us What Song Always Gets Him to the Dance Floor and What You Better Not Bring to a Party at His House

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Morris Chestnut Tells Us What Song Always Gets Him to the Dance Floor and What You Better Not Bring to a Party at His House

Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant and obtained exclusively by the Voice—provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city.

They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

As a result, the tapes show, the rank-and-file NYPD street cop experiences enormous pressure in a strange catch-22: He or she is expected to maintain high “activity”—including stop-and-frisks—but, paradoxically, to record fewer actual crimes.

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