What it’s really like to be a cop — as recorded in hundreds of hours of secret tape recording
Now this is a classic magazine scoop — but it’s from the Village Voice. I’ll let the lede speak for itself:
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.
Aside from small talk and locker-room banter, as well as juvenile jokes like “cocking the books” (drawing lewd penises inside other cops’ memo books), the officer also revealed a pressure-cooker culture where officers and their supervisors were under intense pressure to look really, really busy, but also to record fewer crimes.
The result? More “stop-and-frisks” but also not actually investigating real complaints.
The Village Voice has done a wow job of putting it all up — including two long articles and selections from the recordings themselves.
I haven’t finished it, but it’s gripping stuff, so far.
