NOT ABOVE THE LAW!
City Council rips NYPD for refusal to release details on use-of-force incidents
THE HEAD of a key City Council committee called on the NYPD to end its refusal to release precinct-level use-of-force numbers.
Donovan Richards, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said Thursday the department is violating Local Law 85, which requires the release of such data.
“The law is the law,” said Richards, a Queens Democrat. “The Council obviously will use every bit of power we have to make sure that they comply with the law.”
NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Lawrence Byrne said in a letter that the department would release boroughwide use-of-force data, but not at the precinct level because it could identify individual cops.
He cited Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which the city has claimed renders all police personnel records confidential, including disciplinary outcomes, for safety reasons.
Critics have said the city’s position is too broad, misinterprets the law and is constantly shifting.
“It seems like every other day, the NYPD has a different interpretation of 50-a,” Richards said. “It seems to me that this is just a way to skirt the responsibility around transparency and accountability.”
Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens), who sponsored the use-of-force law, blasted the department’s refusal to comply.
“That’s nonsense,” he said. “You have the city’s primary law enforcement agency violating the law that the mayor signed, with impunity and complete disdain for logic and reason.”
Lancman said “no reasonable interpretation” of the law would support the NYPD’s position.
“It’s as if the mayor has completely abdicated any responsibility for criminal justice in this city, and he’s just letting the NYPD run hog wild over the law and the public’s right to the most basic information,” he said.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson said the NYPD must comply. “The Council believes that this data is important and should be made public, as evidenced by the bill we passed in 2016. The NYPD needs to abide by that law and release this useof-force data,” he said.
Mayor de Blasio’s spokesman, Austin Finan, told the Daily News that New Yorkers “deserve a transparent and accountable Police Department. That’s why the NYPD is working toward making its use-of-force reporting more transparent while still adhering to existing laws.”
On Wednesday, NYPD spokesman Phillip Walzak provided a link to the published borough-level data online.
“In order to be transparent and comply to the fullest extent possible with laws that require use-of-force reporting, while avoiding violations of other confidentiality laws, the NYPD has published this data by borough,” he said.
“That information is readily available to the public online,” he said.
The controversy over the NYPD’s 50-a policy started when it suddenly stopped making summaries of disciplinary case outcomes available to the media. That move reversed four decades of practice.
Police officials then insisted that all disciplinary outcomes and all personnel records were confidential. Even documents entered into evidence in administrative trials open to the public are considered secret, they said.