NYPD-tracking database to go national

A New York police accountability database that tracks lawsuits against cops will be expanded into a nationwide project.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers announced Thursday it would grow out CAPstat, a database compiled by the Legal Aid Society in New York that logs payroll information, certain available disciplinary history and lawsuits against officers in the NYPD.

“As the nation has witnessed in the context of several high-profile cases of police misconduct in recent months and years, a singularly important, persistent and corrosive problem throughout the nation’s criminal justice systems has been the lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to law enforcement misconduct,” the executive director of the defense lawyers’ group, Norman Reimer, said in a statement.

The database, which will be known as the Full Disclosure Project, will make use of lawsuits, community complaints and body camera footage, according to the organization.

To help the group create the police misconduct tracker, it hired Julie Ciccolini, who helped the Legal Aid Society create CAPstat.

New York’s CAPstat project, made public in March 2019, includes more than 2,000 lawsuits filed in New York’s federal courts between 2015 and 2018.

CAPstat was created in part in response to the city’s tight police secrecy law, known as 50-a, which hid cop misconduct records from public view. The law has since been repealed, but New York misconduct records are still hidden after unions sued that the repeal was unconstitutional.

“The formation of defender and public databases create a political dynamic, a ‘virtuous cycle’ of reform, that will induce prosecutors, courts, impacted community groups, legislators and other stakeholders to lift the shroud of secrecy which surrounds law enforcement misconduct,” said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project.