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Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret
- elicash 6y agoI found this interesting: >> The CCRB receives thousands of complaints every year, but it is only able to substantiate a tiny fraction of them. In 2018, the agency examined about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It substantiated 73. >> Investigators are often not able to reach conclusions on cases, in significant part because they must rely on the NYPD to hand over evidence, such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department doesn’t do so, despite a legal duty to cooperate with CCRB investigations.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI wish they'd give a better indication of what "in significant part" means. Is the department failing to hand over footage in 5% of cases or 50% of cases?
- adamsea 6y agoFWIWI think it’s reasonable to infer a number greater than 10% (I’d be greater than 30% but want to be conservative) based on how the NYPD has behaved over time when it comes to its own accountability under the law.
- ryanwatkins 6y agoIts nearly 75% depending on how you count. See May 2020 report: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ccrb/downloads/pdf/policy_pdf/monthly_stats/2020/20200610_monthlystats.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/ccrb/downloads/pdf/policy_pdf/mo... Of the requests made, about 26% are resolved in 30 days or less. 46% requests still outstanding after 90 days. So yes, its pretty clear NYPD delays or doesnt respond to requests for body camera footage.
- oh_sigh 6y agoWhy doesn't the ccrb issue foia requests to get the data, or sue the police department?
- pantaloony 6y agoI'd imagine the (apparent) need to process, what, 12ish of these per weekday has something to do with it. How many can you manage in the "pipeline" at that rate? What's their staffing like? I bet they're staffed as if the police would at least kinda cooperate, so if they don't then there aren't enough personnel to follow up on any but the most clear-cut and serious cases with a bunch of public evidence already available so they know it might go somewhere if they put in the hours.
- jjk166 6y agoSurely if someone is violating a rule 12 times a day you shouldn't need to make separate filings for each instance, right? I would hope something like "Hey we are still waiting on 1178 out of 1195 requests from this quarter" would get a judge's attention.
- black_puppydog 6y agoInteresting... shouldn't a failure to uphold the law disqualify anyone from working for the NYPD? Seems like whoever makes these calls should be personally held to account for that, since they're clearly not doing so?
- tehwebguy 6y ago12k complaints over 35 years and 7-8M population, not sure if low or high
- strathmeyer 6y agoI think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero). I guess you would also need to go make a complaint and see what the odds of it being taken are.
- mcherm 6y ago> I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've made (zero). Except that this approach is NOT useful because police malfeasance is NOT distributed evenly. For example, over my lifetime I have only seen one case I can recall of police misbehavior, and I'm not sure that one even rises to the level of "malfeasance". Perhaps if I were black and lived in New York City (where "stop and frisk" was an official policy for years) I would have a very different impression. It is for exactly this reason that it is important to use actual statistics instead of personal anecdotes.
- dexterdog 6y agoComplaining about stop and frisk would not have been a valid complaint since it was policy at the time.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoDepends on what the complaint is about. Remember that stop-and-frisk didn't end because of any changes to the law or formal policies. In principle, police were never allowed to stop someone without reasonable suspicion; in principle, the standards for NYPD police stops are the same now as they were a decade ago.
- throwawaysea 6y agoIt’s hard to say if this data is telling us anything notable. It seems like 11% of the NYPD has had at least one claim against them substantiated. But isn’t that to be expected? Each officer probably has on the order of a thousand interactions with citizens each year on the low end. Over a ten year period, wouldn’t even a high performing nearly perfect officer violate some rule within their complex policing guidelines just because they are imperfect humans, as we all are? Many of those violations are also likely minor and not material as far as constructing an anti police narrative. The article notes that only 303 of 36000 officers (0.8%) have 5 or more substantiated violations against them. The particulars of those should be examined more closely perhaps, but overall I’m not taking this as a sign of things being irrevocably broken. It even suggests that minor tweaks (reforms) would work, as they have elsewhere like in Seattle.
- Kye 6y agoIf that were true, it would be in their interests to publish and promote data that contradicted the image of a force of violent goons.
- zepto 6y agoWhat data could contradict such an image? Generally, data doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced, and can usually be used to support a wide variety of contradictory interpretations. Avoiding this is why science has to be so rigorous.
- prepend 6y agoI would be more convinced by a solid trail of data of this committee getting full cooperation from the NYPD. I’m not sure we’ll get to absolute confidence. But at least knowing we have a complete data set and sound, valid process.
- kazagistar 6y agoThe absence of such cooperation is sufficient evidence of systematic disregard for the law, and q systematic disregard for the law seems like a good enough reason to wholesale replace a governmental system.
- justinclift 6y agoOne really weird thing about ProPublica publishing this, is they seem to say "this data should be public as it's for public benefit" yet their terms for accessing the data are extremely restrictive: https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms You can’t republish the raw data in its entirety, or otherwise distribute the data (in whole or in part) on a stand-alone basis. So, no spreading the data around. :(
- gruez 6y agoHow can this be enforceable? Aren't the records themselves public domain since they were produced by the government?
- NotSammyHagar 6y agoThis could be part of the aforementioned lawsuit trying to prevent the records becoming public.
- danso 6y agoThe data has obviously been filtered and wrangled (e.g. it includes only complaints to officers with at least one substantiated complaint). What's offered for download is a single CSV, it may have been derived from multiple tables, and several fields may have been cleaned/normalized to the point where the data is substantially different than the raw records.
- Teever 6y agoI was under the impression that you couldn't copyright tables of data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
- jrockway 6y agoTerms of Service and copyright are two different things. Maybe the data's not copyrightable, but they can make their website terms of service say "by using our website and downloading this data, you agree to..." You would have to research the case law to see if courts will enforce this. Anyone can say anything they want.
- adwi 6y agoI have two friends that were former investigators for the CCRB, both as part of a criminal justice lawyer track. The stories they told were horrifying, and even in the clearest cut cases of obvious police abuses absolutely nothing ever came from any case. It was a glorified suggestion box, gutted by NYPD’s union, masquerading as oversight.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoNo need to sugarcoat it. Let’s call a spade a space. It’s corruption, all the way up and down.
- ashtonkem 6y agoCorruption actually undersells it.
- kbenson 6y agoI wonder if some sort of community hearing where any police officer that had a complaint filed had to sit in front of the community and have the details recounted and could explain their side would be useful. If the community had the power (through some elected or random jury) to censure, or cause a week or two probation without pay, or request a more detailed investigation of possible criminal actions, if that would weed out police the community did not deem fit.
- geofft 6y agoIn a functional democracy, that process is called "government." Instead, the police make us pay taxes to fund their own paychecks and openly mocks the idea that they're answerable to us. Look at the way the NYPD union threatened the mayor's own daughter.
- guerrilla 6y agoWell, not exactly, because the government is not necessarily from the community being policed.
- dgellow 6y agoWhere do police control taxes? I never heard of this. Taxes and budgets are responsibility of governments, they then distribute the money around.
- geofft 6y agoThey certainly make sure taxes get paid. I'm not claiming that they set tax rates. (But they do have a lot of influence on how big of a budget the city government gives them, using that tax revenue.)
- dredmorbius 6y agoWould this be the threat incident? https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twitter-1843813751 https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twit... https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/nypd-officer-letter-to-mayor-were-done-with-your-lies-and-abuse/ https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/nypd-officer-letter-to-m...
- Animats 6y agoNow this is progress. If we get anything useful from the Black Lives Matter movement, it will be better cop quality control. A big problem with law enforcement is that it's rare to fire cops even when they commit felonies. That may be changing. More cops should be fired simply for being in the bottom 5-10% of cops. Camden, NJ essentially did that, except they dumped the bottom 25%. It helped. Think HR quality control, not punishment. Not everyone who gets hired should stay on as a cop. There's less stigma associated with doing it this way. The Army has "retention control points". If you go into the Army, and don't make sergeant, you'll be out after some number of years. You still get a honorable discharge and the benefits of that number of years of service. Maybe cops need that kind of arrangement, too.
- kohtatsu 6y agoWhat would you propose measuring?
- Animats 6y agoComplaints. Successes. Management reviews. Peer reviews. Customer evaluations. Just like other jobs.
- berbec 6y agoNumber of unarmed civilians killed
- MagnumOpus 6y agoYes, bu also number of detainees raped and number of unarmed civilians mutilated.
- kbenson 6y agoSuch a low bar for a policy on retention, and yet one routinely not met. :/
- djaque 6y agoI sincerely hope that with all of the well documented instances of police abuse and lack of accountability in the last few months that people in the US are starting to wake up to the problem. Additional scrutiny from journalists like this is nice, but there ultimately needs to be powerful legislative changes.