BOOK REVIEW

NYPD BLUE LIES:
EX-COP CHARLES CASTRO EXPOSES THE SEAMY UNDERBELLY OF RUDY GIULIANI'S LAW ENFORCEMENT "MIRACLE"
Reviewed by A. Kronstadt

During the heyday of the Rudy Giuliani era, as "aggressive policing" and enhanced enforcement of petty "quality of life" laws wiped out New York City's vibrant street culture and changed the use patterns of New York City's neighborhoods in the interest of gentrification and displacement of undesirable residents who did not fit into Rudy's racist vision of the future, The SHADOW was a primary source on both the repression and the resistance. From the standpoint of people on the streets of the Lower East Side and in Tompkins Square Park, and in particular from the standpoint of community-based political activists who were being driven underground by the Giuliani crackdown on public political events, SHADOW reporters were on the scene to make sure that even if the courts and the mainstream press were subservient to the new regime, the truth would nevertheless be told.

However, what we were not able to expose, for the most part, was what this regime looked like from the other side, i.e., from the side of the rank and file police officers who were being exploited as an invading army to stamp out New York City's indigenous culture and spread fear in our communities. Were these people brutal storm troopers who would do these things of their own volition, or workers who were themselves being cracked down upon by oppressive job rules and forced into this
adversarial relationship with the public?

In NYPD Blue Lies (Arbor Books, Inc., 2008), former NYPD officer Charles Castro describes the internal atmosphere at the NYPD, marked by arrest and summons quotas and dominated by the most racist elements of the white heirarchy, who were simultaneously favored by Giuliani with enhanced authority in his brave new world and subjected to unrelenting pressure in a numbers
game that relied on ever-increasing arrests as a one-sided benchmark of progress.

This was the atmosphere, as Castro relates with numerous examples, that led to the deaths of Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond at the hands of NYPD officers, as well as the precinct house torture of Abner Louima and countless other documented incidents during the Giuliani era.

Charles Castro rose to the rank of sergeant during his career with the NYPD, which ran from 1981 until his involuntary termination in 1998. During his stint with the police force, he served in some of the city's most dangerous precincts and made over 500 arrests. Castro describes, at almost documentary level of detail, an incident in which he acted as an impromptu negotiator with a Latino hostage taker who probably would have otherwise simply been gunned down on orders of a racist white commander.

Castro's career was marked by continual conflict with the white brass because of his unwillingness to put up with the humiliations inflicted on Latino police officers. Certainly no passive victim of abuse, he describes his willingness to retaliate for the insults dished out by the old Caucasian commanders, not only by paying them back in kind but by drawing the rank and file cops into rebellion and mischief which ran completely counter to the constipated mentality of New York policing. The book relates numerous, hilarious examples of such shenanigans.

Furthermore, Castro was the husband of Officer Carol Shaya, whom he met while the two were working in riot gear to suppress the Crown Heights disturbances of 1991. The NYPD brass mercilessly hounded Officer Shaya after she did a photo shoot with Playboy magazine that included some nude photographs and that made no secret of the fact that she was an NYC police officer. NYPD Blue Lies details how Castro and Shaya fought unsuccessfully to save Shaya's job, amidst a self-righteous campaign of vilification that focused on the alleged damage to the reputation of the department wrought by these nude pix. The narrow-minded police brass got Officer Shaya swiftly
dismissed even as white male officers tarred with corruption, blind shooting barrages, and involvement with torture were able to hang onto their jobs much longer.

NYPD Blue Lies comes out as Rudy Giuliani seems to be preparing to run for governor of New York state and perhaps attempting to cash in on his alleged single-handed elimination of crime in NYC, as well as his murky relationship to the events of September 11, 2001, a day that saw the deaths of hundreds of police and firefighters whose sacrifice he continually politicizes and claims credit for.

Castro exposes the underside of of the Giuliani "miracle" of crime reduction, pointing to the pressure placed particularly on the elite "anti-crime" units to make arrests even when there were no
genuine arrests to be made, forcing these plainclothes cops to confront people who simply happened to be out on the street in high-crime areas whose residents were mostly people of color. In most cases, the people confronted were doing absolutely nothing, and the misunderstanding itself resulted in violence, as was the case with Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant who was killed in a barrage of 41 shots by an anti-crime unit who mistook his house keys for a gun.

Castro repeatedly refers to the "numbers game" at the NYPD, played in particular by Giuliani's main henchman at 1 Police Plaza, Commissioner Howard Safir. To meet quotas, cops would have to confront far greater numbers of people than were actually suspected of anything, often hoping
to find a gun or a warrant simply by chance. Commanders of precincts were also required to attend meetings of COM-SAT, a computerized system for tracking the ups and downs of crimes in the various precincts, where the brass were directly grilled about crime hot spots appearing in their areas. In some cases, for fear of having too many felonies appearing to have committed in certain places where they were held accountable, an inspector or other higher officer would have for instance, grand larceny and robbery downgraded to petty larceny, rape to sexual harassment, etc.,
letting genuine offenders off easy simply to improve the numbers. This would go on even as these commanders would increase the number of petty arrests, just to drive groups of people off the street, so crime would appear to go down because public spaces were emptier. The Giuliani administration on the NYPD side comes across, in NYPD Blue Lies as being based on racist commanders, ass-kissers, bad bosses, and exploiters, who were at the same time sexually uptight, insecure, and arbitrary.

In NYPD Blue Lies you will read a great deal about Sergeant Castro and his private life with Ms. Shaya and the lively lesbian culture in which the latter also participated. Perhaps there is too much information of this nature, but it establishes that Castro is not your typical uptight suburban cop and is very much a man of the world and a New Yorker. It also makes the book a good read.

NYPD Blue Lies also covers much of the same territory that The SHADOW was covering during the Giuliani era. It is a great revelation that there were police officers like Charlie Castro who were noticing the same things that we were exposing, but from the inside. This gives us hope that there will one day be an era when not arrest quotas but common sense will create a style of law enforcement activity that creates public safety in a context of freedom and human dignity.
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NYPD BLUE LIES author Charles Castro responds to questions posed by A. Kronstadt

The SHADOW: Could you say a few words about how you think that a post-Giuliani, post-Bloomberg police force might keep New York safe without resorting to civil liberties violations and other unconstitutional behavior, racist profiling, shooting barrages, or any of the other negative practices that you describe?

Charles Castro: Of course, NYC could be policed in a safe manner without civil and constitutional violations that have been leading to tragic incidents in our once great city. Rudy Giuliani started this overly aggressive method of policing and Mike Bloomberg has followed in his footsteps.
        First and foremost, we must accept that if crime is down in NYC, then the NYPD has to deal with the existing criminal issues accordingly. Most importantly, the NYPD must cease in their effort to operate like a business. The lives of our residents and the civil and constitutional freedoms of our country must be respected. Our citizens are humans that have names and families, they live, breathe and bleed, they are not interest rates, or numbers. Start treating them like that. One way to start is with com-stats. The NYPD puts serious pressure on commanders into lowering crime stats. Com-stat numbers have to be better month after month. Therefore, if crime is down, how else are you going to match the previous month, quarter, year etc. etc? The pressure from the borough-commanders rolls downhill and in the end, police officers are pressured into creating situations to try and match their quotas. Whether, it is arrest, summonses, or stop and frisk reports.
        When the PBA addresses the matter of quotas enforced by the NYPD in a serious manner, things will change. How can we not expect police officers to violate the rights of our citizens when they are pressured to stop more people, issue more summonses, and arrest more people than the previous month? I will give you a scenario. Imagine a young man coming home from a long day of work. The young man wearing his pants under his butt looking shabby, but styling in the manner in which our youth has adopted. The young man passes by the local grocery store and says hello to the neighborhood corner boys hanging out with nothing better to do. Along comes a couple of young police officers that are aware that the end of the month is around the corner. The officers take a chance and approach the group for no other reason than to try to get what is deemed activity for their monthly report. They choose to profile the below the butt pant wearing individual who has done nothing. They throw the man against a car and frisk him and then say, "someone said that you
were carrying a gun'. There is your stop. The man then becomes offended and challenges the authority of the officers. An argument ensues and they attempt to issue him a summons for creating a disturbance, better known as "disorderly conduct." You know the man becomes even more infuriated and winds up being arrested for resisting arrest or perhaps assaulting a police officer. This is a common occurrence and this is how the NYPD deems the stop justified. They try to cram this down your throat, without once acknowledging that they had no right to stop the man in the first place. All of this to add a stop and frisk to their activity report. The US department of Justice has deemed that the NYPD profiles, targets and abuses their authority when stopping blacks and Latinos. What has the NYPD done about it? Nothing. If the PBA is going to allow officers are to follow the foolish unlawful orders to make shining stars of the police brass, then they must be held accountable for their actions. Make them pay. Not the taxpayers, but the officers themselves. Hurt them in the pocket. Restore respect, open lines of communications between the police and our citizens and stop the us against them mentality.

SHADOW: Do you think that bringing in more Black and Latino captains, inspectors, and chiefs will help to get rid of the abovementioned things?

Castro: Adding Blacks and Latinos to the upper echelon of the NYPD who acknowledge that there is a problem within the NYPD will have a tremendous effect. Let's not forget, there have been and still are a smaller number of minorities at the top; however, only a minuscule number of them ever step up to the plate for what is right for the cops of color. For the most part, we have had weak asses
representing us at the top. The NYPD is good at getting a weak Black or Latino to stand before a group, podium, or press conference and state that all is well in the NYPD and that there is no discrimination or racism, and that the last fifty or so unarmed men or women killed by the NYPD that were all unarmed were people of color is merely a coincidence.

SHADOW: Hiram Monserrate made positive waves in the NYPD as you describe, but as a State Senator he has managed to rile fellow Democrats for what some consider his disloyalty, and has in turn riled Republicans by handing them a deadlock. Is he doing the right thing? Should his own constituents be angry at him, for example, for torpedoing needed legislation on rent regulations?

Castro: As far as I am concerned, politicians have to begin to place their constituents before themselves. Initially, I commended what Hiram Monserrate did because I thought it was giving balance to the [NY State] Senate. Now, I don't know what the hell is going through his mind.
        In my book, you will see that I blame a lot of the NYPD's problems and the aggressive policing on the politicians in NYC. Remember, there are a lot of Black and Latino elected officials that have been around for years. The killing of innocent Blacks and Latinos is not something new. When an innocent individual gets killed, as in the cases of Diallo, Baez, Banks, politicians take advantage of the photo opportunities and nothing more. They have to do something, something with meaning and value, if it means changing the city charter to take away power from the police commissioner then
getting off of their fat asses and doing it. For the most part they are also weak asses. When Diallo was killed, Howard Safir, stated "the officers went through enough, I am waiving their NYPD administrative trial". In my eyes that is way too much power. What about what the parents of Diallo went through?

SHADOW: In spite of the terrible experiences that you describe, do you think that your stint with the NYPD was worth it?

Castro: Without a doubt, my experience was well worth it. It made me the man that I am today. Regardless, the racism and discrimination have made me a fighter and opened my eyes. Furthermore, both as a cop and a sergeant, I had the opportunity  to help save lives, rescued hostages, help the injured and sick, and find lost children, helping to reunite their families. I met great friends both in and out of the NYPD. People that are still my friends today. I also put criminals that deserved to be behind bars in prison.

SHADOW: What are you doing these days? Are you still applying the skills that you learned in the NYPD?

Castro: These days, I am promoting my book NYPD Blue Lies, trying to get my message out there and trying to get an independent monitor to oversee serious corruption and misconduct within the NYPD. God knows they are incapable and incompetent when it comes to policing themselves. I am also a partner in a security firm, Anthony Miranda & Associates. Our firm is a minority-owned business. The skills that I have learned on the NYPD take me a long way. Our firm is comprised of
mostly former NYPD members. We deal with all aspects of security and private investigations.