
Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret - jbegley
https://www.propublica.org/article/nypd-civilian-complaint-review-board-editors-note
======
adwi
I have two friends that were former investigators for the CCRB, both as part
of a criminal justice lawyer track.

The stories they told were horrifying, and even in the clearest cut cases of
obvious police abuses absolutely nothing ever came from any case.

It was a glorified suggestion box, gutted by NYPD’s union, masquerading as
oversight.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
No need to sugarcoat it.

Let’s call a spade a space.

It’s corruption, all the way up and down.

~~~
ashtonkem
Corruption actually undersells it.

------
elicash
I found this interesting:

>> The CCRB receives thousands of complaints every year, but it is only able
to substantiate a tiny fraction of them. In 2018, the agency examined about
3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It substantiated 73.

>> Investigators are often not able to reach conclusions on cases, in
significant part because they must rely on the NYPD to hand over evidence,
such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department doesn’t do so,
despite a legal duty to cooperate with CCRB investigations.

~~~
oh_sigh
Why doesn't the ccrb issue foia requests to get the data, or sue the police
department?

~~~
pantaloony
I'd imagine the (apparent) need to process, what, 12ish of these per weekday
has something to do with it. How many can you manage in the "pipeline" at that
rate? What's their staffing like? I bet they're staffed _as if_ the police
would at least kinda cooperate, so if they don't then there aren't enough
personnel to follow up on any but the most clear-cut and serious cases with a
bunch of public evidence already available so they know it _might_ go
somewhere if they put in the hours.

~~~
jjk166
Surely if someone is violating a rule 12 times a day you shouldn't need to
make separate filings for each instance, right? I would hope something like
"Hey we are still waiting on 1178 out of 1195 requests from this quarter"
would get a judge's attention.

------
Animats
Now this is progress. If we get anything useful from the Black Lives Matter
movement, it will be better cop quality control. A big problem with law
enforcement is that it's rare to fire cops even when they commit felonies.
That may be changing.

More cops should be fired simply for being in the bottom 5-10% of cops.
Camden, NJ essentially did that, except they dumped the bottom 25%. It helped.

Think HR quality control, not punishment. Not everyone who gets hired should
stay on as a cop. There's less stigma associated with doing it this way. The
Army has "retention control points". If you go into the Army, and don't make
sergeant, you'll be out after some number of years. You still get a honorable
discharge and the benefits of that number of years of service. Maybe cops need
that kind of arrangement, too.

~~~
kohtatsu
What would you propose measuring?

~~~
berbec
Number of unarmed civilians killed

~~~
MagnumOpus
Yes, bu also number of detainees raped and number of unarmed civilians
mutilated.

~~~
kbenson
Such a low bar for a policy on retention, and yet one routinely not met. :/

------
justinclift
One really weird thing about ProPublica publishing this, is they seem to say
"this data should be public as it's for public benefit" yet their terms for
accessing the data are _extremely_ restrictive:

[https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms](https://www.propublica.org/datastore/terms)

    
    
      You can’t republish the raw data in its entirety, or otherwise distribute
      the data (in whole or in part) on a stand-alone basis.
    

So, no spreading the data around. :(

~~~
gruez
How can this be enforceable? Aren't the records themselves public domain since
they were produced by the government?

~~~
danso
The data has obviously been filtered and wrangled (e.g. it includes only
complaints to officers with at least one substantiated complaint). What's
offered for download is a single CSV, it may have been derived from multiple
tables, and several fields may have been cleaned/normalized to the point where
the data is substantially different than the raw records.

~~~
Teever
I was under the impression that you couldn't copyright tables of data.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

~~~
lmkg
You cannot copyright facts, but you can copyright _arrangements_ of facts, as
long as the arrangement has a modicum of creativity.

The litmus test for this is literally the telephone book. The White Pages
cannot be copyrighted (the court case you linked). But, the Yellow Pages _can_
be copyrighted. The White Pages are nothing more than an alphabetic listing of
phone numbers, but the Yellow Pages groups phone numbers by business type.
This involves some editorial discretion, which involves a bare minimum of
thinking, and therefore qualifies as a creative work.

------
djaque
I sincerely hope that with all of the well documented instances of police
abuse and lack of accountability in the last few months that people in the US
are starting to wake up to the problem. Additional scrutiny from journalists
like this is nice, but there ultimately needs to be powerful legislative
changes.

------
kbenson
I wonder if some sort of community hearing where any police officer that had a
complaint filed had to sit in front of the community and have the details
recounted and could explain their side would be useful. If the community had
the power (through some elected or random jury) to censure, or cause a week or
two probation without pay, or request a more detailed investigation of
possible criminal actions, if that would weed out police the community did not
deem fit.

~~~
geofft
In a functional democracy, that process is called "government."

Instead, the police make us pay taxes to fund their own paychecks and openly
mocks the idea that they're answerable to us. Look at the way the NYPD union
threatened the mayor's own daughter.

~~~
dgellow
Where do police control taxes? I never heard of this. Taxes and budgets are
responsibility of governments, they then distribute the money around.

~~~
geofft
They certainly make sure taxes get paid. I'm not claiming that they set tax
rates.

(But they do have a lot of influence on how big of a budget the city
government gives them, using that tax revenue.)

------
throwawaysea
It’s hard to say if this data is telling us anything notable. It seems like
11% of the NYPD has had at least one claim against them substantiated. But
isn’t that to be expected? Each officer probably has on the order of a
thousand interactions with citizens each year on the low end. Over a ten year
period, wouldn’t even a high performing nearly perfect officer violate some
rule within their complex policing guidelines just because they are imperfect
humans, as we all are? Many of those violations are also likely minor and not
material as far as constructing an anti police narrative.

The article notes that only 303 of 36000 officers (0.8%) have 5 or more
substantiated violations against them. The particulars of those should be
examined more closely perhaps, but overall I’m not taking this as a sign of
things being irrevocably broken. It even suggests that minor tweaks (reforms)
would work, as they have elsewhere like in Seattle.

~~~
Kye
If that were true, it would be in their interests to publish and promote data
that contradicted the image of a force of violent goons.

~~~
zepto
What data could contradict such an image?

Generally, data doesn’t convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced, and
can usually be used to support a wide variety of contradictory
interpretations.

Avoiding this is why science has to be so rigorous.

~~~
prepend
I would be more convinced by a solid trail of data of this committee getting
full cooperation from the NYPD.

I’m not sure we’ll get to absolute confidence. But at least knowing we have a
complete data set and sound, valid process.

~~~
kazagistar
The absence of such cooperation is sufficient evidence of systematic disregard
for the law, and q systematic disregard for the law seems like a good enough
reason to wholesale replace a governmental system.

------
tehwebguy
12k complaints over 35 years and 7-8M population, not sure if low or high

~~~
strathmeyer
I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of
malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave
inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've
made (zero).

I guess you would also need to go make a complaint and see what the odds of it
being taken are.

~~~
mcherm
> I think it's easy for everyone here to estimate the actual amount of
> malfeasance by taken the number of times they've seen police behave
> inappropriately (dozens) and divide it by the number of complaints they've
> made (zero).

Except that this approach is NOT useful because police malfeasance is NOT
distributed evenly. For example, over my lifetime I have only seen one case I
can recall of police misbehavior, and I'm not sure that one even rises to the
level of "malfeasance".

Perhaps if I were black and lived in New York City (where "stop and frisk" was
an official policy for years) I would have a very different impression.

It is for exactly this reason that it is important to use actual statistics
instead of personal anecdotes.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Statistics aside for a minute.

Every single interaction I’ve had with the police personally has been worthy
of complaint.

He’ll, I’ll even complain when I see them take their side arms in to the
bakery for lunch, here in Launceston Tasmania.

Who is so insecure they need a gun with their croissant.

Additionally, when the police prosecutor charged me with drug trafficking on
evidence they knew was collected illegally, and 27 months later they had to
drop the charges, there’s no simple way to have the officers involved and the
police prosecutor charged, or even reprimanded in any way, for knowingly
contravening the law.

Those 27 months weren’t real comfortable for me, but ok I’ll wear that, I did
have the drugs in my possession, my guilt is indisputable, but my privacy, in
that case, is more important than the intentional malfeasance of these
institutionalised bullies, and the courts here, at the time, agreed.

To summaries, anyone who can act with impunity deserves constant derision
until we see real change.

The police need to be trained that escalating violence isn’t the only path to
working in the community, and that even when they honestly believe they caught
someone in the act, they need to be treating that human being with kindness
and respect.

What I’m saying is, if the police can’t behave, and they presently aren’t
behaving, then another agency needs to be created that sends agentes out with
the police to act as a public advocate, to protect the rights of everyone, and
guide the police in their responsibilities.

~~~
DenisM
> Who is so insecure they need a gun with their croissant.

Maybe these guys:

... four police officers of Lakewood, Washington were fatally shot at the
Forza Coffee shop ...

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Lakewood_shooting](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Lakewood_shooting)

~~~
majormajor
This is an example of the whole classic theory with "I need my gun because
criminals will get guns regardless" 2nd Amendment justifications: no gun will
save you from someone who wants to shoot you before you have a chance to
react.

Escalation is not a logical policy.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
That’s my question. Looks like the perp got shot once, but the cops still
died, so how is that example a counter argument?

