Case not closed

It took New York City’s Department of Investigation nearly six months to finish an inquiry Mayor de Blasio initially promised would take only 30 days: a dive into the NYPD’s handling of protests after George Floyd’s death last spring.

What DOI finally produced Friday was hardly worth the wait.

The 115-page report found that “some police officers engaged in actions that were, at a minimum, unprofessional and, at worst, unjustified excessive force or abuse of authority,” and more alarmingly, that “the department itself made a number of key errors or omissions that likely escalated tensions, and certainly contributed to both the perception and the reality that the department was suppressing rather than facilitating lawful First Amendment assembly and expression.”

But the document stops short of assigning fault. Which is to say, there’s no indication who made fateful errors, which means accountability remains elusive. De Blasio isn’t complaining. “I think if people say, we did our job, but we didn’t do good enough, we need to do better and agree to it and accept it and embrace it, that’s something that I actually feel good about.” That’s not the mantra of the NYPD under Compstat, and it shouldn’t guide exhaustive after-action reviews, either.

How thorough was DOI’s investigation? Probers didn’t interview any protesters, and refused to tell this Board how many NYPD officers were interviewed, beyond the six identifiedin the report. While de Blasio on Friday blamed now-former NYPD Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo, who resigned in October, for “a lot of what happened,” DOI revealed in a footnote that staffers never interviewed Pichardo, and declined to subpoena him after he resigned.

This is becoming a pattern for the watchdog agency, which failed to interview the mayor himself in an inquiry into whether he interfered politically with a probe of yeshiva educational standards. Why?