Outside the matrix

The NYPD likes to call itself a numbers-driven agency, and on one key metric, Commissioner Keechant Sewell is well out of league with her predecessors: the rejection of Civilian Complaint Review Board recommendations for police discipline. According to a Legal Aid Society review, Sewell last year rejected more than half of the CCRB’s recommendations, reached via a disciplinary matrix that was supposed to improve accountability. Her immediate two predecessors imposed requested discipline about 80% of the time.

The entire point of the matrix was that it was a consensus approach — already a compromise that took into account the NYPD’s own considerations and arrived at the proper spectrum of punishments for each potential transgression. To toss that aside is to reject the concept that officers must be held accountable for misconduct under agreed-upon terms.

While Sewell and Mayor Adams might represent this as the department declining to impose grave consequences on officers acting under pressure in the field, the discipline often isn’t even that dire. Many

CCRB recommendations amount to nothing more than losing vacation days or being put under some additional command scrutiny. Recommendations for more serious consequences like termination and charges are rare, and come after extensive investigation. Even then, they’re most often not followed.

It’s frequently unclear even on what basis the commissioner is rejecting recommendations. Sewell provided written explanations for rejecting about 70 discipline recommendations, leaving the impression that most of the rejections are little more than cursory. In many cases, the department seems to be wiggling out of responsibility for holding officers accountable by claiming that the CCRB was forwarding investigating complaints too late for it to impose discipline, despite having weeks or months to respond.

The message that gets sent out is two-fold: to cops, that there is little they can do to draw official scrutiny, and even if a complaint is substantiated, they don’t have to worry about consequences. And civilians are on notice that they shouldn’t expect much should they witness or are subject to misconduct. In the end, everyone loses.