NYC watchdog has become toothless

Few consequences despite complaints

One New York City police officer was accused of pepper-spraying a woman, then denying her medical treatment while she was handcuffed in a Bronx holding cell.

Another officer slammed a 51-year-old man who had been arguing with some restaurant workers onto the floor, knocking him unconscious, the man said.

A third officer was accused of tackling a gay man during a pride parade and using a homophobic slur.

The city’s independent oversight agency that investigates police misconduct found enough evidence in all three cases to conclude that the officers should face the most severe discipline available, including suspension or dismissal from the force.

But in the end, senior police officials downgraded or outright rejected those charges, and the officers were given lesser punishments or none at all — the kind of routine outcome that has left the Police Department facing a crisis of trust in its ability to discipline its own.

“It’s a very raw thing,” recalled Zakariyya Amin, who said he was left deeply disillusioned by how the Police Department handled his case involving the incident in the restaurant. “I wake up, still seeing this guy throwing me around, pushing me around.”

This pattern of lenient punishment holds true for about 71 percent of the 6,900 misconduct charges over the last two decades in which the agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, recommended the highest level of discipline and a final outcome was recorded, according to an analysis of recently released data by The New York Times.

In case after case, the records show that the Police Department often used its power over the disciplinary process to nullify the review board’s determination that serious misconduct had occurred and that the stiffest punishment should be meted out.

The department regularly ignored the board’s recommendations, overruled them or downgraded the punishments, even when police officials confirmed that the officers had violated department regulations, The Times found. All the while, the city paid millions of dollars to resolve lawsuits from people filing complaints in some of those very same cases.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected on a platform that included reining in police misconduct, but these trends have gone largely unchanged during his stewardship of the department.

The analysis shows that since de Blasio took office in 2014, the department has overruled the board’s recommendation in more than half of the cases in which the board sought the most severe discipline.

In the first half of 2019, the police commissioner at the time, James O’neill, imposed the penalty recommended by the review board in just three out of the 14 cases the panel prosecuted.

In one of the remaining cases, the Police Department decided to allow an officer to go unpunished after the review board concluded that he had used excessive force in punching

a 14-year-old boy. In another case, the department chose not to take action against an officer found to have used a chokehold to lift a handcuffed man off his feet and slam him into a car. The release of the Civilian Complaint Review Board records comes as police departments across the country are under mounting pressure to remove problematic officers from their forces after the death of George Floyd.

As protests swept the city and nation this summer, both de Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot Shea urged the public to have confidence in the city’s ability to hold officers accountable. But the data offers further evidence of the challenges that outside oversight agencies face in going up against police forces.

Shea, who was appointed a year ago, has imposed the board’s recommended penalty in only two of the 28 cases in which charges were brought, records show. After learning that The Times had inquired about how Shea has handled misconduct, the Police Department issued a news release last week promoting his record on discipline. It said that under Shea, the department had made several changes, including adopting disciplinary guidelines that standardize penalties.

“We ask for the public’s trust — and the public must know we are worthy of it,” Shea said.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board was established in 1993 by Mayor David Dinkins and the City Council to address widespread complaints that police officers were operating with impunity, rarely facing consequences for harassment and brutality, particularly in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Residents who believed that they had been subjected to misconduct often felt they had no recourse, which led to a growing resentment of the police.

The Dinkins administration envisioned that the board would be independent of the Police Department, with its own investigators and subpoena power, and would give the public confidence that abusive officers would be held accountable.

But the data, released for the first time in the agency’s history, instead suggests that the board has become all but toothless. The public can file complaints, but the board, often referred to as the CCRB, has little ability to ensure that officers deemed troublesome or worse will face serious consequences.