Whistleblower Sgt. Robert Borrelli taped a conversation with a theft victim to back up his accusations that his precinct was fudging crime statistics. In an exclusive interview, a 19-year veteran of the NYPD describes widespread manipulation of crime reports at the 100th Precinct in Queens. The sergeant says when he blew the whistle on the routine fudging of crimes, the department retaliated and transferred him to a midnight shift at Bronx Central.
We’ve spent weeks talking to this Sergeant and examining hours of audio tape and numerous crime reports he gave to us.
Proof, he says, that the Rockaway precinct where he was a supervisor has been downgrading felonies to make crime look low and top brass look good.
Sgt. Robert Borrelli says the N-Y-P-D has left him with no choice but to go public after months of ignoring his allegations of routine misclassification of crimes at 100th Precinct in Queens.
He says the pressure there to manipulate crime reports has become unbearable:
” I just couldn’t take it anymore. There came a point I finally broke and I’m like you know this has to stop,” said Sgt. Borrelli.
So, last May, Sgt. Borrelli started handing over dozens of crime reports to the NYPD’s Quality Assurance Division, whose job it is to ensure the accuracy of crime stats.
The reports, he claims, amounted to smoking gun evidence of intentional, routine downgrading of crimes.
“They’re constantly changing the classification to downgrade crimes so they’re not tracked it goes under the radar according to the FBI crime stats,” said Sgt. Borrelli.
In other words, I asked, trying to bury the serious crimes? “That’s correct,” said Borelli.
For example, an incident from last August in which an angry customer fired four shots at a cab driver, a clear case of felony assault.
“I was the supervisor on the scene,” said Sgt. Borelli. “I made the determination what we had, I appropriately charged the proper crime attempted assault-1. It was later on changed, believe the following morning, someone lined it out and changed it to reckless endangerment.”
NEW YORK (WABC) -- The NYPD's multi-agency training exercise that simulates a dirty bomb attack on New York City is entering its fourth day Friday.
On Thursday, police, FDNY and Coast Guard vessels managed to find a mock dirty bomb aboard a boat near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Friday's drill includes police checkpoints in front of the United Nations, at 96th Street and Columbus Avenue, Broadway and Riverside Drive, Canal and Broadway, and Lafayette and Varick streets.
Also, there will be increased police activity at both terminals of the Staten Island Ferry.
On a cold afternoon at the mouth of New York Harbor, a tiny yellow fishing boat bobs in the water as a flotilla of law enforcement vessels fitted with sophisticated radiation detection equipment closes in.
The boat has drawn suspicion by emitting gamma rays - a sign it may be carrying a dirty bomb, packed with radioactive material.
High-speed vessels from the New York Police Department and state Naval Militia halt the boat, tie it up and accomplish their mission of neutralizing an apparent terror threat.
The radiation was real, but the threat wasn't: The scene Thursday was a drill designed to test an ambitious NYPD-led effort called Securing the Cities. The program aims to detect and intercept radiological devices before they can wreak havoc on Wall Street and other high-profile targets in Manhattan, the heart of the nation's largest city.
The effort also has tested the limits of domestic counterterrorism logistics, costs and tactics. It relies on the manpower and expertise of more than 100 law enforcement and public safety agencies across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tens of millions of dollars in federal funding and a belief that plots already set in motion can be thwarted wherever necessary.
"That includes the waterways," NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
Security experts say such safety initiatives can't just look good on paper. To work, first responders need to be drilled constantly using mock devices and various scenarios cooked up by their superiors.
"That's what these exercises are all about - so you can be better prepared to respond when there's an actual event," said William Bratton, a Kroll security firm executive who's served as NYPD commissioner and Los Angeles police chief. "You need to identify what works and what doesn't work."
The current commissioner has a "much-needed fixation on terrorism and keeping New York safe," Bratton added.
Still, critics question whether the prevention drills are a sound use of time and resources. The Securing the Cities approach is overly reliant on the rare instances when investigators receive a tip of trouble and ignores the fact that terrorists don't have to travel outside the city to obtain dangerous materials used legitimately in the medical and construction fields, said retired Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, head of the non-profit Institute for Homeland Security.
"It's fine to do all the lights-and-sirens exercises," Larson said. "But that doesn't address what to do once a dirty bomb goes off. No one wants to do that exercise."
Police officials respond that while remaking the NYPD since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the nation's largest police department has diligently trained officers on how to both prevent and respond to attacks. More than 1,000 officers are assigned to counterterrorism on a daily basis - a force that eclipses that of most entire departments elsewhere.
In the mid-2000s, the Department of Homeland Security came up with the concept of Securing the Cities to combat dirty bombs and decided that the NYPD, which currently has about 35,000 officers, was best suited to test if for the rest of the country, officials said.
The city also was chosen based on accepted wisdom that it remains a ripe terror target. In the past two years alone, New Yorkers have seen an aborted al-Qaida-sanctioned plot to attack subways with homemade explosives and a failed attempt to set off a crude fertilizer car bomb in Times Square.
By contrast, a dirty bomb - intended to spread panic by exploding and creating a radioactive cloud in urban settings - has never been discovered or detonated in a U.S. terror plot. But law enforcement considers dirty bombs a serious threat because they're easy to build and because of intelligence that foreign terrorists want to use them against American cities.
Officials also point to the case of Jose Padilla, who was accused in 2002 of receiving dirty-bomb training from al-Qaida for a potential attack. Padilla, a U.S. citizen who claimed he was illegally detained as an enemy combatant, was convicted of conspiracy in 2007 and was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison.
Securing the Cities began with a series of meetings with officials from the NYPD and 12 other larger agencies from the region, including the New Jersey State Police, the New York State Office of Homeland Security and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police Department. With the backing of the FBI, the U.S.
Coast Guard and various other federal entities, a plan was developed to respond to threats using checkpoints - on bridges, outside tunnels, in the water, along railways - and grid searches in and around the city.
The program has faced fiscal challenges: Proposed federal budgets in 2009 and 2010 initially withheld funding before restoring it under pressure by lawmakers. But Homeland Security has since decided that what began as a pilot project in 2006 should be permanent and could be expanded to other cities. So far, it has received $69.2 million in federal funds, which has paid for the state-of-the-art detection devices, communication networks and other equipment.
Securing the Cities planning has culminated this week in an ongoing five-day drill testing the line of defense - the largest exercise yet. The scenario in play "involves thefts of radiological material by four separate cells of a fictional terrorist group intent on targeting New York City with a dirty bomb," officials said.
Friday's drills were to involve scores of NYPD vehicles at U.N.
headquarters and increased police activity at both terminals of the Staten Island Ferry, which carries tens of thousands of people a day to lower Manhattan and the Wall Street area.
Earlier in the week, hundreds of officers who fanned out across the city and suburbs located phony devices and stolen materials at a Cadillac dealer in Westport, Conn., inside an SUV near Yankee Stadium and on three fake terrorists caught inside New York's Penn Station, one of the nation's busiest rail hubs.
On Thursday, 67 government boats were in New York Harbor, the Hudson River and other spots to monitor maritime traffic - specifically commercial and recreational boats under 300 tons - for evidence of mock bombs. The officers had been fed fictional information that radioactive cobalt and cesium had been taken from a hospital, said Capt. Michael Riggio, a coordinator from the NYPD's Counterterrorism Division.
Riggio watched as the boats, including specially designed NYPD boats with detection devices implanted in their hulls, converged on the fishing boat before officers boarded it with an array of other equipment that can further measure the threat level. The readings were transmitted by computer to a police headquarters command center and to federal scientists in Washington for analysis to help determine if the boat was indeed "hostile," he said.
Said the captain: "It's all about stopping the bad guys and weapons from getting into the city."
BROOKLYN - Two men from Brooklyn are under arrest and charged with running a sex trafficking ring.
Prosecutors say the suspects forced teenage girls into prostitution, beat them, and branded them with tattoos.
"The way she dressed, the way she started talking, she just wasn't the same, it was like she was losing her mind," said the victim's sister.
The girl's family asked not to be identified, but they told reporters that the district attorney's hotline may have saved her life.
They called Brooklyn prosecutors desperate for help.
D.A. Charles Hynes says the girl had been lured away as a sex-slave.
"He told her that she had to make at least $1,000 per night, and he beat her and threatened to kill her when didn't do so," said Charles Hynes, the Kings County District Attorney.
Hynes says Arctic Rogers and an accomplice are charged with using the internet to prostitute young, underage girls.
At times they even forced them to walk the streets of Brooklyn.
Prosecutors say they threatened them, and their families, if they tried to leave.
"He forced the 17 year-old watch as he tortured animals, burning them, electrocuting them, and strangling them, and he explained that if she didn't comply with his rules he would do the same to her," Hynes said.
Hynes says at least one girl was tattooed with his street name.
Family members say the healing will take time.
"It's going to take a slow, a lot of time, to get back to where we once were," said the victim's father.
The men are charged in connection with two victims so far, and could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
But, prosecutors say there were many others victims and this investigation is not over.
NEW YORK - A New York City narcotics detective claimed he bought drugs from people he then arrested.
Prosecutors say it was all a lie.
The detective out of Queens is facing dozens of counts of falsifying records and making bogus arrests, which according to the indictment led to innocent people being accused of selling drugs.
HOFFER: I just wanted to ask you about the charges. Are you telling me you have no comment? DETECTIVE OSBACK: I have no comment about the charges.
NYPD Narcotics Detective Adolph Osback knows he could be facing years behind bars if found guilty of charges detailed in the 48-count indictment obtained exclusively by Eyewitness News. It alleges that the undercover detective repeatedly filed false reports about having bought drugs from people whom he then had arrested.
HOFFER: You have a long list of charges against you, you have nothing to say about it detective? DETECTIVE OSBACK: I have nothing to say about it sir.
Among the charges: falsifying records, perjury and unlawful imprisonment in which it's alleged he had five people falsely arrested on drug charges. Some of the arrests occurred in the 110th precinct in Elmhurst, Queens. It's the same precinct where back in 2008, two brothers, Maximo and Jose Colon, were falsely accused of selling cocaine by two undercover narcotics detectives. The brothers got a $300-thousand dollar settlement from the city. A federal judge in that case slammed the NYPD for what he called ''widespread falsification by arresting police officers."
"I think it happens a lot more then we think," attorney Rochelle Berliner said.
Berliner was the attorney for the falsely-accused Colon Brothers. She says this latest indictment of an officer seems to back the judge's claims of a widespread problem which she believes is caused by intense pressure to make arrests.
ROCHELLE: "He's getting overtime and he's getting numbers. Sometimes the undercovers are expected to perform whether there are quotas or just expectations in order to remain as an undercover officer." HOFFER: So they have a certain number of arrests to make? ROCHELLE: It might not be specifically a number, but they have to maintain some sort of stats so that they can remain as undercovers."
The NYPD denies the existence of quotas or punishment for failure to make numbers, but with each arrest of an officer comes more questions about what's corrupting cops?
HOFFER: What about these false arrests? What do you say about it? OSBACK: You just said it yourself HOFFER: Are the allegations true? OSBACK: Absolutely not!
We've also learned that 3-days ago, Detective Osback was indicted by the Brooklyn D-A on similar charges of falsifying arrest records.
Despite two separate indictments, an NYPD spokesperson says this is an isolated case and not likely to involve other officers.
