Report: NYPD Withholding Evidence From Investigations Into Police Abuse

The NYPD Is Withholding Evidence From Investigations Into Police Abuse

The NYPD has regularly failed to turn over key records and videos to police abuse investigators at New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. “This just seems like contempt,” said the now-retired judge who ordered the NYPD to use body cameras.

by Eric Umansky and Mollie Simon Aug. 17
Pro Publica

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This story is co-published with THE CITY.

ProPublica is working with THE CITY, WNYC/Gothamist and The Marshall Project to report on how allegations of misconduct by law enforcement officers in New York are investigated and to examine and analyze police disciplinary records that have recently been made public.

Last summer, New York City police officers drove by two friends sitting on a bench outside a Brooklyn school. The officers stopped, later telling investigators that they suspected the two — a 16-year-old and 21-year-old, both male and Black — of carrying marijuana. As the teenager ran, one of the officers grabbed the 21-year-old from behind, lifted him up and slammed him into the pavement.

The officer, who was 60 pounds heavier than the young man, broke three bones in the man’s left foot, and among other injuries caused a brain bleed, leaving him hospitalized for six days.

The bare details we know about the case come from the city agency charged with digging into civilians’ complaints of police misconduct, New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. But investigators faced a significant impediment: the NYPD itself.

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Seventy years ago, a coalition of advocacy groups in New York pushed the city to address “police misconduct in their relations with Puerto Ricans and Negros specifically.”

In response, the city created the Civilian Complaint Review Board. It was a committee of high-ranking police officials.

Police unions have fought ever since to limit the CCRB’s authority and independence. When Mayor John Lindsay moved to put a few civilians on the board in the mid-1960s, police unions organized a ballot measure that rolled back the change. “I’m sick and tired of giving in to minority groups with their whims and their gripes and shouting,” the head of one of the unions said.

Nearly 30 years later, David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, sought to move the CCRB out from under the NYPD. The proposed change stirred union leaders to gather thousands of off-duty officers outside City Hall. Officers, mostly white, stormed through barricades and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“They drained cans of beer and pushed and screamed and shook their fists in the air and shoved people and kicked them and threatened them,” wrote Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. “Some waved toilet plungers and others held up a sign saying, ‘Dump the Washroom Attendant.’ This meant the mayor.”

The lawless spectacle generated its own outrage and, in 1993, Dinkins’ changes were enacted, among them granting the CCRB subpoena power.

The law is clear. The agency “may compel the attendance of witnesses and require the production of such records and other materials as are necessary for the investigation of complaints.”

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