The NYPD's Polycrisis
In case you haven't heard, the New York City Department is getting a makeover. Billionaire heir and Israel lobby scion Jessica Tisch, who was given her start in the NYPD's Ray Kelly-era Intelligence Unit thanks to a phone call from one of her relatives on the board of the NYPD's slushfund/booster nonprofit, is working overtime to burnish her public image.
Still yet to take unscripted questions at an open press conference, in the two months since her appointment by Gotham's own Black Frank Rizzo, Tisch has been hard at work with a reputation management firm (yes, I track my subscribers) to seed positive stories in the press, from a New York Times softball interview that vastly exaggerated the NYPD's role in apprehending the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to a December photo shoot with the NYPD's heavy weapons team on the Brooklyn waterfront for an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair (for the record, I did not learn about this from my editors there).
Putting aside Tisch's soft reception from the city's much-diminished local press corps and clear maneuvering for higher office (à la her mother), the largest police department in the United States is in what historian Adam Tooze would have once labeled a 'polycrisis' that stems from deep-seated problems with external accountability, oversight, discipline and integrity. For those not familiar with the dynamics of police corruption in New York City, it tends to run on roughly ten-year cycles of scandal, with the most egregious examples triggering independent commissions (Knapp in 1970 to address the systemic graft famously exposed by whistleblowers Frank Serpico and David Durk, Mollen in 1992 for egregious bribe solicitation, protection rackets for drug dealers, brutality, theft and other matters ) charged with exhuming bad practices and then proscribing changes.
There hasn't been an independent commission since Mollen, even with the department's recent history of unlawful killings and torture during Giuliani Time, mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers and the stop-and-frisk regime that ruled over black and brown neighborhoods, a DeBlasio-era bribery scandal that touched the upper echelons of the NYPD brass, a years-long investigation of the NYPD's disastrous handling of sex crimes, and the department's costly brutality during the summer 2020 George Floyd uprising.
Under Mayor Eric Adams, the agency's rapid political drift rightward is accompanied by spiraling use of force and racial profiling scandals, a disciplinary system in (deliberate) freefall, a rampant overtime fraud racket among both 'white-shirt' supervisors and the rank and file, a corrupt group of senior officials under federal investigation for extorting nightclubs, sexually assaulting subordinates and steering city contracts to their own businesses, and a brash return to the NYPD's brutal protest policing tactics that drew national opprobrium during the George Floyd uprising of Summer 2020.
There's also been a vacuum of leadership: Tisch, the former Sanitation Commissioner who didn't do a particularly good job of keeping the city clean, is Eric's fourth NYPD commissioner since taking office in 2022. That's due entirely to the fuckery of Adams' handpicked "tough on crime" command team, which initially had Keechant Sewell, a Queens native and former chief of detectives at Long Island's Nassau County Police Department, ostensibly running the NYPD as the city's first female police commissioner.
However, Sewell was overshadowed and outranked from the start by a 'shadow' commissioner Phillip Banks II, the former chief of department (#2 in NYPD's hierarchy) under Commissioner Ray Kelly who was forced to retire under a cloud after FBI agents found evidence he'd received thousands of dollars in free meals and sports tickets — even a $20,000 “gift” from a corrupt businessman trying to bribe his way to favorable police treatment. Banks was never charged with a crime, but federal prosecutors named him as an unindicted co-conspirator during the trial of another high-ranking NYPD member bribed by the same group of businessmen.
Banks was flown to Israel by that same business too, and the photos from his trip are HYSTERICAL. The short of it is Banks effectively ran the NYPD as Adams' deputy mayor for public safety while steering $154 million in questionable municipal security contracts to a security firm he once owned along with his brother's wife, leaving Sewell in an unenviable and highly uncomfortable position. She eventually quit in June 2023 after clashing with Banks and Adams over their refusal to let her discipline another key member of the mayor's NYPD goon squad, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey (we'll get to Maddrey in a second), over his inappropriate intervention in a 2021 Brooklyn incident where a former subordinate was arrested, then cut loose for threatening two teenage boys with a pistol.
Banks, his brothers Terrence and David, and former first deputy mayor Sheena Wright all resigned this fall after their phones were seized by the FBI, which is reviewing the award of the security contracts for potential criminal violations. That same company was founded in 2010 by another former NYPD supervisor, Dwayne Montgomery, who earlier this year plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges to funnel illegal donations to Eric's successful 2021 mayoral campaign. Illegal campaign donations to Adams' election coffers are the subject of yet another FBI investigation (currently there are at least four separate federal probes targeting the current administration).
Sewell's successor on the 14th floor, Edward Caban, kept a lower profile in the administration, preferring to let Phil Banks run the show while he partied incessantly at a Bronx nightlife spot owned by his ex-cop brother James (who had his own shitty history on the job) that racked up several fire code and building code violations for an illegally built outdoor space. Turns out Caban's brother had a silent partner in the business - Albanian gangster Muhamet "Mike" Demaj, who is allegedly involved in human trafficking across New York's northern border with Canada. Violations at Con Sofrito, which became quite popular with other cops and local politicos, got so out of hand that the New York Liquor Board opened a probe into the establishment. It was forced to close last year.
Why this matters is the nightlife business is serious money in New York City - and Eric Adams' NYPD has their hands out for their cut. On September 5, FBI agents seized the phones of Commissioner Caban, his brother and several other commanders in Manhattan and Queens to investigate whether owners of several high-end clubs and lounges had paid protection money to have the NYPD ignore more than a hundred city code violations. A number of bar and restaurant owners go public with allegations that they had been instructed to pay bribes to Caban's brother in order to avoid action over liquor license and noise violations.
Caban quit a week after the feds jacked him up. Auspiciously, Caban's final actions as commissioner were to decrease punishment guidelines for cops found guilty of misconduct and to clear three cops of disciplinary charges over attempts to extort one of the bar owners who blew the whistle on the alleged extortion attempt. The downgrading of discipline was a pattern not just for Caban (who routinely closed hundreds of allegations against cops without even reviewing the files) but for Sewell as well, even as misconduct complaints from the public rise to levels last seen during Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly's stop-and-frisk regime. All this indicates a department where cops do not fear discipline for brutality, failing to take police action, or abuse of authority - which is how we ended up with a Bronx cop killing a drug suspect fleeing on a dirt bike by throwing a cooler at him two summers ago.
Caban's interrim replacement, former FBI supervisor Tom Donlon, isn't worth a mention save for catching his own doorknock from his former colleagues for failing to return classified records from another law enforcement post twenty years ago, and getting into a yelling match at the starting line of the New York City Marathon with one of the most obnoxious members of the NYPD's ridiculously bloated press/disinformation office.
As for Jeffrey Maddrey, who is is a walking full-size fridge I've met in person while working on the New York Times' much-diminished Metro Desk, he is also out on the street. Late last month, Maddrey was accused by a subordinate of coercing her into a years-long abusive sexual relationship (see the hyperlink for particulars, I'm not gonna get into it) that was an "open secret" around the department." At least two other women have accused Maddrey, who stepped down as chief of department on December 21and has been labeled "a predator" by some insiders, of similar wrongdoing.
The whole matter only became public because the New York Daily News named Maddrey's mistress/victim in November as the NYPD's top earner, with overtime making up more than half of her $406,515 salary in Fiscal Year 2024. For what it's worth, the NYPD's overtime spending has skyrocketed under Eric Adams and is currently projected to be $960.9 million this fiscal year, about 16% of the agency’s total budget.
Earlier today, Maddrey's home in Rosedale, Queens was raided by the FBI and NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau. That indicates whatever criminal case could come from this is going federal. He's been formally suspended from duty, along with his former right-hand man Deputy Chief Paul Saraceno. There is definitely wide-scale overtime fraud within the NYPD, and there's a good chance the feds may be able to build a broader criminal case depending on who they get to talk. Remember kids, overtime fraud is a crime eligible for federal prosecution because federal grant money pays in part for police overtime.
...Which brings us to Jonathan Chell, sworn in as chief of department this week. Chell looks, talks and acts like the Giuliani-era knuckledragger that he is, killing a fleeing driver in an "accidential 2008" shooting that cost taxpayers $2.5 million in a rare civil trial and tallying 13 misconduct allegations over his career with the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
There's no telling how many cases Chell had with Internal Affairs, since those figures are not disclosed. The NYPD is engaging in far more pursuits these days - from just 61 vehicle pursuits in 2018 to 1,592 in 2023 and 1,523 as of mid December, per NYPC 911 call data. This is the direct result of a Chell's decision early in the Adams administration to loosen the NYPD's restrictions of when to chase suspects. For those not familiar with modern American law enforcement, vehicle chases are discouraged as measures of last resort due to the incredibly high risk they pose for officers, suspects, and uninvolved civilians alike.
Before Interrim Commissioner Donlan yanked Chell's chain earlier this fall, Chell was one of the NYPD's elite keyboard warriors along with jumped-up detective and Eric Adams confidante Kaz Daughtry, using the department's 200+ Twitter accounts to pour a storm of bravado, invective and disinformation at reporters, citizens, and city councilmembers alike. [For brevity's sake, I'm saving Daughtry for another day. He's a particularly useful way to discuss what happens when you merge Dubya-era police surveillance strategies with Trump-era cop radicalization.]
As if Chell's political leanings weren't clear enough from his incessant posting, in 2024 he visibly threw his uniform hat in with Donald Trump, appearing in uniform at a May rally Trump held in the Bronx, and on wild-eyed right wing propaganda channel NewsMax during the October 27 re-enactment of A Night At The Garden re-enactment on. There's far more about Chell's actual incompetence on the job, including the illegal and wildly obvious proliferation of 'ghost cars' throughout New York City the past few years while traffic casualties soared, and a notable decline in the department's clearance rate for murders (it's currently sitting at around 30 percent). Despite all this, Commissioner Tisch saw fit to appoint Chell as her number two, indicating she's fine with his far-right politics, minimal achievements, and the clear risks he's created for the public.
Tisch is currently making a lot of noise for shuffling around Internal Affairs personnel and putting some desk cops back out on the streets. However, as I sincerely hope I've made clear, the NYPD is riddled through with corruption and graft. But what else can be expected of an agency that has essentially policed itself since the Mollen Commission of the 1990s, first emboldened by Giuliani's Mussolini-on-the-Hudson reign and then cleverly leveraging the tragedy of September 9/11 to handicap, fob off and gut whatever (weak)oversight measures were set up after Mollen.
Seems like the reckoning is nigh.