A whistleblowing NYPD sergeant had a hand in the monstrous spike in crime that plagued a Queens precinct last year when his scrutiny of fellow cops’ official reports prompted them to properly classify a wave of felony complaints, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.
For doing his job, Sgt. Robert Borrelli was banished to an abysmal night shift at Central Booking in the basement of the South Bronx criminal courthouse, the sources said.
“This guy is definitely a significant reason for the crime [spike]” in the 100th Precinct, one police source said, pointing out that “you could correlate when he started looking at the [complaints] to the increase in crime in this precinct.”
In December, The Post first reported that the Rockaways were getting rocked by a crime wave.
Burglaries jumped 144 percent, from 54 the previous year to 132. Felony assaults climbed 66 percent from 78 to 130 and robberies rose 31 percent from 63 to 83.
The 47-year-old cowboy cop, who’s eligible to retire and collect his full pension in just 18 months, threatened to go to Internal Affairs if anyone downgraded a single crime, a police source said.
“He made sure that everybody did it the way they were supposed to. He was making sure it was being done by the book,” the source said.
On one occasion, Borrelli got into a beef with the squad commander over a burglary report and contacted the complainant in his quest to make sure the crime was accurately reported, sources said.
“They’re downgrading shootings to reckless endangerment when they should be attempted assault,” Borrelli told The Post, adding that it was done “to keep the crime index low, as well as [downgrading] plenty of other felonies.”
He took his claims to Internal Affairs, but investigators insist they claims are baloney, sources said.
One source called him a “loose cannon” and a “malcontent” with a long disciplinary history.
Additional reporting by Michael Gartland