In September, 2016, Bratton stepped down as commissioner, and O’Neill took his place. Latrice Walker, who represents a district that includes Brownsville in the New York State Assembly, spoke warmly of O’Neill, who grew up in East Flatbush; there was a “human element” to him, she told me. But some within the department had reservations. “He’s a bridge-builder,” a former police chief explained. “But he doesn’t keep very good company, and that’s a big failing of his.” To fill two of the department’s most influential roles, O’Neill turned to Dermot Shea and Terence Monahan. They had all been commanders in the Bronx, they all belonged to the N.Y.P.D.’s Emerald Society, a fraternal order of Irish-American cops, and they were all closely associated with the tactics ushered in by Bratton.
Shea, whom O’Neill picked to be the chief of detectives, previously led the Forty-fourth Precinct, near Yankee Stadium. At the height of stop-and-frisk, his officers used force during stops more often than in any other precinct in New York, according to data reported in the Times. Monahan, whom O’Neill made the chief of department, had spent years overseeing precincts in the Bronx. He “personified” the department’s stop-and-frisk policy, according to Warner Frey, a retired Transit Bureau captain who worked in the Bronx. At CompStat meetings, Monahan would push cops to write more stop-and-frisk reports and quality-of-life summonses. Every officer in a patrol unit was judged by how many of these reports they produced, which led to “unnecessary confrontations between police and citizens,” Frey told me. “It was all about getting numbers,” he added. “There were plenty of people like Monahan, and they all wanted to carry out this policy, because that’s how you got promoted.” (The department disputes this, and said Monahan does not believe that the number of summonses or arrests is a measure of success.)
One of Craig Edelman’s closest connections within the top brass was Charles McEvoy, a deputy chief. Edelman and McEvoy first met in 2004, while on duty at the Republican National Convention. Banks, who then supervised McEvoy, considered him a “very conscientious officer.” In 2012, when the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than half a million stops, McEvoy led the 103rd Precinct, in Jamaica, Queens; Edelman, as one of his sergeants, earned a collection of awards from the department. Martin Zuniga, a lieutenant in the precinct, recalled that Edelman was a “very active” worker, the type who would race to every crime scene and stay up late doing paperwork. McEvoy, he said, was a good boss, exacting but fair.
Not everyone felt that way. In 2010, Clifford Rigaud, who by then had worked at the 103rd Precinct for six years, recorded a meeting with McEvoy after receiving what he felt was an unfair performance review. McEvoy, who is white, criticized Rigaud, who is Haitian-American, for arresting only four people that year. In the N.Y.P.D., McEvoy told him, “a lot of what you’re evaluated on is activity by numbers.” He added that he tried to instill this lesson in all of his sergeants and lieutenants. “I always tell them personally, ‘Everything’s all about numbers, numbers, numbers.’ ”
Rigaud told me that the pressure to deliver numbers caused cops and commanders to lose their “moral compasses.” Rigaud’s former partner Michele Alexander agreed. “If there is no crime, you make the crime,” she said. In 2015, Alexander and another cop, Jazmia Inserillo, both of whom are Black, received six-figure settlements after claiming, in separate lawsuits, that one of their supervisors, Jason Margolis, sexually harassed them. Both women told me that Margolis, who is white, was a particularly aggressive presence on the streets of Jamaica, which is predominantly Black. “He would stop people for no rhyme or reason,” Inserillo said, “and he had us doing the same thing.” (A legal representative for Margolis did not respond to a request for comment.)
According to Inserillo’s lawsuit, McEvoy insisted that Margolis was an “asset to the command,” and refused to assign Inserillo to a different supervisor. McEvoy generally gave preference to his white subordinates, she told me. Edelman, she added, was one of his favorites. (The department disputes these claims. Edelman told me he didn’t see discrimination at the precinct, and added that he worked closely with a Black officer.)
By 2013, Edelman had left Queens and was working as a lieutenant in Brownsville. His duties included supervising rookies in a program called Operation Impact, which flooded blocks that the department had identified as “high-crime” with recruits fresh out of the police academy—a centerpiece of the department’s stop-and-frisk strategy. The following year, Bratton announced that he would reform the program. He branded the department’s new strategy “precision policing,” which he defined as an attempt to pinpoint “the small cohort of actors” who “perpetuate a vastly disproportionate amount of the city’s violent crime.”
Edelman was positioned at the forefront of this undertaking. By 2017, he had become the head of a unit that investigated gang activity in Brooklyn. The N.Y.P.D. had built a database listing thousands of suspected gang members, virtually all of them Black or Latino. Investigators were instructed to follow young people on Instagram or play video games with them online, posing as teen-agers. If a kid bragged about some dubious exploit, or even “liked” such a boast, he risked getting listed in the database. Edelman and other gang investigators would build cases against dozens of suspects at a time, but the Brooklyn D.A.’s office eventually tossed many of the cases out. “People who live in public housing know that there are a couple bad apples doing the shootings and the robberies,” Eric Gonzalez told me. “They want us to deal with them, but they really don’t want us to ensnare every young person who likes something they put on their social-media page.”
In the fall of 2018, Brownsville saw a spate of shootings. At CompStat meetings, Edelman was able to recite the names and aliases of alleged gang members, describe their rivalries and “territories,” and explain how his anti-gang unit was investigating them. “He was very good at the podium because we had mentored him,” Lori Pollock, a retired chief who co-chaired the meetings, told me. “And given his connections,” she added, “there was no doubt that he would go farther.” At the time, McEvoy served as second-in-command of Patrol Borough Brooklyn North. When the position of commander opened up at the Seven-Three, Edelman took over. Monahan, as chief of department, likely approved the move. According to several chiefs, this was a mistake. “Edelman is a good soldier,” Pollock said, “but he wasn’t the logical choice to perform community outreach.” Monahan, she said, “put him in a bad position.” (Monahan couldn’t be reached for comment.)
In February, Edelman spoke with me by phone, from police headquarters, in the only interview that he has given since the previous summer’s protest at Barclays. He declined to talk about the incident, but described feeling a sense of duty toward what he referred to as Brownsville’s “silent majority”—the “great people that aren’t committing the violence.” He claimed that he got along with some gang members, too, many of whom he’d known for years. “We would crack jokes, and they were appreciative of the police being on post,” he said. “It sounds bizarre, but it’s true.”
When Edelman took over as commander of the Seven-Three, he said, a number of local gangs were engaged in “historical beefs.” He stationed cops on blocks where shots had been fired, and directed his anti-crime team to get more guns off of the streets. Only one other Brooklyn precinct, the much larger Seven-Five, which contains East New York and Cypress Hills, made more arrests for gun possession in 2019. Meanwhile, according to data reported in The City, officers in the Seven-Three self-reported a thirty-three-per-cent increase in the use of force that year; sixty of these incidents resulted in civilian injuries. The Civilian Complaint Review Board received a hundred and forty-eight complaints, about a quarter more than the year before.
Gonzalez told me that this style of policing eroded trust in the criminal-justice system, discouraging witnesses and victims from coming forward with information about crimes. He also said that Edelman’s gun arrests often failed to meet constitutional standards. In some cases, officers had neglected to turn on their body cameras, or had engaged in what Gonzalez regarded as racial profiling. “People were getting stopped for jaywalking or spitting,” he said. “You just don’t see that in Park Slope.” Gonzalez, who grew up near Brownsville, refused to pursue many of these cases. In the year before the summer of 2020, the Seven-Three accounted for seventy-nine of the gun cases that Gonzalez’s office declined to prosecute. No other precinct in Brooklyn accounted for more than fifty-five. Disagreements between police and prosecutors over these arrests “became more and more personal,” Gonzalez said. One argument with Edelman left an Assistant District Attorney in tears. (Edelman says he was never involved in such an encounter.)
In a series of closed-door conversations, Gonzalez and N.Y.P.D. representatives, led by Monahan, tried to talk through their differences. Officials from the Mayor’s office acted as mediators. They went over the disputed gun cases one by one. “In the overwhelming majority of cases, we stood by our decision,” Gonzalez said. Still, he added, Monahan remained adamant that Edelman was “doing a fantastic job of getting guns off the street.”
