NYPD Union Sues Oversight Board For Letting People Know How Awful Some Cops Might Be

Legal Issues

from the NYPD-exists-to-serve-itself dept

The NYPD’s biggest union is back in lawsuit mode. As usual, the impetus is accountability and transparency — things the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and NYPD have been opposed to since their respective inceptions.

A law put on the books 50 years ago was finally erased 40 years after its enactment. “50-a” allowed the NYPD to withhold information about officers who had been accused of misconduct. It did not forbid the NYPD from releasing this information, however. And, because it didn’t, the NYPD often shared certain info with the public.

But in 2020, someone in the NYPD re-read the 1976 law and found a loophole. Well, it wasn’t actually a loophole. It was just an option the NYPD didn’t bother considering until the public had turned on cops in general following an impossible-to-ignore stream of unjustified killings of Black people by white cops, culminating in the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Less than two months after that murder, the NYPD realized that while the law did not forbid the release of police misconduct information to the public, it also didn’t compel it. So, the NYPD demonstratively sat on its hands, forcing the NY legislature to finally write this law out of existence.

During this same time period, the city was seeking NYPD oversight that might be independent enough to actually be worthy of the term “oversight.” The Civilian Complaint Review Board” (CCRB) has existed in one form or another since 1953. Its effectiveness has been closely tied to whoever’s in the mayor’s office, its fortunes rising and falling with city leaders’ actual interest in police accountability. The result of nationwide protests was an actual effort to keep the CCRB from being controlled by the NYPD.

Now that Eric Adams is gone — along with his embrace of political and police corruption — the Police Benevolent Association is back in action, claiming (in court!) the CCRB should not be allowed to release misconduct files the CCRB is legally allowed to release. Samantha Max has more details for Gothamist:

New York City’s largest police union is suing the watchdog agency that investigates allegations of officer misconduct, saying the Civilian Complaint Review Board has stigmatized officers by sharing “inflammatory” records related to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, bias-based policing and lying.

The Police Benevolent Association is urging the CCRB to redact officers’ identifying information when it turns over records related to these three categories of misconduct, if the officers were not found guilty of wrongdoing. 

There’s a lot of stuff to get into here, but let’s start with the final sentence. At the time the CCRB turns over records to public records requesters (most notably, 50-a.org, which is named after the now-dead law that used to prevent this sort of accountability), it may not know the final results of internal investigations. If that’s the sticking point the PBA chooses to stake its claim on, it’s just going to keep losing in the actual court and the court of public opinion.

It’s also notable that the PBA only considers “three categories” to be worthy of court-enforced secrecy. It implies that the cops the PBA most wants to protect are those most inclined to engage in these particular activities.

The PBA seems extremely upset by 50-a.org’s searchable database of police misconduct, but it has chosen to use the CCRB which normally obscures the nature of offenses it might be taking a look at.

CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche said at a board meeting in October that the agency does not specify in its public datasets when unsubstantiated abuse of authority complaints pertain to sexual misconduct, racial profiling or untruthful statements, because those types of allegations are “very prejudicial to the character of the officer.” 

The guidelines that cover the CCRB’s reporting do not apply to public records requests, however.

But he said the agency does not take those same privacy measures when releasing data pursuant to a court order or public records request.

Nor should they! The CCRB may be limited in its own reporting, but if the legislature wanted to limit what public records requesters could access, it would have done so when it overturned the law that previously made most police misconduct records inaccessible. And if the legislature wanted the CCRB’s internal guidelines to apply to its public records request releases, it has had more than seven decades to do so.

And that means the PBA should be headed for a swift loss in court. If the PBA doesn’t like what’s happening, it should take it up with state legislators, rather than ask the court to rewrite the law in its favor. I doubt the PBA will try to take it up with legislators because legislators are the reason it can no longer use a 1976 law to separate NYPD officers from accountability.

It’s too early to tell how this will all play out, but I want to highlight something else before we retire to the anteroom known as the comment section:

[CCRB Director Darche] said criminal defendants and prosecutors, for instance, should be allowed to know if an officer involved in a trial has been accused of lying.

The PBA, on the other hand, argues that disclosing these types of unsubstantiated allegations is “defamatory” and makes them available to “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks and the public at large,” without giving officers a process to challenge or remove them. 

Seriously? Every arrest is a presumptive public record. Police agencies willingly share these with local newscasters, many of which treat these as part of their regular reporting. Mugshots and arrest records are shared everywhere and no one in the NYPD or the PBA gives a single fuck whether or not these “defamatory” assertions result in adverse reactions from “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks, and the public at large.”

But when it comes to cops, no amount of secrecy is secret enough. They’re somehow owed absolute secrecy until these investigations have been closed. And even then, they’ll go to court to argue that substantiated claims are unfairly “prejudicial” during criminal trials.

Fuck these guys and their union reps. If they want to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to unsubstantiated allegations, they should extend this privilege to the people they’re supposed to be serving. Until they’re willing to do that, they have no legitimate complaint to raise.

I know I don’t expect Joe Whoeverthefuck from two blocks away to steer clear of sexual misconduct, lying, or being a racist. But I goddamn well expect that minimum level of competence from the people whose paychecks are reliant on my tax dollars. The PBA clearly believes the public owes everything to the cops it represents. And the people paying the PBA’s paychecks owe nothing to anyone.

Filed Under: 50-a, ccrb, nypd, patrick hendry, pba, police accountability, police misconduct