New York City's largest police union filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the City agency tasked with investigating police misconduct, accusing the agency of "disseminating… inflammatory, stigmatizing, and life-altering unsubstantiated accusations… tied to identifiable police officers."
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan by the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, alleges that the CCRB is violating officers' rights by allowing the public to see the agency's closing reports of investigations into police misconduct—specifically, the part of those reports that shows the type of misconduct the officer was investigated for, in cases where, for whatever reason, the agency didn't make a final determination that the misconduct took place. That information, the PBA contends, should be secret from the public—at least in instances where officers are accused of lying to investigators, sexual misconduct, or bias-based policing.
Hell Gate broke the news last year that the CCRB had a previously undisclosed policy of obscuring the nature of some charges against officers in public-facing data. When police officers are accused of making untruthful statements to investigators—or of sexual misconduct, or of racial profiling—and the board doesn't substantiate those allegations, it reclassifies them in the City's Open Data Portal to something more vague and innocuous-sounding.