One night in October 2009, a team of police officers, led by a deputy chief, raided the home of a police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft, and dragged him out of his bed and to the psychiatric emergency room at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. He was held for six days in a locked ward. No judge was involved. There was no hearing.

The decision to take him to the hospital was made solely by armed men who happened to be his superior officers in the Police Department with a vested interest in shutting him up.

For more than a year, Officer Schoolcraft had been collecting information about what appeared to be illegal arrests and manipulation of crime statistics in the 81st Precinct, in Brooklyn. Along the way, he secretly recorded orders from supervisors to lock up people without cause. He also documented cases in which armed robberies were classified as “lost property” cases. A few weeks before he was seized in his home, he met with investigators for the Internal Affairs Bureau and told them about what he had uncovered. He began recording after his bosses accused him of loafing because he was not meeting their goals for arrests and summonses.

To date, neither Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg nor Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly have publicly discussed why Officer Schoolcraft was thrown into a psychiatric ward. On Tuesday, that silence continued: both the city’s Law Department and the Police Department declined to discuss the Schoolcraft situation because he is now suing the city.