Michael Birch, a police officer with the New York Police Department claims he was punished for not racially profiling black and Latino people, according to a January report from the New York Daily News. Now, Gawker has obtained and published a portion of a secret recording Birch made of conversation with two men he claims were his superiors. In the recording, it appears Birch was being scolded for not arresting more black people and Latinos.
In the lawsuit filed earlier this year, 44-year-old Birch, a transit cop who was working in Brooklyn at the time the recording was made, claims he was punished in various ways, such as not being allowed overtime hours and had his professional activities scrutinized as a result of refusing to specifically target teens of color in the subway.
According to the New York Daily News, Birch said he made the recording in 2011 when he was meeting with superior officers after receiving a poor performance review. The full audio from this meeting has not been publicly released, but according to the Daily News, the people in the recording, who Birch says were his bosses at the time, criticized him for mostly arresting women and white people for jumping turnstiles, while claiming that most of the people jumping turnstiles were teenage black and Latino males.
In a portion of the audio obtained by Gawker, Birch can be heard saying, "I stop everybody. I'm not targeting anybody." Also in the recording, one of the people Birch says was his superior officer told him, "You’re like the fire department. You’re just waiting. The proactive is not there... putting your hands on a limited amount of people and not the right people," according to The Daily News.
Birch told Gawker this week that he interpreted the conversation to mean that his superiors were "basically telling me it’s OK to racially profile."
An attorney for Birch told the New York Daily News in January that Birch had since been transferred from Brooklyn to Bed-Stuy, where "miraculously, he has had no performance problems."
The NYPD and an attorney for Birch did not immediately reply to Complex's requests for comment.
