Certain members of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, including an NYPD appointee and a former New York Post columnist, are continuing to overturn investigators' findings of police misconduct at a rate far out of proportion to historic norms and their colleagues, according to new information reviewed by Hell Gate.
Last month, we wrote about a panel of three board members who, at a meeting in March, reviewed 190 instances in which CCRB investigators had found evidence of NYPD misconduct, and reversed roughly half of the recommendations, far above the roughly 10 percent rate at which board members have overruled investigators' findings over the past decade.
Last week, they did it again. According to documents reviewed by Hell Gate, on Tuesday, the same three board members—Joseph Fox, appointed by the NYPD; AU Hogan, appointed by the City Council; and Pat Smith, appointed by Mayor Eric Adams—considered another slate of alleged police misconduct cases, including 146 allegations for which CCRB investigators found enough evidence to recommend a finding of substantiated misconduct.
Once again, a majority of this three-member panel—specifically, Fox and Smith—voted to disregard an unusually large number of those investigative findings, flipping 40 percent. Rather than concur with the investigators' findings, they instead issued final determinations that either there was not enough evidence to show police misconduct, or that the officers' conduct was actually allowable under police rules.
The allegations the board panel declined to substantiate range from inappropriate use of force to abuse of authority to discourtesy, and include a case where investigators concluded an officer made a false official statement, an offense that is supposed to result in being fired. All told, New Yorkers made 59 allegations of police misconduct for which investigators found enough evidence to recommend substantiating the allegations, only to have those cases wiped away last week by Fox, the NYPD appointee, and Smith, the mayoral appointee.
Smith, the mayoral appointee, voted most often out of the three to overturn staff findings of misconduct, outstripping even Fox, the NYPD appointee.
This emerging trend of select CCRB board members overruling trained investigators' recommendations in large volumes raises some important questions: Are these political appointees whitewashing evidence of police misconduct? And if some CCRB panels are disregarding investigators' findings at much higher rates than other panels, what does that mean for New Yorkers' expectation of equal access to the protections against police misconduct offered by the CCRB? If two people can make similar misconduct complaints and receive different outcomes based on the luck of the draw of which board members review their case, is that police accountability?
We posed these questions to the CCRB, which declined to comment. The board will hold its monthly open meeting on Wednesday at 4 p.m.