_Do you work for the NYPD? _We'd love to talk to you. Contact the writer from a non-work device at laura.wagner@vice.com or laura.wags@protonmail.com.
VICE presented the NYPD with the allegations in this story as well as a detailed list of questions; it declined to comment, citing pending litigation. The Captains Endowment Association, the group that represents members at Tsachas’s rank in the NYPD, did not respond.Tsachas’s deposition, obtained by VICE, offers a rare look at the inner workings of the NYPD. In it, Tsachas defends himself against the suggestion that he misappropriated federal funds by saying he did it "for the benefit of the department"; admits that he did not put white officers who didn’t meet quotas on "performance monitoring," an NYPD disciplinary track; and acknowledges that he encouraged officers to hide in closets in subway stations in order to catch people hopping turnstiles.Depositions are part of the legal process and do not by themselves substantiate legal claims. In fact, not a single claim has been substantiated by plaintiffs in this case. The proper venue to defend against the meritless accusations made against our officers in this case is in a court of law, and that’s where we will present our case. Vigorously.
In the seven-hour deposition, Scola worked his way through the sworn affidavits of eight different police officers who are not part of the lawsuit but provided affidavits stating that Tsachas ordered them to specifically target Black and Latino men for minor infractions like fare evasion, and punished these officers with poor evaluations, undesirable shifts, or by giving them low evaluations if they didn’t meet quotas.The testimonies in these affidavits, which were reported on by the New York Times in December, are scathing. Cops who worked under Tsachas in Brooklyn Transit accuse him of harping relentlessly on quotas and taking punitive action against minority officers who didn’t meet them. They say that while arrest quotas existed before Tsachas, the pressure to meet them ramped up dramatically under his leadership, driving morale to new lows. Six of the officers said in their affidavits that Tsachas’s discrimination forced them to retire. One officer even said he warned his son, who is currently serving in the U.S. military and aspires to be a police officer, not to join the NYPD.In his testimony, Tsachas didn’t so much deny that his orders had a racially-disparate impact as deny that they were motivated by racism, in essence defending his actions by saying that supposedly neutral motivations mattered more than decidedly less than neutral effects.Tsachas defends himself against the suggestion that he misappropriated federal funds by saying he did it "for the benefit of the department" and acknowledges that he encouraged officers to hide in closets in subway stations in order to catch people hopping turnstiles.
The complaints against Tsachas are, in essence, complaints against how the NYPD has operated for decades, but they’re no less important for that, especially given the recent MTA and NYPD crackdown on fare evasion, the data on which have shown poor Black and Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected by enforcement. The complaints against Tsachas also come to bear on the role that NYPD policing strategy is playing in this year’s presidential election. Whichever way the causality runs, with the mayor echoing the cop or the cop echoing the mayor, there is an unmistakable resonance between Tsachas’s testimony and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2015 defense of violent racist policing:"He’s not savvy enough to euphemize the objective."
Bloomberg has been desperately trying to distance himself from these comments and from stop-and-frisk in general—in a statement released earlier this month he called it "overused" while passively depicting it as a policy he inherited—but what he said in 2015, is, at its core, the same as what Tsachas’s admitted in his deposition to telling officers in his command when he "discussed crime statistics" with them: Young Black and brown men commit crime; target them with enforcement.Birch has a theory about why Tsachas still works for the NYPD."To fire him now," he said, "would be an admission that what they did was wrong."Follow Laura Wagner on Twitter."Ninety-five percent of your murders—murderers and murder victims—fit one M.O.," he can be heard saying. "You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25."