Critics: Take fights ‘outside’
Want independent eyes on cases against police
Critics of the NYPD's handling of disciplinary cases want a panel reviewing the system to give the task to an outside agency.
But moving NYPD administrative trials to the Office of Trials and Hearings — which conducts hearings for all city workers except police officers and teachers — would face multiple hurdles, including either a legal change, or deputizing the agency's judge to preside over NYPD trials.
And it would likely spark stiff opposition from the city's biggest police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, whose president, Pat Lynch, defends police administrative judges as the best arbiters of NYPD rules and practices.
“Discipline cannot be separated from a police department's ultimate public safety mission, and the disciplinary process effects all cops' ability to do their job effectively,” Lynch said.
“The buck has to stop somewhere — in the NYPD, that place is with the police commissioner and the mayor who appointed him or her.”
The panel reviewing the disciplinary process was appointed by Police Commissioner James O'Neill last June following an explosive series of Daily News stories about deep flaws and a lack of transparency in the system.
The panel will present its report to O'Neill next month.
Civil rights lawyer Joel Berger argues that the Trials and Hearings should take over the NYPD disciplinary process because its administrative law judges are “totally independent from the NYPD.”
“No one from the first deputy commissioner's office or the police commissioner's office is going to make a phone call and say, ‘Hey, I think you should go easy on this guy,'” Berger said.
Right now, the police department controls the whole process.” But the panel is also hearing suggestions that safeguards be added to the current system to keep the process free from politics and meddling.
Martin Karopkin, a former NYPD deputy commissioner of trials, said the trials deputy commissioner should once again be allowed to review plea deals — a practice ended in 2014.
“If a plea came in and the penalty seemed inappropriately lenient, I recommended that the police commissioner disapprove it,” Karopkin said. “In the eight years I was there, I do not recall a single case in which the police commissioner approved a plea deal I felt carried an inadequate penalty.”
The NYPD's top spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Phil Walzak, countered that removing the deputy commissioner of trials from the plea process was done to speed up cases and reduce the case backlog — and that the official still reviews cases prosecuted at 1 Police Plaza by the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Walzak added the NYPD “looks forward to the critical insight the panel will provide on how to further strengthen our disciplinary system.”
Addressing a major point of concern — that NYPD disciplinary decisions are shielded from public scrutiny by state civil rights law — Christopher Dunn, associate legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said all cases before the Trials and Hearings are a matter of public record.
“This would help put an end to NYPD brass being able to manipulate the disciplinary process and help restore public confidence that officers will not be able to get away with serious misconduct,” Dunn said.