BRuTAL COP
‘THE DAMAGE IS PROFOUND’ He failed to record his deeds
FOR EVERY officer of the NYPD, their memo book serves as a daily memoir of each eight-hour tour.
Respond to an accident? Put it in the book. Conduct a vertical patrol? Put it in the book. Stop and question someone? Put it in the book.
Sgt. David Grieco is the exception to that rule.
Eight times while working the 75th Precinct in East New York, Grieco was cited for taking some form of police action — but failing to write down the details.
Sources said officers, especially young ones, can forget to make their required notations. The omission can be overlooked if the officer made an arrest or wrote a summons, which gives supervisors a secondary account of what’s missing in the memo book.
With Grieco, only one of his eight instances involved an arrest. On the other seven occasions, details only emerged after he was accused of misconduct via the Internal Affairs Bureau, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, or a lawsuit.
The results of the IAB and CCRB probes remain a mystery. The NYPD does not comment on disciplinary matters, claiming any statements would violate Section 50-a of the state’s Civil Rights Code.
But the 12-year veteran now faces more memo book issues — another lawsuit, this one from a 27-year-old construction worker.
Attorney Victor Brown claims his client, Omar McFarland, was stopped five times by officers in the 75th Precinct. Three times, Grieco participated — but you wouldn’t know it from his memo book.
According to the lawyer, police held McFarland for hours — twice in front of his 2-yearold daughter, the only times he wasn’t handcuffed — before turning him loose.
He received just a single disorderly conduct summons, later dismissed by a judge. As for the other four times, the city says there is no record of the stops.
“Their position seems to be, ‘We don’t have any record of that happening — therefore, it didn’t happen,’” Brown said. Grieco refused to talk to The News about the incidents.