At 8:38 p.m. on April 26, the St. John’s County Sheriff’s office near Jacksonville, Fla. received a call from the NYPD about online threats that were made to a retired NYPD lieutenant who now lives in the area.
The threats involved images of a map with a route drawn to Florida, a picture of a man’s arm holding a gun and posts with text written over stock images about harming the victim’s children.
The call was marked by the sheriff’s office as priority 2, meaning not a crime in progress, vehicle collision or other top priority, and within five minutes the first unit was dispatched to the home of former NYPD lieutenant John Macari.
Macari, 44, is the founder of a podcast about policing that has been unsparing in its criticism of the leaders of the department for over two years. He launched the podcast, which he co-hosts with former NYPD Lt. Eric Dym, after he says he was forced to resign from the department in 2021 for refusing to take the COVID vaccine, citing a religious exemption that the NYPD denied.
On that Saturday, Macari was reading his phone on the couch at 9:05 p.m. when he heard a knock on the door and saw light beams pointed through the glass panes. He said his first instinct was to grab his gun, but afterward it got him to think more deeply about the incident.
On the face of it, the arrival of three sheriff’s vehicles to his home might seem like an appropriate response to a credible report that he had been the target of threats. But that’s not the way Macari took it.
The unexpected visit opened the door on a two-year saga that has featured an unusually public battle between the former lieutenants and outspoken department leaders. At its core is the police department’s response to the lieutenants’ concerns about what they perceive as retribution for speaking out — which at one point crossed the line into an overt threat.
Retired officers with the New York’s Finest Unfiltered podcast documented what they described as threatening posts from a former Instagram account called “AllCopsAreWoke.” Credit: Screengrab via John Macari
It was that threat that was the subject of the NYPD’s notification to the St. John’s sheriff, but the threat was hardly imminent. Macari and Dym had reported it to the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau 15 months prior, on Jan. 22, 2024.
They took their complaint to IAB because they had reason to believe the account posting the threats, AllCopsAreWoke, was run by one or more members of the department.A day earlier, they had filed a complaint with the bureau about a separate slew of negative posts about them, which they believed had been orchestrated by then Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry and then Chief of Patrol John Chell.
Retired officers with the New York’s Finest Unfiltered podcast documented what they described as threatening posts from a former Instagram account called “AllCopsAreWoke.” Credit: Screengrab via John Macari
Chell, who is now Chief of Department, the NYPD’s highest ranking uniformed officer, and Daughtry, who is now the city’s deputy mayor for public safety, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.
City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak Altus said of the possibility that Daughtry and Chell orchestrated the posts by NYPD members: “These accusations are baseless and false.”
Macari said if the NYPD’s concerns about the threats against him were genuine, the department would have alerted him that the sheriff was being dispatched and would have made the notification at a regular hour.
Asked why the NYPD dispatched the sheriff’s office on a Saturday evening, without informing Macari they were coming, a police spokesperson who declined to provide a name said, “The NYPD has no control over any other law enforcement agency or their actions.”
George Harrigan, commander of the sheriff’s office, said his officers saw the NYPD’s notification as a standard call for service from one agency to another, which he said amounted to a “check on welfare” on the target of threats.
“The subject was contacted, advised of the concerns, and that was it,” he wrote in an email. “No further law enforcement involvement was necessary.”
According to records of the call Harrigan provided to THE CITY, the NYPD also told his office that Macari “will be home to make a report.”
Since he was not informed of the visit, Macari says that’s something the NYPD couldn’t — or shouldn’t — have known, which contributed to his concerns about the interaction.
“That situation could go bad a million different ways,” Macari told THE CITY.
‘Dream Team’
The New York’s Finest: Retired & Unfiltered podcast launched in mid-2022 as a peek behind the curtain of policing and the NYPD, often through interviews with retired members.
Dym, who retired in the face of a number of complaints of improper use of force by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, joined the show as co-host toward the end of that year.
He has faulted the NYPD leadership for not standing up for his policing, which he said conformed to the training he received and used the minimum force necessary against often violent suspects.
Within months, the podcast began offering more opinion and analysis on crime and policing, which grew more pointed and critical over time. Mayor Eric Adams’ atypical appointments to lead the police department, particularly in 2023, gave them plenty of fodder.
Adams’ deputy mayor for public safety, Phil Banks, was placed in that role despite having resigned from the department a decade earlier while he was an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal bribery case; his Chief of Department, Jeffrey Maddrey, was promoted to that position after nearly losing his job for getting in a physical tussle with a female officer who said the two were having an affair.
Adams’ second police commissioner, Edward Caban, whom Dym often calls “the most inconsequential” commissioner in the department’s history, was plucked by Adams from a dead-end assignment in Brooklyn North to become the department’s number two. He rose to the top job in 2023 and was forced to resign after 15 months amid a federal protection racket probe also involving his identical twin brother.
Banks and Maddrey have also resigned after they, like Caban, were the targets of FBI raids.
Daughtry, who Dym says was propelled by “rocket fuel,” hadn’t attained the rank of sergeant before he was named assistant commissioner — prompting questions on the podcast about his leadership skills.
NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry speaks with Chief of Patrol John Chell during a crime stats update at One Police Plaza, April 3, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
And the hosts often jabbed Chell over his early-career shooting of an unarmed man in the back following a vehicle stop, a killing that Chell says was accidental but that a Brooklyn jury found in 2017 had been intentional, yielding the victim’s family $1.5 million in a subsequent civil settlement with New York City.
The podcast became a particular focus of the NYPD in 2023, when the hosts repeatedly denounced the department’s aggressive vehicle pursuit policy under Chell, and argued his stance of not letting the “bad guys” get away contributed to an NYPD sergeant’s decision to throw a cooler at a suspected drug dealer fleeing on a scooter who crashed and later died.
That November, the hosts upped their criticism of Daughtry’s meteoric rise in an episode titled “Nepotism in the NYPD and its Impact on Morale,” which highlighted his close relationship to Maddrey, for whom he’d worked as a driver for many years.
Around that time Macari heard that Chell was asking members of the department about him, and he saw one night in late November 2023 that Chell had looked up his profile on the site LinkedIn. He took a screenshot of the notification and invited Chell onto the podcast in a post on Instagram.
The post launched a flurry of negative responses from ranking members of a unit known as the Community Response Team (CRT) run by Chell and Daughtry, which had a reputation for aggressive tactics, including in vehicle pursuits.
A number of posts called Macari a rat for having worked for two years at the Internal Affairs Bureau, which investigates police wrongdoing. They also ridiculed his time assigned to building maintenance.
A post by a lieutenant in the CRT suggested that he had talked to Chell about Macari, while other posts accused Macari of having previously filed complaints against fellow officers, which Macari denied.
NYPD Chief of Department John Chell oversees the arrest of protesters in Trump Tower, March 13, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The comments continued past the weekend, when Daughtry appeared at an NYPD fraternal group event on December 4 to receive an award.
“There’s a handful of retired officers that don’t live in the state that have a lot to say about the ‘dream team’ as I like to call it,” he said that night, according to a video Macari posted to Instagram. “All of a sudden they retire and have a massive plan on how to fight crime, but nothing to contribute when they were here.”
In his post of the video, Macari chided Daughtry and the NYPD for sending “paid goons” to go after the podcast. A department attorney assigned to the CRT responded by calling Macari a “clown” and an “Instagram warrior that hides in Florida spewing hate.”
The attorney later softened his tone after saying he spoke to Daughtry “regarding your posts and attacks on him and the men and women of the NYPD.”
“The rank and file that know the men and women who you attack… have come to their defense because we believe in his and the other executives leadership,” wrote the attorney, under the handle kevin__ram.
He then addressed those who were responding to the podcast hosts in support of Daughtry and Chell, writing that “your words are appreciated, but not necessary — Commissioner Daughtry wants to stop the back and forth and have us refocus our energy on making the job better for all.”
Things died down until January 2024, when the podcast hosts aired an episode with former NYPD Officer Sal Greco discussing a Bronx restaurant with a checkered history that was frequented by top NYPD officials and co-owned by Edward Caban’s brother, Richard.
It prompted backlash from a figure associated with the restaurant, as well as from the AllCopsAreWoke (ACAW) account, which Macari and Dym believed was run by one or more members of the NYPD. It was around then that Dym started getting anonymous calls and texts that he felt mimicked the ACAW account.
Days later, on January 21, Macari and Dym filed a lengthy complaint with IAB about their suspicion that Chell and Daughtry had been organizing their troops against the podcast in order to intimidate them into silence. The complaint also mentioned ACAW but did not draw a direct connection between that account and the higher-ups.
Within a day of the complaint, however, the threats from ACAW escalated considerably, including an Instagram post with a stock photo that read, “Hopefully nothing happens to your family. Kids are a precious thing.” Another post, showing a man’s arm clutching a firearm, said “ACAW is after your home now. #StayViligant [sic].”
On January 22, Macari and Dym added those threats to the original complaint, which they did not tie to Chell or Daughtry. Their belief that ACAW was a member of service was based on the account’s interactions with other current members, and they say they were troubled by how some of them dismissed ACAW’s posts as being of no concern — at times referring to the account holder as a teenage girl living in Nebraska.
Two months after their complaint, Macari and Dym got a call from the sergeant at IAB they’d been dealing with. He informed them that the member is no longer employed by New York City, according to Macari.
When they asked if it was as a result of the probe, the sergeant said he couldn’t say, Macari told THE CITY. When they asked for the name, they got the same answer.
In response to questions, the NYPD declined to say if any members of service were disciplined as a result of the investigation, or how.
“The NYPD took these allegations seriously and initiated an investigation. The creation and dissemination of these photos was inappropriate,” said the spokesperson. “We investigated this carefully, and appropriate disciplinary action was taken.”
Macari and Dym said they need the name of the former NYPD member in order to secure orders of protection for their families, but that it should be made public for other reasons as well.
“Maybe this unhinged character is a cop somewhere in another law enforcement agency in the country,” Dym said on a podcast episode that aired Monday, where they discussed the home visit by the sheriffs. “That’s a major problem.”
Pushing Back
In the spring of 2024, a few months after they filed the complaint with IAB, the X accounts associated with Chell and Daughtry began to take on a strident tone, offering pointed pushback on the media, elected officials and even judges who they condemned as bad for public safety or anti-police. (One of the targets was an editor at THE CITY, whom the NYPD’s official X account called “deceitful.”)
Adams defended the leadership, saying they had a right to express their opinions. Macari and Dym noted on their podcast that they had been the first members of the media attacked, although less publicly.
A few months later, Daughtry reportedly confronted a longtime New York Daily News police reporter over a story he wasn’t happy with, and had to be restrained twice from physically going after him, according to Patch. The NYPD’s X account lambasted the reporter, saying he had “been as dedicated to waging personal attacks on select NYPD executives as he has been committed to writing ‘hit’ pieces about the New York City Police Department.”
NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry speaks alongside Mayor Eric Adams and border czar Tom Homan at a Manhattan federal building about a joint gang-takedown operation, April 22, 2025. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
In January 2025, the city’s Department of Investigation, responding to a complaint by the City Council speaker, released a report on the NYPD leadership’s social media postings, calling them irresponsible and unprofessional.
Macari and Dym, meanwhile, were still trying to get answers from IAB, particularly regarding whether criminal charges would be filed against whoever was behind the ACAW account. They last discussed the issue with IAB via email on April 22, four days before the home visit by the sheriffs.
But they were told repeatedly they had to file a complaint with their local police departments, something the unnamed DCPI spokesperson confirmed.
“Over the past year, the complainants were informed numerous times to file the complaint with their local police department, as that is the appropriate jurisdiction,” the spokesperson said.
Dym noted that he hasn’t stepped foot in Florida in over a year, and that he was living in Asia at the time the threats came in. He told THE CITY the whole experience had led him to lose “‘all trust and credibility for the NYPD Internal Affairs and upper echelon.”
Macari said if the NYPD already conducted a probe and knows where the threats originated, it makes no sense for the St. John’s County sheriff to launch a new investigation.
The NYPD spokesperson didn’t respond when asked whether the IAB probe is still open, and wouldn’t say whether the complaint of Chell’s and Daughtry’s alleged involvement in the CRT members’ posts was investigated.
However, the NYPD did relay a suspect’s name — of a former NYPD sergeant — to the sheriff’s office, records of the communications show. When asked about the sergeant’s departure, the NYPD said he retired in March 2024.
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