A panel of politically appointed Civilian Complaint Review Board members reversed nearly half of their own investigators' findings of police misconduct at a session in March, according to internal documents reviewed by Hell Gate, an enormous increase over the board's usual "flip rate," which has hovered around 10 percent for more than a decade.
The panel's votes were dominated by a majority made up of two people: an NYPD appointee and a former New York Post columnist who has been waging a months-long campaign to discourage civilian complaints against police, many of which, he claims, are "malicious lies."
The CCRB is tasked by the City Charter with investigating a wide variety of police misconduct. When a civilian files a complaint alleging wrongdoing against an officer, professional investigators who work for the board dig into the case, interviewing witnesses and police officers, reviewing body-worn camera footage and other evidence, and determining whether the allegation can be substantiated. The results of those investigations are then presented to a panel composed of members of the board, who vote on whether to uphold the findings.
Board members are appointed by the mayor, the City Council, or the NYPD commissioner. Panels generally consist of three board members, and though it's not part of the board's official rules, by convention at least one member of each panel is an NYPD appointee. Because the NYPD appointees are, on average, more protective of police officers and more skeptical of accusations that those officers have engaged in misconduct, all it takes is one of the other political appointees on a panel to join the NYPD appointee to effectively nullify the findings of investigators.
To be clear, this is literally, formally, how the system is supposed to work. "It is the job of CCRB investigators to investigate and come up with a recommendation, but the final decision on charges is vested in the appointed board members themselves," CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche told Hell Gate.
Nevertheless, a panel that looks at a slate of accusations that the investigators have deemed to be substantiated by evidence and tosses out half of them is a historic shift for the board, and it suggests that something is amiss: Either staff investigators are saying the evidence supports twice as many accusations as it actually does, or political appointees are burying half the cases where evidence supports the accusations.
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