An oversight slight
The NYPD stood up the City Council Wednesday at a hearing focused on the contentious Strategic Response Group, hours after the city reached a multimillion-dollar settlement involving police brutality including by that same unit during the 2020 George Floyd protests. These are symptoms of a broader problem, namely the NYPD’s apparent comfort with often viewing itself as apart from civilian city government, when of course it is one more city agency, no more at liberty to ignore accountability and make its own rules than the Department of Buildings or another uniformed service like Sanitation.
No one can deny that they have a tough job that’s piled high with onerous and dangerous responsibilities that shouldn’t necessarily be in the police’s wheelhouse — one thing that the police unions and the police reformers can actually agree on — but that doesn’t entail a blank check to treat oversight with contempt. In fact, the nature of the department’s job means that everyone benefits the more public trust there is, which makes eroding that trust not only inherently bad but counterintuitive to its very important mission.
Public hearings can certainly be weaponized as political show trials (see the House GOP’s endless crusade on the now-barely-intelligible story of Hunter Biden’s laptop). Yet asking the NYPD to respond to questions about one of its most controversial units right as the city is reaching a massive settlement about that unit’s conduct, not to mention after the department has refused to impose due consequences on officers even after extensive investigation by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, is both reasonable and necessary.
Yet the NYPD couldn’t manage to send anyone, even after the hearing had been postponed twice already specifically to accommodate them. By way of explanation, the department wrote that it couldn’t discuss issues under active litigation, which is, pun intended, a cop-out. If it was truly the case that some answers could interfere with settlement negotiations, a witness could point that out and take the next one. Instead, the NYPD just couldn’t be bothered.