How An NYPD Officer Can Hit A Teen With His Car In Front Of Several Witnesses And Get Away With It

from the accountability-makes-officers-fear-for-their-job-safety dept

The NYPD has made internal discipline procedures a loop so closed that even its "independent" oversight -- the Civilian Complaint Review Board -- can't get in the door. The NYPD is effectively its own oversight. Decisions made by the CCRB can be overridden by the Police Commissioner. Even if the Commissioner agrees with the findings, recommended punishments can be departed from or ignored completely.

This story of police misconduct springs from this accountability void. ProPublica journalist Eric Umansky lives in New York City. Last year, while trick-or-treating with their daughter, his wife witnessed an unmarked police car hit a black teen. This happened in full view of several witnesses, including a person who worked at a business near the scene of the accident.

“Yeah, I saw a cop car hit a kid,” a waiter told me. He said he had a clear view of it: A handful of kids were running. One of them jumped out into the street and got hit by the police car, “probably going faster than he should have been.” He saw the boy roll over the hood and fall to the ground: “It sounded like when people hit concrete. It made a horrible sound.”

This eyewitness account agreed with what Umansky's wife had seen. But the end result wasn't a plainclothes officer being cited or disciplined for hitting a kid with his car. Instead, it was just a small part of a full-blown police rollout, where officers swarmed the street to run black teens and pre-teens up against the nearest wall.

Apparently, this is how an investigation unfolds. Officers were responding to a report that a group of teen boys had attacked another teen and stolen his cell phone. One of the officers responding was in plainclothes, driving an unmarked car against traffic. This was the officer that hit one of the running teens. A bunch of other teens who just happened to be on the street were picked up by cops and hauled to the station.

Umansky tried to follow up on this incident. The kids arrested by the officers were all released around one a.m. the next morning. They were given no paperwork on their arrests or the names of their arresting officers. Umansky was at the station the night it happened and couldn't get answers from any NYPD personnel.

He called the next day and talked to the NYPD's spokesman, who happens to be a former journalist. This was a dead end as well. The spokesman, Al Baker, simply said the arrested teens were being charged with resisting arrest. But this was the real kicker: the official word from the NYPD was that this was teen-on-car action, not the other way around.

I spoke to four witnesses, including my wife. All of them said they saw the same thing. When I called Baker back, he told me that my wife and the three others were mistaken. The car hadn’t hit the kid. The kid had hit the car.

As his statement put it: “One unknown male fled the scene and ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

And that was it. The NYPD declared its own officer free of guilt or responsibility. There's still an investigation open, but there's little chance this will result in discipline of the plainclothes officer. In fact, there's little chance it will ever be resolved at all. At this point, the CCRB has 2,848 open investigations. And, as Umansky's article points out, moving these forward is almost impossible at this point.

Since the pandemic started, officers haven’t allowed CCRB to interview them remotely, meaning investigations have effectively stalled. The police unions had objected to doing it over video.

“We won’t do Zoom,” one union spokesman told The City. The CCRB is re-starting in-person interviews soon. It noted 1,109 investigations are awaiting police officer interviews.

Most CCRB investigations aren’t completed, and not just because of police intransigence. The roughly 100 investigators can only handle so many cases at once.

Thanks to the pandemic, the CCRB's budget has been cut, meaning there's even fewer investigators digging into thousands of cases containing allegations against officers who refuse to speak to them.

Even if the CCRB decides it would rather watch a recording of the alleged incident, rather than deal with a more uncooperative witnesses, it's not going to find anything there either. First off, the NYPD stonewalls CCRB request for camera footage. Then it finds some reason to deny the request. If it can't deny the request, the CCRB will receive the footage -- with any redactions the NYPD feels are necessary -- months after it has asked for it.

More immediate access to footage is possible, but it involves having to travel to the precinct to watch the footage while bound, gagged, and heavily-supervised.

CCRB investigators can now go to a room and watch footage. The agreement stipulates that CCRB staff can only take notes. They cannot record anything or use footage they see of abuse that happens to be different from the specific incident they’re investigating. They must sign a nondisclosure agreement.

With all of these unaccountaiblity practices in place, it comes as no surprise the NYPD would claim a person hit by a car driven by one of their officers was actually just an assault on an innocent police car by a person fleeing the forces of justice.

Filed Under: accountability, ccrb, nypd, police misconduct

Oversight Board Spares NYPD's Feelings By Softening Language In Taser Complaint Report

from the say-a-prayer-for-the-people-in-power dept

The NYPD's estranged relationship with its oversight continues. The Civilian Complaint Review Board -- put into place after it became apparent the NYPD wasn't interested in policing itself -- has noticed the department is vocally supportive of better policing, but has no interest in actually making any changes to the way it disciplines its officers.

The NYPD has yet to see a civilian complaint it can't make disappear and has almost always recommended a lesser punishment for misconduct than the Board has recommended. In controversial "chokehold" cases, the Board found the NYPD was completely uninterested in doing anything about officers' use of a tactic it has outlawed.

In those cases where CCRB substantiated chokeholds, recommended Administrative Charges, and DAO became involved, none of the substantiated cases ever went to trial before a NYPD Trial Commissioner. Instead, DAO departed from CCRB’s recommendation every time. Rather than pursue the more serious Administrative Charges, DAO recommended lesser penalties or no discipline whatsoever.

Despite being shown no respect by the NYPD, the CCRB has decided to protect the badged-and-armed delicate flower of the department by softening the language in its Taser use report before publication.

In the spring, an oversight agency for the New York Police Department circulated a draft report on the use of Taser stun guns. The report highlighted “troubling” findings and issued stern recommendations: The police should create an annual report on the use of Tasers and prohibit their use on handcuffed suspects.

But the latter recommendation was removed from the final version of the report, quietly released in October by the agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, with no formal announcement. The other was removed from the executive summary and relegated to the report’s final page.

The agency also removed language highlighting what police reform advocates and civil liberties groups later said was the board’s central finding: In most Taser encounters reviewed, officers used the stun guns on people who were unarmed.

What the CCRB found wasn't encouraging. The NYPD already has a troubled history of Taser misuse. Not much is made of it because Taser deployment in the force is severely limited. But the NYPD's ability to make even a small number of civilian complaints vanish into the ether remains unchanged. The New York Times highlights the report's findings, which are disturbing and have remained unaltered.

Over the period studied in the report, from 2014 through 2015, the board’s investigators conducted full investigations of 51 of the 153 complaints filed and substantiated only three of them.

The other 102 fell by the wayside because the complainants failed to cooperate with the investigation. Perhaps some of them felt the outcome would be no different than the 94% that did make it all the way through the process. Perhaps some had outstanding warrants, unpaid tickets, a general disinterest in interacting with law enforcement, or whatever. But with only six percent of complaints being substantiated, the outcome of the NYPD's internal efforts are par for the course: lots of complaints, almost zero repercussions.

But just as disheartening is the fact that the CCRB edited its report to ensure the NYPD wouldn't even feel the weight of PRINTED WORDS.

The alterations to the report run throughout and appear to play down the findings — which remain unchanged — and remove language that could be considered charged or critical of the Police Department.

This is an organization with an inordinate amount of power -- both over the people it serves as well as the politicians that ostensibly control its budget and activities. Specific edits were made to turn the report into something as proactively exonerative as statements made by the NYPD itself in the wake of excessive force allegations. Police brass say things like "the officer's gun discharged." The CCRB -- post-editing -- says things like this:

[T]he draft report found that “there is also evidence” that Tasers were being used in response to unruly or obstinate behavior by suspects. That phrase was changed in the final version to say that “there is concern.”

Also excised was the Board's "troubling" finding that Taser deployment often occurred when suspects were already in custody. The stat -- 30% of the time -- remains. The word "troubling" is nowhere to be found. Another sentence was removed completely, apparently out of concern the NYPD might react badly to it.

"[A] review of several of the police custody complaints supports the perception that the Tasing may have occurred unnecessarily."

The NYPD needs to be subjected to strong language that draws attention unavoidably to its use of excessive force. This is the sort of thing the NYPD finds to be "appropriate" Taser use.

Mr. Sells said in an interview that during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, he learned that two separate officers used Tasers on Mr. Paul, striking him a total of 13 times — six by one officer; seven by the other — over the course of 41 seconds.

Anthony Paul is dead. He was 29 years old when he died in NYPD custody. The NYPD brushed off accusations of excessive force with the above "appropriate" statement, as well as the excuse that the Tasers failed to deliver even more electricity to the eventual corpse of Mr. Paul.

"...not all of the “activations” resulted “in actual electrical circuit charge transmissions.”

A government entity that has the power to kill civilians who do not immediately subject themselves to an arrest is apparently too weak to handle direct criticism of its actions. The Board has wiped any implications from its findings, leaving the stats to speak for themselves. The facts aren't pretty, but the NYPD has no problem ignoring hard numbers and incontrovertible facts. But it must be protected from any insinuations that its use of force is sometimes too much… or occasionally unjustifiable.

Filed Under: abuse, ccrb, nypd, oversight, police, taser

NYPD Raises Middle Finger To Public, Oversight In Inspector General's Year-End Roundup

from the NO-ONE-polices-the-police dept

The NYPD's Office of the Inspector General has just released its year-end report summarizing its 2015 oversight work. We covered its use of force report late last year -- a report which found the NYPD completely uninterested in policing itself. The report noted the NYPD has "historically… failed to discipline officers who use force without justification."

This report points to the OIG's investigation of chokehold use by NYPD officers -- the tactic that ended Eric Garner's life during his arrest. As is the case with most other excessive uses of force, this tactic -- which has been forbidden by department policy -- tended to be greeted with shrugs from PD supervisors and a middle finger raised to the general public.

CCRB [Civilian Complaint Review Board[ generally believed that severe penalties were warranted in chokehold cases. CCRB recommended Administrative Charges, the most serious level of discipline within NYPD, in nine of the ten cases where it found an NYPD officer had used a chokehold.

The CCRB is another oft-ignored element of the NYPD's oversight. It investigates complaints and recommends discipline. The CCRB is also part of the problem, as the earlier report on use of force points out:

The total number of substantiated force allegations represents approximately 2.0% of the more than 10,000 allegations of force received by CCRB from 2010 to 2014.

But in the ten cases the OIG examined, the CCRB recommended severe penalties. This, of course, resulted in next to nothing happening to officers who deployed the banned form of restraint.

NYPD, by contrast, believed that lesser penalties were warranted in substantiated chokehold cases. NYPD’s Department Advocate’s Office (DAO) is the NYPD unit that prosecutes NYPD disciplinary matters and, until April 11, 2013, was responsible for prosecuting all substantiated use-of-force cases that resulted in Administrative Charges. In those cases where CCRB substantiated chokeholds, recommended Administrative Charges, and DAO became involved, none of the substantiated cases ever went to trial before a NYPD Trial Commissioner. Instead, DAO departed from CCRB’s recommendation every time. Rather than pursue the more serious Administrative Charges, DAO recommended lesser penalties or no discipline whatsoever.

The NYPD won't fix its chokehold problem. End of sentence. Those at the very top are no different than those in NYPD middle management.

The Police Commissioner has the authority in all cases to make a final determination about discipline. In those substantiated chokehold cases presented to the Police Commissioner, he rejected CCRB’s disciplinary recommendation, imposing a less severe penalty than that recommended by CCRB or deciding that no discipline was warranted at all.

The NYPD does not want to discipline its officers for force-related misconduct. It just doesn't. It has rejected the OIG's recommendations on two critical matters related to force-related complaints.

The OIG has recommended that a separate penalty be attached to each count in multiple-count disciplinary actions. The NYPD, on the other hand, feels this is too punitive. Apparently, every use of force incident needs to be weighed against all the small moments during an incident where the officer didn't apply excessive force.

NYPD reports that it examines the totality of the actions of each officer in a given situation to determine the appropriate penalty.

The NYPD has also rejected the recommendation that it perform better tracking of use of force incidents.

According to NYPD, the factors that result in a police officer’s use of force, and the determination of the question of whether that force was proportional or excessive, are impacted by several variables. NYPD states that attempting to measure the Department-wide impact of excessive force penalties on new excessive force incidents would not be a useful endeavor.

Depends on what you mean by "useful." NYPD brass apparently feel tracking use of force incidents, their frequency and compiling data on repeat offenders is a waste of resources. The OIG says it is "concerned" with the department's lack of interest in transparency and accountability, but unfortunately, all it can do is "continue to review and report on systemic use of force issues."

Also of note is the fact that most of the NYPD's responses to OIG recommendations are that the department "agrees in principle." Otto von Bismarck had something to say about that line of thinking:

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of putting it into practice.

The NYPD won't change because no one who could propel change has any interest in doing it. NYPD officials aren't even willing to make incremental improvements. They resist the OIG's recommendations and undercut the CCRB decisions habitually. Some of this can be chalked up to a long, mutually-beneficial relationship with the city's previous mayor, who found the NYPD to be the embodiment of all that is right and good. There's been a regime change -- both within the mayor's office and the police commissioner's -- but the same problems have carried over. And they won't change if no one's willing to hold those at the top responsible for everything they've permitted and fostered under their supervision.

Filed Under: ccrb, law enforcement, nypd, oig

Civilian Complaint Board Finds The Public And Their Cell Phones Are Foisting Some Accountability On The NYPD

from the the-camera-is-on-the-other-eye...-or-something dept

There's probably not much the NYPD will like about the latest CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board) report, but then again, the CCRB isn't really there to serve up the sort of stuff it likes. What it will discover is that some form of accountability is now inevitable, rather than remaining a lofty ideal thrust in its general direction by a handful of activist groups and politicians.

Cameras are changing the way complaints are investigated. The report notes that video footage relevant to CCRB investigations is leading to more substantiated complaints.

Under the preponderance of evidence standard that the CCRB must use in evaluating cases, the increased prevalence of video in force cases has led to an increased percentage of cases where CCRB can substantiate the use of improper or excessive force. The percentage of substantiated force complaints with video evidence increased from 15% in 2012, to 26% in 2013, 34% in 2014, and 45% in the first half of 2015.

Substantiated cases of abuse of authority, discourtesy, and offensive language increasingly have contained video evidence: 6% of such cases in 2012 had video evidence, as compared to 23% during the first half of 2015.

So, not great news for the NYPD. While it is seeing an overall drop in complaints (thanks largely to the scaling back of stop-and-frisk), more and more cases are being decided in favor of citizens, thanks to camera footage, most of which has been obtained by the citizens themselves. (Note that most of what's detailed in this report occurred before the NYPD's body cam pilot program began.)

While the ubiquity of cameras has begun to force a certain amount of restraint on police officers, it hasn't been able to cure them of all their bad habits.

In the first half of 2015, the highest substantiation rate by allegation was for retaliatory summons and retaliatory arrest, which were substantiated at a rate of 70% and 58%, respectively.

And despite everyone and their mother being able to produce footage, officers just keep on lying.

In the first half of 2015, the CCRB closed investigations that noted 19 allegations of false official statement, 18 of which stemmed from incidents that occurred in 2014. Those 19 allegations of false official statement are on pace to far exceed the 26 allegations noted in 2014. The reason for the significant increase is primarily the result of video evidence.

On the bright side, the number of cameras in use at any given time is likely discouraging a few would-be complainants from filing bogus paperwork.

In the first half of 2015, civilian complaints against the police decreased by 22%, as compared to the first half of 2014. The CCRB received 2,092 complaints from January through June 2015, as compared to 2,698 for the same time period in 2014. This is the lowest number of complaints since 2001.

Now for more bad news: the thing about "bad apples?" Not just a stereotype.

More than 80% of NYPD officers have had no complaints in the last 18 months, whereas 14% of officers are responsible for 100% of all complaints. Five percent of officers on the force—about 1,800—are responsible for 80% of the force complaints.

There's a good chance their fellow officers know who these problematic cops are. And yet, they remain employed. NYPD officials absolutely know who these officers are. And yet, it would appear a great many of them are still employed. If the CCRB is going to be effective, and if the NYPD brass wants to be taken seriously when it claims to care about ensuring New York's Finest only contains the finest, then these numbers will need to drop by next year's report -- both in terms of overall complaints and the number of still-employed officers generating a majority of complaints.

Filed Under: accountability, ccrb, civilian complaint review board, mobile phones, nypd, police, transparency