Social Issues

The Even Sadder New York Police Saga

By Richard Emery

The New York Times, December 12, 1987

The recent revelation that Transit Police officers made scores of illegal arrests for alleged sex abuse and other crimes in 1983 and 1984 is only the beginning of what promises to be a long and sorry story. It is fast becoming clear that the ill-advised practice of measuring police productivity by arrest quotas is responsible for a far more extensive pattern of false arrests and for undermining the credibility of an entire police agency.

A scandal that started with the false arrest of Ronald Yeadon, an off-duty New York City police officer, now encompasses at least nine officers in the Union Square district who were engaged in a pattern of baseless arrests. The evidence shows that those officers, and perhaps many others, falsely charged black and Hispanic men with sex abuse and jostling-attempted pick-pocketing. The officers made arrests without the corroboration of victims, who, in many cases, disputed the charges. Moreover, in researching the case, I have heard convincing stories of summonses written for names taken from the telephone book, of quotas filled by officers who waited at destination stations to arrest homeless riders who sleep on the subways, of officers competing for detective status and overtime by racking up false arrests, of racial bigotry infecting the entire arrest process, of arrest abuses at the Columbus Circle Station (the system's biggest district) that far exceed those in Union Square, and of supervisors who pressure officers to make "collars."

Transit Police officers tell me that their jobs are terrible. They fear the subways but are required to ride alone and seek out trouble. Their radios often do not work. If they have achieved plainclothes status, they must balance supervisory pressures to make arrests against their fear of reassignment to uniform. This systemic decay has reached even the elite decoy unit where frame-up, entrapment and enticement allegedly occurred. In 20 cases that the Legal Aid Society referred to the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, eight months ago, officers allegedly "flaked" suspects planted evidence on them to make arrests. Apparently, crimes were staged to draw in bystanders, who were then arrested as accomplices. Worst of all, the Transit Police with the apparent cooperation of the District Attorney covered up clear evidence of the abuses. A report by Lieut. Thomas Dargan, compiled in 1984 after the District Attorney's office alerted the Transit Police internal affairs department to the problem, zealously documented the racist pattern of false arrests in Union Square. The report further documented that Mr. Morgenthau's office took guilty pleas from defendants even in cases where the alleged victims say they told prosecutors that no crime occurred.

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