Fairness, discipline and the NYPD
Aformer Emergency Service Unit cop I know, who over the course of his 25-year career had seen it all — been shot and stabbed, saved kids, been reprimanded for wearing too many medals and been given orders to shoot a polar bear in Prospect Park — had once gotten his integrity questioned by his NYPD bosses.
It was 1982, and the newly-minted sergeant wanted back into the famed unit that fellow cops call upon when they need a hand. Then a hidden obstacle got thrown up in his path: A boss on the job disclosed a civilian complaint against him for some stolen jewelry at the scene of an earlier ESU job. No one had ever questioned his truthfulness on or off the job, and, long story short, it was unfounded.
But this cop I know was stunned. He’d never heard of this allegation. He’d never been asked to defend himself. Yet now, as he sought to advance his career, this accusation showed up as a character issue in his personnel folder at the job interview.
Established in 1993, the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board regularly delivers dispositions on adjudicated cases, along the lines of four categories of misconduct: force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, offensive language. But nowhere in its voluminous reporting does it post data on false accounts by disgruntled or even malicious complainants. Yes, the board reports on unfounded and unsubstantiated complaints – including those events that never occurred – but it doesn’t routinely inform officers of those kinds of outcomes though of course, it’s understood by all that a well-intentioned person may believe that the actions of an officer were improper when they were actually appropriate.
But the board’s work has prompted no deeper dive into questions about why some cases fall apart and complainants disappear or whether there are ramifications for wrongly pointing fingers.
Pushing hard for that would enhance its credibility. In most contexts, there are legal implications for fudging the facts. There’s been a ton written lately on “testilying” by cops. Zero tolerance for false narratives should apply when the reputation and career of a police officer is at stake.
Certainly, we must never overlook the reality that a small percentage of officers are guilty of wrongdoing. So are a small percentage of workers all professions. As Jack Maple always said, cops don’t come from Planet Perfect.
Missing from the current CCRB system is that they must adjudicate 100% of police wrongdoing allegations that arrive at their door in four categories, whereas the typical complaint might be mostly against an officer who has successfully managed thousands of people in crisis without any civilian discomfort. Also missing is any real transparency on how the individual CCRB board members vote on any single case or type of allegation.
There is also little conversation around the CCRB’s released data, which actually shows that the vast majority of CCRB complaints are closed without being fully investigated or that the majority of fully-investigated CCRB complaints were either unfounded, unsubstantiated or exonerated by the CCRB’s own investigators and board members.
As for that ESU cop who had his integrity questioned by his bosses in blue? That was my father, retired NYPD lieutenant Al Baker, a veteran of an agency Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once agreed was the finest around. By the numbers, my dad represents a tainted cop the NYPD blindly moved along. That’s not true of course, but on paper, his record has a blemish he never had the chance to clear – just as unfounded and unsubstantiated CCRB complaints stay on all officer’s records.
And that’s not just the perspective of a boy who watched a man return from work each day and lock a pistol in a steel box painted red and bolted to the ceiling.
Ironically, when the real Al Baker, as I like to call him, was in the Police Academy in 1965, he was tasked by his instructors with writing a “term paper” on the pros and cons of creating a civilian review board for the police.
His handwritten notes from that Academy Class 55 years ago are a snapshot of the NYPD’s timeless efforts to put swift and certain discipline central into the minds of its newly-minted cops. “Complaints by civilians,” my dad wrote, can lead to “a trial, fines or loss of vacation.” He often said he wished for Internal Affairs to trail his every move so it could see just how hard he worked.
The advent of body-worn cameras has done part of the job of shining light on officers’ work. But maybe the public, the CCRB, and departmental bosses should absorb what my dad wrote next in his academy class notebook to better understand the full range of a cop’s ethos: “Departmental Recognition” and “awards received,” including a “medal of honor” and “medal for merit.”