Aim is to advance their careers, he adds
members of the NYPD. Among the considerations are individual assessments of leadership and management skills.”
Vucinaj is currently in hot water for not blowing his whistle fast enough. In November, the department accused him of “failing to notify Internal Affairs” about 10 instances of misconduct by other cops for periods ranging from two days to one year. He claims he was charged because he rejected a penalty of seven lost vacation days.
But the allegations he made were substantially more serious than what the NYPD charged him with. In June 2016, for example, he reported a precinct commander and a lieutenant for misreporting crime statistics. That same month, he reported a deputy inspector for stealing time and not working scheduled hours.
Roy Richter, head of the Captains Endowment Association, which represents Vucinaj, said only, “I am aware of no contract violation regarding the assignment of the captain.”
Vucinaj says he found the 156 cases in the course of reviewing complaint reports. He said he compared how commanders classified a crime — for example as a misdemeanor assault instead of a felony assault — to how cops had described what happened. In some cases, he called the crime victims.
John Eterno, a Molloy College criminologist who studies NYPD stats, has been interviewing activeduty cops over the past year, and says Vucinaj’s claims ring true.
“In the past, it was rare that a desk officer would change the classification, but today, they are looking very closely at every possible word to get it out of the index category. I call it ‘scrubbing,’ ” he said.
Among the discrepancies Vucinaj says he’s found are more than 40 cases where suspects injured cops but no assault was charged.
The incidents happened in 2017 in the Transit Division. Suspects who injured police officers during an arrest were not charged with felony assault, as he says is required. Instead, the cases were classified as misdemeanor resisting arrest or obstructing governmental administration.
The injuries included fractured hands, sprained wrists, contusions to the face, knees and arms, and back injuries.
The NYPD has started tracking assaults on cops. There were 3,523 assaults citywide on police officers from June 1 2016, to Dec. 31, 2016. Of those, 2,273 took place during an arrest. Vucinaj’s cases are solely from Brooklyn Transit.
Pontillo countered that assault requires a showing that the suspect intended to hurt the officer. “If a police officer is pursuing a suspect and he falls, that’s resisting but not assault,” he said. “You’ve got to do something to the officer to warrant assault.”
Among other examples cited by Vucinaj were 72 attempted thefts classified as misdemeanor jostling.
Vucinaj said those cases — largely involving sleeping passengers in the transit system in 2016 and 2017 — should have been classified as attempted grand larceny, a felony index crime.
Jostling is defined under the law as someone placing their hand in the proximity of a person’s pocket or bag. “There were times when they zipped open the bags and put their hands in their pockets, and they called those jostling,” Vucinaj said. “Those are attempted grand larcenies, and attempts count on the index crimes.”
Pontillo disagrees that there is a significant problem with jostling cases and said Vucinaj was misreading the rules. “You have to establish intent under the statute to charge grand larceny,” he said.
The captain also cited 32 possible grand larcenies classified as lost property.
Vucinaj says cops are too quick to say someone lost their wallet or cell phone, when the circumstances suggest a pickpocket was at work. He provided The News with summaries of 32 lost property reports where the language is strikingly similar. “Wallets don’t just fall out of pockets at such a high frequency,” he said.
Pontillo said lost property reports are carefully monitored for fudging. “That’s one of the categories we look at the most,” he said. “The definitions of the penal law can be convoluted. You have to have evidence a crime took place.”
Vucinaj has seen 12 reports he claims involve other types of statistical manipulation, including classifying a shooting where no one is injured as reckless endangerment, criminal mischief or “investigate shots fired” even when someone has been clearly targeted.
Vucinaj says the proper classification is attempted assault 2 or attempted murder, both felony index crimes.
Last March, Vucinaj responded to a report of a shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that was classified as criminal mischief. A car had been hit and there were three shell casings on the ground.
Witnesses told him the gunman fired at two other men as they sprinted into a building.
“The guy was shooting at them and they made it criminal mischief,” he said. “That’s not criminal mischief.”
A police official said these incidents are analyzed closely, and if someone reports they were targeted, then the classification would be changed to attempted assault.
“That’s why detectives get these cases,” he said. “There’s a lot of followup, and detectives regularly change things.”