New York City Wants Journalist to Turn Over Secret Police Recordings

The city seeks material used by a journalist to write a book alleged corruption in the NYPD

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The City of New York has filed a subpoena for documents and tapes used to write a book that chronicled alleged corruption by the NYPD.

In what the New York Times described as a “broadly worded, five-page subpoena,” New York City lawyers are demanding that former Village Voice reporter Graham Rayman turn over tape recordings police officers Adrian Schoolcraft made of his superiors at the NYPD’s 81st precinct in Brooklyn. The tapes were the basis for Rayman’s book, The NYPD Tapes, which alleges officers manipulated crime data in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Rayman has said he has no intention of cooperating, telling the Times, “I think it would be malpractice for a journalist to cooperate with a subpoena like this and would have a chilling effect on what all journalists do.”

Lawyers for the city insist that the materials are central to the corruption case, cannot be obtained elsewhere, and that the subpoena is a “last resort.”

[New York Times]