Caught on Tape: NYPD Cooking the Books and Cocking the Books

God bless whistleblowers. Graham Rayman and the Village Voice obtained hundreds of hours of covertly recorded audio from one disgruntled Bed-Stuy cop:

Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors.

He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs. [VV]

The Voice is publishing the juciest excerpts on their website. The tapes appear to expose some serious misconduct, like officers pressuring underlings to step up stop-and-frisk to make the department seem busy while failing to investigate thefts to keep crime statistics low. The funniest clip, recorded on September 1, 2009 is a supervisor reprimanding the cops for scrawling graffiti on their own police station and “cocking the memo books” (drawing penises in each other’s notebooks).