Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret

https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-civilian-complaint-review-board-editors-note

by jbegley • 6 years ago

244 90 6 years ago

tehwebguy• 6 years ago

12k complaints over 35 years and 7-8M population, not sure if low or high

catalogia3• 6 years ago

I think that depends on how severe they are. If that's 12 thousand reports of covered up beatings, that's extremely alarming. If it's 12 thousand reports of "showed up five minutes late to work", that's less alarming.

jellicle• 6 years ago

They're complaints by the public about police treatment of them, so have nothing to do with "showing up late to work".

They are also only records where the complaint has been substantiated by the [tilted towards police] Civilian Complaint Review Board, so only the most egregious and well-documented complaints are present. If you got the crap beat out of you, but no one else saw it and the officer says you fell down the stairs 8 or 10 times, that's not a substantiated complaint. If there's video footage of your beating but the NYPD declines to turn the footage over to the CCRB, then that's not a substantiated complaint.

kingkawn3• 6 years ago

Did you write this without reading anything at all about this database?

schwanksta• 6 years ago

There are more complaints than that, but these are all closed complaints for any officer who has had at least one substantiated allegation. It's only a fraction.

danso2• 6 years ago

And it's only for currently active officers, right?

strathmeyer2• 6 years ago

I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero).

I guess you would also need to go make a complaint and see what the odds of it being taken are.

mcherm• 6 years ago

I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero).

Except that this approach is NOT useful because police malfeasance is NOT distributed evenly. For example, over my lifetime I have only seen one case I can recall of police misbehavior, and I'm not sure that one even rises to the level of "malfeasance".

Perhaps if I were black and lived in New York City (where "stop and frisk" was an official policy for years) I would have a very different impression.

It is for exactly this reason that it is important to use actual statistics instead of personal anecdotes.

bitcurious• 6 years ago

I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero).

I would be surprised if the average American had a dozen interactions with police in a given year, not to mention dozens of instances of police misbehavior.

Can you share a bit about your life? What context do you have for dozens of instances of police abuse?

DenisM5• 6 years ago

In two decades I’ve had a handful interactions and witnessed quite a few more in Seattle - zero malfeasance observed. Most people who are happy with the police will never be loud about it, but they do vote.

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

It’s hard to say if this data is telling us anything notable. It seems like 11% of the NYPD has had at least one claim against them substantiated. But isn’t that to be expected? Each officer probably has on the order of a thousand interactions with citizens each year on the low end. Over a ten year period, wouldn’t even a high performing nearly perfect officer violate some rule within their complex policing guidelines just because they are imperfect humans, as we all are? Many of those violations are also likely minor and not material as far as constructing an anti police narrative.

The article notes that only 303 of 36000 officers (0.8%) have 5 or more substantiated violations against them. The particulars of those should be examined more closely perhaps, but overall I’m not taking this as a sign of things being irrevocably broken. It even suggests that minor tweaks (reforms) would work, as they have elsewhere like in Seattle.

Kye• 6 years ago

If that were true, it would be in their interests to publish and promote data that contradicted the image of a force of violent goons.

zepto• 6 years ago

What data could contradict such an image?

Generally, data doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced, and can usually be used to support a wide variety of contradictory interpretations.

Avoiding this is why science has to be so rigorous.

kingkawn3• 6 years ago

Except the data substantiates the image of a force of violent goons

dencodev2• 6 years ago

I would imagine if I did anything at my workplace that these cops get complaints for, I would get fired instantly, even if the complainant wasn't able to substantiate it.

dexterdog3• 6 years ago

You probably don't have a union.

jezclaremurugan• 6 years ago

"Thirty-four officers have had 40 or more allegations against them."

That's 34 people who should be off the streets - so that's notable.

It would also be interesting to find the count of claims where the board was unable to get evidence it was entitled to.

robk• 6 years ago

Could be the same complainant with a grudge on a particular beat. Likely not but blanket statements like yours aren't helpful.

quercusgrisea• 6 years ago

If you think these numbers are anything other than the tip of the iceberg you're incredibly naive. Consider how many victims of police violence have the means to make a complaint to the CCRB. The fact that these complaints (to this point) have almost never resulted in the firing or disciplining of violent officers makes filing the complaint itself mostly pointless. Add to that the fear of retribution from the NYPD, who have your address and have already made you a victim, and it's shocking that there are this many on file.

kerkeslager2• 6 years ago

Each officer probably has on the order of a thousand interactions with citizens each year on the low end. Over a ten year period, wouldn’t even a high performing nearly perfect officer violate some rule within their complex policing guidelines just because they are imperfect humans, as we all are?

No, this narrative is disgusting. People don't punch people in the face, choke them, hit them with nightsticks, spray them with tear gas and pepper spray, shoot them with rubber bullets, and fucking murder people, because they're "imperfect humans, as we all are". You wouldn't cut anyone else this kind of slack, stop putting police officers above the rest of us.

People don't report officers because they "violate some rule within their complex policing guidelines", for the simple reason that people don't know all the complex policing guidelines. People report officers because they do stuff that is obviously illegal (or should be).

What's unexpected here are how few officers have received any sort of disciplinary action.

elicash• 6 years ago

I found this interesting:

> The CCRB receives thousands of complaints every year, but it is only able to substantiate a tiny fraction of them. In 2018, the agency examined about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It substantiated 73.
> Investigators are often not able to reach conclusions on cases, in significant part because they must rely on the NYPD to hand over evidence, such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department doesn’t do so, despite a legal duty to cooperate with CCRB investigations.

SpicyLemonZest3• 6 years ago

I wish they'd give a better indication of what "in significant part" means. Is the department failing to hand over footage in 5% of cases or 50% of cases?

adamsea• 6 years ago

FWIWI think it’s reasonable to infer a number greater than 10% (I’d be greater than 30% but want to be conservative) based on how the NYPD has behaved over time when it comes to its own accountability under the law.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

Why doesn't the ccrb issue foia requests to get the data, or sue the police department?

pantaloony• 6 years ago

I'd imagine the (apparent) need to process, what, 12ish of these per weekday has something to do with it. How many can you manage in the "pipeline" at that rate? What's their staffing like? I bet they're staffed as if the police would at least kinda cooperate, so if they don't then there aren't enough personnel to follow up on any but the most clear-cut and serious cases with a bunch of public evidence already available so they know it might go somewhere if they put in the hours.

black_puppydog• 6 years ago

Interesting... shouldn't a failure to uphold the law disqualify anyone from working for the NYPD? Seems like whoever makes these calls should be personally held to account for that, since they're clearly not doing so?

justinclift4• 6 years ago

One really weird thing about ProPublica publishing this, is they seem to say "this data should be public as it's for public benefit" yet their terms for accessing the data are extremely restrictive:

https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms

  You can’t republish the raw data in its entirety, or otherwise distribute
  the data (in whole or in part) on a stand-alone basis.

So, no spreading the data around. :(

gruez• 6 years ago

How can this be enforceable? Aren't the records themselves public domain since they were produced by the government?

NotSammyHagar• 6 years ago

This could be part of the aforementioned lawsuit trying to prevent the records becoming public.

danso2• 6 years ago

The data has obviously been filtered and wrangled (e.g. it includes only complaints to officers with at least one substantiated complaint). What's offered for download is a single CSV, it may have been derived from multiple tables, and several fields may have been cleaned/normalized to the point where the data is substantially different than the raw records.

theklub• 6 years ago

"In its entirety" So delete the last line of the DB...

justinclift4• 6 years ago

The "in whole or in part" piece kind of kills that. ;)

DangitBobby• 6 years ago

It seems to me that "on a stand-alone basis" can be interpreted to mean "without context," which would mean that publishing with proper context of the data is acceptable.

justinclift4• 6 years ago

Either way, they're a single point of failure for the complete data set.

To me, that sounds non-optimal for getting the data widely used. :(

strstr• 6 years ago

This is a blanket terms of use for their data store. They want you to cite them. And they don't want it to be possible to launder the data by having a non-profit/non-commercial user re-upload, so that a for-profit user can then download.

This feels like a heavy hammer for that purpose, but it seems pretty straightforward to read between the lines on these terms.

adwi• 6 years ago

I have two friends that were former investigators for the CCRB, both as part of a criminal justice lawyer track.

The stories they told were horrifying, and even in the clearest cut cases of obvious police abuses absolutely nothing ever came from any case.

It was a glorified suggestion box, gutted by NYPD’s union, masquerading as oversight.

TheSpiceIsLife5• 6 years ago

No need to sugarcoat it.

Let’s call a spade a space.

It’s corruption, all the way up and down.

ashtonkem• 6 years ago

Corruption actually undersells it.

kbenson3• 6 years ago

I wonder if some sort of community hearing where any police officer that had a complaint filed had to sit in front of the community and have the details recounted and could explain their side would be useful. If the community had the power (through some elected or random jury) to censure, or cause a week or two probation without pay, or request a more detailed investigation of possible criminal actions, if that would weed out police the community did not deem fit.

geofft2• 6 years ago

In a functional democracy, that process is called "government."

Instead, the police make us pay taxes to fund their own paychecks and openly mocks the idea that they're answerable to us. Look at the way the NYPD union threatened the mayor's own daughter.

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

Well, not exactly, because the government is not necessarily from the community being policed.

dgellow• 6 years ago

Where do police control taxes? I never heard of this. Taxes and budgets are responsibility of governments, they then distribute the money around.

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

Would this be the threat incident?

https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twit...

https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/nypd-officer-letter-to-m...

mtnGoat• 6 years ago

The police unions would vehemently argue against anything of this type, any accountability or question answering is against their stance.

Animats2• 6 years ago

Now this is progress. If we get anything useful from the Black Lives Matter movement, it will be better cop quality control. A big problem with law enforcement is that it's rare to fire cops even when they commit felonies. That may be changing.

More cops should be fired simply for being in the bottom 5-10% of cops. Camden, NJ essentially did that, except they dumped the bottom 25%. It helped.

Think HR quality control, not punishment. Not everyone who gets hired should stay on as a cop. There's less stigma associated with doing it this way. The Army has "retention control points". If you go into the Army, and don't make sergeant, you'll be out after some number of years. You still get a honorable discharge and the benefits of that number of years of service. Maybe cops need that kind of arrangement, too.

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

What would you propose measuring?

Animats2• 6 years ago

Complaints. Successes. Management reviews. Peer reviews. Customer evaluations. Just like other jobs.

berbec• 6 years ago

Number of unarmed civilians killed

djaque• 6 years ago

I sincerely hope that with all of the well documented instances of police abuse and lack of accountability in the last few months that people in the US are starting to wake up to the problem. Additional scrutiny from journalists like this is nice, but there ultimately needs to be powerful legislative changes.

Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret

Related Stories