from the buy-in-complete dept
What a difference a near-decade makes. Back in 2017, the main concerns raised by New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board was that officers were routinely violating the right to record police officers.
Sure, there wasn’t nearly as much precedent to rely on then (and we’re still waiting for the Supreme Court to make this right definitive), but it seemed pretty clear no one should be arrested for exercising their First Amendment right to record public officials engaged in their public duties.
Years later, the problem with the Civilian Complaint Review Board was that it didn’t actually have the power to hold NYPD officers accountable for their actions. It could always suggest punishments and detail violations, but it was ultimately up to the NYPD itself to decide whether or not it would follow the CCRB’s recommendations. Mostly it didn’t. And it didn’t because NYPD officials — including the department’s commissioner — simply decided to sweep misconduct complaints under the rug. And that’s in addition to exchanging the discipline recommended by the CCRB for meaningless wrist slaps that deterred nothing.
What’s always been the Achilles heel of the CCRB has finally made itself apparent. While it is indeed the “Civilian Complaint Review Board,” actual civilians have almost no control over the composition of the oversight board. Almost everyone on it is a political appointee, which means the deck has been stacked by the outgoing Eric Adams administration with cop apologists.
Here’s what happens when people in power (who also happen to think cops are aces) take control of the CCRB:
As Hell Gate revealed earlier this month, the CCRB’s politically appointed members have not only been dismissing investigators’ allegations that cops lied to them at a disproportionately high rate, the board has also been altering public data to obscure the fact that the CCRB has been overturning a high proportion of cases in which its own investigators found strong evidence that NYPD officers lied to them. The board has instead been quietly misclassifying those allegations under the different and more opaque “Abuse of Authority—Other” category, which includes such difficult-to-categorize misconduct as improperly ejecting a person from the subway.
The CCRB was given the power to bring disciplinary charges against officers who lied to the board’s investigators. Of course, those recommendations were almost always ignored by NYPD supervisors, who generally chose to reject these recommendations. But at least it was something, a relative rarity in the nation where almost every city, state, and federal official thinks no one should be doing anything about police misconduct.
But the CCRB was, at least, owed an explanation. It never officially bothered to seek one, though, which meant the journalists writing for Hell Gate took it upon themselves to hold the CCRB — and the cops beyond it — accountable. For all of its trouble, it was blown off by the oversight board itself.
Last Wednesday, Hell Gate asked that question again, this time at the board’s monthly public hearing, and finally got some answers: The board has indeed been deliberately altering the data it publishes to the public portal, CCRB Executive Director John Darche confirmed to Hell Gate—and according to the CCRB, it is doing so in order to protect officers’ reputations, after unidentified “associated stakeholders” expressed “concerns” about the allegations of lying being public.
Wow. I wonder who these “associated stakeholders” who have expressed “concerns” about their patterns of lying to investigators being made public might be?
Here’s the thing about the CCRB and stakeholders. On one hand, you have the cops. More particularly, you have the cops that lie to CCRB investigators and run to their union reps when they get caught lying. While the cops (and more specifically, their unions) may be “stakeholders” in these incidents, the CCRB should be more obligated to serve the other stakeholders: millions of NYC taxpayers.
But apparently this CCRB doesn’t care that it’s being lied to… at least not after having been approached/threatened by certain “stakeholders.”
Hell Gate’s earlier investigation found that while the CCRB has substantiated some 200 of those allegations, in nearly a quarter of the cases where investigators alleged, again, with evidence, that officers lied to them, the politically appointed board members overturned the recommendations, making the charges go away. That’s more than twice the rate at which board members have overturned investigator’s recommendations for other types of misconduct.
If that’s how things are going to go, why even bother engaging in investigations? If more cases are going to be rejected because an officer lied to investigators, there’s a blueprint for dismissal being created with the explicit assistance of an oversight board that’s supposed to serve the public, rather than the interests of the cops they’re investigating.
Somehow, it manages to get worse, as Hell Gate reported earlier this month:
Last month, Hell Gate broke the story that the Civilian Complaint Review Board has a practice of obscuring the nature of some misconduct allegations against officers in its public-facing data, a previously undisclosed practice the agency told Hell Gate it had undertaken at the request of unnamed “stakeholders.”
Since then, the website 50-a.org, which downloads and makes searchable NYPD misconduct records from public databases, has updated thousands of its listings, and Hell Gate’s review of those updates shows that in 2023 and 2024, the CCRB recategorized more than 10,000 misconduct allegations previously published to the City’s open data portal.
It’s not just the lying that’s getting recategorized to make it more difficult for regular people to obtain information on the specifics of NYPD misconduct. It’s also a bunch of other stuff. Officers who have (allegedly) used racial slurs against residents, arrestees, and even other members of the force have been moved to the vague category of “offensive language – other,” which doesn’t contain the specificity needed to determine whether an officer routinely uses bigoted slurs.
This, however, is even worse than the whitewashing of lying cops and bigoted officers:
Also altered after the fact, according to the 50-a.org data, are a host of sexual misconduct allegations, including verbal and gestural sexual harassment, sexual or romantic propositioning, and sexual humiliation through failing to cover up someone whose body is exposed. These allegations were all recategorized after the fact to the generic “abuse of authority–other” category.
While these acts are undoubtedly covered by the “abuse of authority” categorization, they deserve to be broken out because they are sexually motivated abuses of authority. It’s like turning every rape charge into an assault charge because both involve physically harming another human being. Sure, that’s the common denominator, but there’s a massive amount of psychological damage that differentiates a rape from punching someone in the face.
All of this adds up to the CCRB just being an extension of the NYPD and its unions, rather than a force for police accountability. The few people who still care about this are steadily being forced out of their CCRB positions. The few that remain don’t have the voting power to offset the pro-cop appointees infesting the oversight board. And that means everything will go back to getting worse, which is the regression to the mean most cops love to see happen.
Filed Under: ccrb, cops lie, nypd, opacity, oversight, police accountability, police misconduct
