The two Civilian Complaint Review Board members collectively responsible over the past several months for dismissing nearly 150 cases where investigators found evidence of police misconduct refused to answer direct questions about their conduct at the CCRB's monthly hearing last week.
As Hell Gate has reported, the board members, Pat Smith and Joseph Fox, were part of three-person panels that reviewed misconduct cases in March and May. At the March meeting, Smith and Fox voted as a majority to overturn nearly half of the cases where CCRB investigators had found evidence of police misconduct. In May, they did it again, overturning 40 percent of the cases where investigators had substantiated misconduct. By comparison, the usual "flip rate" for CCRB panels hovers around 10 percent.
Hell Gate first sought comment in April from Pat Smith, an Eric Adams appointee and former New York Post columnist who has been vocal about his belief that there are too many complaints against police and that the number of complaints should be reduced by threatening civilians with perjury if they choose to complain about police misconduct. When we reached out to him to ask why he and his colleague Fox, an NYPD appointee, overturned such a high percentage of cases at the March 31 meeting, he declined, through a CCRB spokesperson, to answer questions—then overruled even more misconduct findings on May 6.
In an effort to get Smith and Fox on the record, Hell Gate attended the board's public hearing last Wednesday, and asked them to their faces: Why are they erasing cases of police misconduct that are supported by evidence at a rate four to five times higher than the board average? And how are New Yorkers supposed to feel knowing that if they complain about a well-documented incident of police misconduct but have the bad luck to draw a panel with them on it, their complaint stands a greater chance of getting disappeared?
Even confronted in person, Smith and Fox refused to comment. Instead, the interim chair of the CCRB, Dr. Mohammed Khalid, an oral surgeon who served on the CCRB from 2005 to 2014 and who was appointed by Adams at the end of 2024, offered up a statement of warmed-over pablum.
"I just want to tell you that I'm really confident that each member of the board takes their work seriously and is fully committed to making fair and thoughtful decisions," Khalid told us. "I'm fully confident that our board members, they are really hard-working."
Did that answer our question, Khalid asked? Well... no. We were asking about the evident disparity in how seriously different CCRB panels take investigators' findings of misconduct.
"We try our best to make sure that we do the right thing," Khalid said. "We are human beings. People are not perfect, so thank you for your questions."
Others who also have experience with New York City's system of police oversight take the issue more seriously.
"If you end up having one board panel that just has a very different standard of what police misconduct is, then you're throwing the whole system out of whack," said Andrew Case, the supervising counsel with LatinoJustice and the former communications and policy director for the CCRB.
"When you create a board that has a political framework, there's going to be politics involved, and people who are more opposed to police accountability are going to be able to exert influence," Case said.
Case believes that the board's rules should be changed to take political appointees' sign-off out of the equation. "If the agency investigator and that person's supervisor, who's the lawyer who would prosecute the case, if they both think that the allegations should be substantiated, then really, the board shouldn't be spending its time meeting in panels dragging the process out," he said.
Another fix Case thinks would help is ditching the CCRB's rule that every panel include a board member appointed by the NYPD, since the CCRB's disciplinary findings are all subject to NYPD approval anyway. It's a recommendation shared by the federal monitor overseeing the NYPD's efforts to reform its racist stop-and-frisk practices.
Reverend Frederick Davie, who chaired the CCRB from 2017 until 2022 and is now the senior executive vice president at Union Theological Seminary, told Hell Gate that while board members are political appointees, investigators are professionals trained to follow the evidence.
"I know for a fact that the CCRB hires and trains excellent investigators, and the investigators are not there to represent the police department's point of view, or the mayor's point of view, or even the City Council or the public advocate's point of view," he said. "The investigators are there to objectively investigate what transpired between a police officer and the person complaining, and then issue a report with recommendations."
Davie added, "Unless there's some truly compelling evidence to the contrary, the board should choose the course that's being recommended by CCRB staff."
If that's not happening, Davie said, it's cause for concern.
"It does New York City a disservice if board members are flipping decisions based on an obligation to who appointed them and not on the facts," Davie said. "If that is happening, it's unconscionable and needs to be seriously looked at. If the flip rates are multiple times of what they historically have been, it is reason for the City Council to take notice and perhaps have its own public hearings about why this is the case."