No Wins | S1 Ep4

February 4, 2019·38 min·3 clips

Internal NYPD records show Detective Terrell was found guilty of sexually harassing a minor and lost only vacation days.

The villain story starts to wobble. The host lays out the competing versions of Pedro Hernandez's case: Manny says Terrell was the villain, while Terrell denies personal involvement with Pedro, calls the allegations lies, and says Manny conspired with gang members. Then an older complaint record changes the air in the room. Richard Emery, former head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, reviews Terrell's officer complaint index and says very few officers had that many complaints. The timing matters. People had complained before Manny became central to the story, which makes it harder to write everything off as Manny's vendetta. From there, the episode moves into a smaller, harsher room. A mother remembers being in a cell with all three sons nearby, laughing and crying because she could not protect them. Her fear is practical, not abstract. She tells her 17-year-old son, Ja'Shawn, not to say anything because, in her words, you have no wins. That line sits there. Speak back and force may follow. Stay quiet and it still may not matter. The system may believe the officers anyway. Then the reports become the battleground. In her account, the family had already left the precinct when police confronted them. In the officers' reports, they refused to leave. That small difference does a lot of work. In the police version, the alleged refusal explains the arrests and the force. Charges followed: trespassing, obstructing justice, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct against the mother and the older boys. Prosecutors kept pushing guilty pleas for three years. The episode does not hand out a clean win. It even complicates Manny near the end, previewing his own past as an aggressive young cop accused of crossing lines before the department turned on him.

As heard by us

A careful police-accountability story that lets complaint records and testimony collide.

The chapter shifts the argument from Manny's version of events to the complaints and records surrounding Detective David Terrell. Richard Emery's account of Terrell's complaint history gives the story some real weight, and those complaints are treated as evidence rather than…

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Why you'd press play

If you want the case file to matter as much as the storytelling, start here.

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