New York City's police watchdog agency retroactively altered thousands of records of police misconduct allegations in published records, new data reveals.
Last month, Hell Gate broke the story that the Civilian Complaint Review Board has a practice of obscuring the nature of some misconduct allegations against officers in its public-facing data, a previously undisclosed practice the agency told Hell Gate it had undertaken at the request of unnamed "stakeholders."
Since then, the website 50-a.org, which downloads and makes searchable NYPD misconduct records from public databases, has updated thousands of its listings, and Hell Gate's review of those updates shows that in 2023 and 2024, the CCRB recategorized more than 10,000 misconduct allegations previously published to the City's open data portal.
Most of those allegations didn't get very far with the CCRB, whether because the person who lodged them didn't end up cooperating with the agency's investigators, because investigators didn't find enough evidence to support the allegation, because an officer died or retired, or other reasons.
But the altered data includes 83 allegations for which the agency's investigators had found enough evidence to recommend that they be substantiated, only to have board members themselves, who hold the ultimate authority within the CCRB, disagree.
The allegations include not only that police officers made false statements to investigators, as Hell Gate has previously reported, but also allegations that cops used slurs or made derogatory comments on the basis of New Yorkers' identities, including their ethnicity, disability, religion, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Those latter allegations have now been altered to the more opaque "offensive language–other" category.
Also altered after the fact, according to the 50-a.org data, are a host of sexual misconduct allegations, including verbal and gestural sexual harassment, sexual or romantic propositioning, and sexual humiliation through failing to cover up someone whose body is exposed. These allegations were all recategorized after the fact to the generic "abuse of authority–other" category.
The cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct, which span a period of time from 2018 to 2023, were recategorized under more innocuous-sounding descriptors in August of 2023. Other altered allegations identified by 50-a.org took place through 2024. There are no public changes identified in the data that took place in 2025, suggesting that after going back to scrub previously published allegation data, the agency is now altering public-facing allegation data before they are published to the portal.
The CCRB's explanation for the practice of altering the public-facing data has been that it is undertaken to protect the reputation of officers from the taint of especially incendiary allegations that the board does not ultimately vote to substantiate. But in 43 percent of the cases where allegation information was altered, according to the 50-a.org data, there wasn't even a named officer identified.
So in cases where there's no officer named with a reputation to be protected, why is the CCRB altering the allegation information published to the public data portal?
We asked the CCRB, which declined to answer. Earlier today, the agency put out a press release announcing that the board's interim chair, Staten Island dentist Mohammad Khalid, is resigning amidst an ongoing, unhinged attack campaign by the city's largest police union.
To some police accountability advocates, deliberately misreporting data, even if it's only for misconduct allegations that aren't substantiated, is a betrayal of the agency's mission.
"The CCRB is an important data collection agency in addition to being an important investigative agency, and if the CCRB is not accurately reporting allegations as they were made, they are not serving their purpose as a data reporting agency," Andrew Case, supervising attorney at LatinoJustice PRLDEF and a former director of communications for the CCRB, told Hell Gate.
Case added, "If you want to understand police community relations in New York City and how to deploy, train and manage a police department, you should be aware not only of what police do that violates the rules, but also what they do that generates conflict with the community. That's why they put 'Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect' on the cars in the first place—before Eric Adams took it off."