inside the office of the nypd police commissioner

INSIDE THE OFFICE OF THE NYPD POLICE COMMISSIONER TRIAL

She ran out and saw her sister, Patrice, struggling with three men, who were plainclothes detectives who had not identified themselves as police, according to a lawsuit the sisters filed in 2015. One lawsuit involving the use of racist language, which the city settled for $70,000, resulted from a May 2014 incident in which Charlene Jack heard a scream from the street below her Brooklyn apartment. There’s rampant sexism and racism, not unrelated in what we see when they deal with the public.” If you’re a person of color in the police department or a woman, you are treated quite differently than white men. “There has to be a fundamental shift in the way NYPD and officers think about their behavior, inside and outside the department. “The abusive language, that’s a function of the culture of the department, and it starts with the leadership,” he said. “The police department doesn’t take misconduct seriously and it needs to.” The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.ĭunn said that while it’s important for individual officers to face consequences for their actions, the entire culture of the department needs to change, starting with drastic changes to the NYPD’s hiring and promotion processes. “The question is, how come people aren’t getting disciplined at all, even with what’s available?” Dunn said. Most cops who are found guilty of serious misconduct get sensitivity training or docked vacation days.

INSIDE THE OFFICE OF THE NYPD POLICE COMMISSIONER TRIAL

For serious offenses, the deputy commissioner of trials oversees an administrative trial where an administrative law judge issues a ruling, and the NYPD commissioner makes the final decision as to what discipline to impose.

Even when the CCRB recommends that an officer be retrained, it has no say in what type of training should be offered.Ĭhristopher Dunn, the legal director of the NYCLU, told The Intercept that there’s a very limited set of disciplinary actions the department can take. The CCRB’s recommendations are nonbinding, though, and in many of the claims reviewed by The Intercept, the NYPD deemed the officers “not guilty” despite the CCRB’s findings. The board also determines the severity of the charge, and based on that conclusion, it recommends punishment, ranging from termination to trainings or docked vacation days. In all of the other cases, the officers received penalties ranging from docked vacation days to added training.Īfter investigating a complaint, the CCRB, an independent body, comes to a conclusion about whether a claim is substantiated. There’s been only one termination, one instance of a brief suspension, one resignation, and one incident after which the officer was put on probation. In many instances, the CCRB could not definitively prove that the incident happened or determined that the complaint was unfounded, but the board found that 554 claims were substantiated.Īn Intercept analysis of the NYCLU’s CCRB data found that almost no officers faced serious consequences in the more than 500 substantiated claims of using offensive language, which took place across almost three decades. The CCRB defines an “offensive language” incident as one in which bias - racial, gender, LGBTQ+, religious, and a host of other categories - is evident. The CCRB has received tens of thousands of claims of offensive language since 1985, according to records published by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which run through July 2020. (CAPstat’s organizers emphasize that the website “is a demonstration project and does not represent the universe of data of police misconduct in New York City.”)Ī large majority of those lawsuits are still pending, but the 14 that have been settled have cost the city $508,001 in just four years.Ĭomplaints filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a regulatory body charged with investigating allegations of misconduct against the NYPD, reveal a similar pattern. NYPD officers were accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, or transphobia in 70 lawsuits between January 2015 and June 2018, according to the database CAPstat, a website created by public defenders that collects information on the NYPD, including on federal civil rights lawsuits.

Officers face virtually no serious consequences for accusations of sexual assault and violent attacks that result in severe physical injury.Ī review of lawsuits against the department as well as recently public civilian complaints reveal that the lack of accountability extends to accusations of shockingly racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-trans behavior - the kind of offensive behavior that gets regular people fired and dragged online. The New York City Police Department is notorious for its culture of impunity.

Inside the office of the nypd police commissioner