Finest get slightly more open on officer discipline

The NYPD is revealing what officers are facing disciplinary action, but not much else.

The department posted its trial calendar on the NYPD website Tuesday, listing the names and ranks of cops in trouble, but not the charges or accusations that landed them in hot water.

Publicizing what goes on in the trial room at Police Headquarters is one of 13 special panel recommendations to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the department’s punitive process.

“[The calendar] is an important step and provides the people that we serve more transparency,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said. The information is the NYPD’s way of “balancing [the information] with the privacy and safety of our officers,” he said.

The special panel of former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White (photo), former Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers and former Brooklyn Federal Judge Barbara Jones suggested the trial calendar — considered a confidential document by the NYPD — be made public.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city’s police watchdog group, posts departmental trials it is prosecuting, but the list doesn’t have the name of the officer — just the incident number and the charges.

In the report released Feb. 1, White and her colleagues found the NYPD disciplinary system “imperfect,” shrouded in secrecy, and that too little information was being publicized.

The group found “an almost complete lack of transparency and public accountability” in the punitive process, White said.

The biggest culprit, the report says, is “50-a,” a section of the state’s Civil Rights Law that prevents public release of information about police disciplinary actions unless ordered by a judge. The Legislature should amend the law to provide more openness, the panel wrote.