At issue was what officers who worked under Tsachas’s command say was a long history of racist policing, and the NYPD’s failure to address it. The four officers bringing the lawsuit—Ritchie Baez, Sandy Gonzalez, Edwin Raymond, and Pedro Serrano—claim they faced discrimination and retaliation for speaking out against an illegal quota system and racist policies.

On the morning of last October 23, NYPD Deputy Inspector Constantin Tsachas took his place in front of a court reporter at the the New York City Law Department building in downtown Manhattan. The 27-year veteran of the force, who is being sued along with other high-ranking police officers including former police chiefs Bill Bratton and James O’Neill, was being deposed.

Baez, Gonzalez, and Serrano worked in the 40th Precinct in the Bronx; Raymond worked in Brooklyn in Transit District 32, under Tsachas. He, and eight other former and current police officers who have worked under Tsachas and provided sworn affidavits in support of the plaintiffs, say Tsachas told them to go after "hard targets," or Black and Latino men, and to let white and Asian men and women generally—"soft targets"—slide. They also say Tsachas punished them for not meeting quotas for arrests and summonses by taking away their overtime and banishing them to the worst posts.

Early in his testimony, when read a line from one of the affidavits saying that Tsachas told officers to "target certain groups of people when they were on patrol" and asked if he ever did that, Tsachas denied it. He then turned dismissive, saying that all the officers making allegations against him sounded the same.

"These guys are all buddies," Tsachas said, according to a previously unreported transcript of the deposition. "Of course it’s going to sound the same."

"Or they’re telling the truth," said John Scola, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

"They’re all buddies," repeated Tsachas, who over the years has risen through the ranks to be second-in-command of Brooklyn’s transit policing bureau.

Do you work for the NYPD? We'd love to talk to you. Contact the writer from a non-work device at laura.wagner@vice.com or laura.wags@protonmail.com.

In his testimony, Tsachas offered a series of similarly evasive answers to claims that he’d ordered cops to racially profile citizens ("I discussed crime statistics with officers"), enforced quotas for arrest and summonses ("I have expectations"), and gave plum overtime assignments to cops who made more arrests while stripping them from those who didn’t ("They don’t deserve it").

A union representative for Tsachas has previously denied the allegations against him. A spokesman for the the New York City Law Department, Nicholas Paolucci, told VICE that the claims against Tsachas were "meritless":

Depositions are part of the legal process and do not by themselves substantiate legal claims. In fact, not a single claim has been substantiated by plaintiffs in this case. The proper venue to defend against the meritless accusations made against our officers in this case is in a court of law, and that’s where we will present our case. Vigorously.

VICE presented the NYPD with the allegations in this story as well as a detailed list of questions; it declined to comment, citing pending litigation. The Captains Endowment Association, the group that represents members at Tsachas’s rank in the NYPD, did not respond.

Tsachas’s deposition, obtained by VICE, offers a rare look at the inner workings of the NYPD. In it, Tsachas defends himself against the suggestion that he misappropriated federal funds by saying he did it "for the benefit of the department"; admits that he did not put white officers who didn’t meet quotas on "performance monitoring," an NYPD disciplinary track; and acknowledges that he encouraged officers to hide in closets in subway stations in order to catch people hopping turnstiles.

Tsachas defends himself against the suggestion that he misappropriated federal funds by saying he did it "for the benefit of the department" and acknowledges that he encouraged officers to hide in closets in subway stations in order to catch people hopping turnstiles.

In the seven-hour deposition, Scola worked his way through the sworn affidavits of eight different police officers who are not part of the lawsuit but provided affidavits stating that Tsachas ordered them to specifically target Black and Latino men for minor infractions like fare evasion, and punished these officers with poor evaluations, undesirable shifts, or by giving them low evaluations if they didn’t meet quotas.