In 2019, New York City voters gave the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the NYPD's independent watchdog agency, the power to bring disciplinary charges against officers who lie to the board's investigators, as part of a broader package of reforms pushed by police accountability organizations.
In the years since, the agency has not exactly fullheartedly embraced its expanded authority. 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.
Why is the board publishing false and misleading data in the City's Open Data portal, data that is meant to give New Yorkers an accurate picture of police misconduct proceedings and the board's work? When we first reported the story, the CCRB refused to say.
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.
It's not just overturned allegations of lying to the CCRB that are buried in this manner, Darche said. When an officer is accused of engaging in bias-based policing or sexual misconduct and the allegation is not substantiated—either because investigators can't find supporting evidence or because they did find evidence but the board voted not to bring the charges anyway—the board conceals the fact that the allegation was even made in publicly available data. That means that if an officer has been accused of racial profiling or sexually propositioning members of the public but the allegations haven't been substantiated, those allegations won't be legible in the public data.
These types of allegations are "very prejudicial to someone's character," Darche told Hell Gate.
"How the agency characterizes certain allegation types that could be very prejudicial to a person when they are not substantiated, is why that is listed as abuse. Those are the reasons for the discrepancy that you noted."
Unlike allegations of sexual misconduct or racial profiling, which are brought by members of the public and sometimes don't have evidence to back them up, CCRB investigators only bring what are known as "Untrue Statement," or "U," allegations against cops when there is evidence that a cop misled them as part of an inquiry. 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. As former board chair Fred Davie told Hell Gate at the time, flipping investigator's conclusions that cops lied to them at such a high rate "suggests that something's amiss." Davie added, "Allowing police officers to get away with making false statements to the CCRB, on its face, would seem to hinder the effectiveness of the agency."
The CCRB's newly-unearthed practice of concealing in the public data that such allegations were ever made in the first place has significant consequences. If a member of the public looks up the public record in the City's portal of a cop that was accused (but never charged) of lying to the CCRB as part of a misconduct investigation, the data will accurately show that the officer faced any number of other allegations that were ultimately not substantiated, for misconduct ranging from speaking discourteously to putting someone in an illegal chokehold. But that data will falsely suggest that an officer never faced allegations of lying to investigators.
Darche defended the practice of miscategorizing those U allegations, telling Hell Gate that the public data does accurately reflect that some sort of accusation (albeit a different category) was brought and not substantiated by the board. If one were to file a Freedom of Information Law request for the records of those cases, he said, the true allegations would still be noted on the underlying documents.
After Wednesday's meeting, CCRB spokesperson Dakota Gardner provided Hell Gate with a statement shedding a bit more light on what's going on, writing, "The CCRB is empowered to investigate allegations of misconduct by NYPD officers. Its authority is narrow, in that the CCRB only makes recommendations of discipline that it relies on the Police Commissioner to enact. For this reason, it is vital for us to work to have consensus and good-faith participation by all of our associated stakeholders in order to keep the process working." Gardner continued, "We were informed of concerns with how we report certain allegations that have not been substantiated. After considering those concerns, the CCRB took steps to mitigate them, helping to bolster faith and engagement in the disciplinary process by all parties. The CCRB takes every allegation it receives extremely seriously, as well as its duty to share its findings with the public."
One can make an educated guess about the identity of those "associated stakeholders." Two powerful "stakeholders" often concerned about the CCRB's work spring to mind: the NYPD itself and the Police Benevolent Association, the union which represents rank-and-file officers. The union did not respond to a request for comment. The NYPD responded with a single sentence: "The NYPD has no control over what the CCRB does."
Significantly, the practice of scrubbing public data to obscure the fact that officers have been accused of lying to the CCRB's investigators is not a formal policy memorialized anywhere, nor has the public ever been notified until now that the board is engaged in the practice.
"Whether or not the CCRB has the discretion to alter this data, they absolutely have to explicitly disclose that they're doing it," said John Kaehny, the executive director of the good government group Reinvent Albany. "That's something that the public and stakeholders should be told, rather than the press having to extract it from the board as an admission."
Jennvine Wong, the supervising attorney with the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project, told Hell Gate that she's sympathetic to the delicate political environment in which the CCRB must navigate, but agreed that the practice should have been disclosed. "They are also a public agency," Wong said. "What they should have done is brought it up at a public board meeting and allowed for some public comment. At the end of the day, they are an agency that is accountable to the public."
That the CCRB has a previously undisclosed arrangement to keep certain types of misconduct allegations off of officers' records only underscores the vulnerable position of the NYPD watchdog. Unable to bring misconduct charges or impose discipline independently, the board can only operate with the cooperation of the NYPD, and, by extension, the politically powerful unions which represent its employees.
To some, this situation is untenable. A watchdog whose position is ultimately advisory and dependent on the approval of the very institution it's supposed to be overseeing is necessarily hamstrung. The board has repeatedly asked the City Council to grant it the authority to bring charges against police officers who engage in misconduct on its own and without the approval of the NYPD, a prospect vehemently opposed by the NYPD and the police unions. Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner in the race to be the next mayor, has said he believes the board should have independent authority.
"It’s true that the CCRB depends on the cooperation of the NYPD and its officers to do its work," said Andrew Case, supervising attorney at LatinoJustice PRLDEF and a former director of communications for the CCRB. "But that cooperation should not be contingent on how the CCRB reports its accurate data."
The failure to disclose the policy goes directly to a question of trust, Reinvent Albany's Kaehny told Hell Gate.
"A crucial part of the CCRB's moral authority and real authority is transparency," Kaehny said. "If they are keeping basic decisions secret about how they decide things, that's a big, big problem, and it goes against why they were created in the first place. If they're not clear about what they're doing, it raises questions about their impartiality and whose interests they're serving."