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.
Subscribe to read the full story
Become a paid subscriber to Hell Gate to access all of our posts.
Subscribe