Massive coverup of police misconduct in New York City

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Secret files obtained by BuzzFeed News reveal that from 2011 to 2015 at least 319 New York Police Department employees who committed offenses serious enough to merit firing were allowed to keep their jobs.

Many of the officers lied, cheated, stole, or assaulted New York City residents. At least fifty employees lied on official reports, under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation. Thirty-eight were found guilty by a police tribunal of excessive force, getting into a fight, or firing their gun unnecessarily. Fifty-seven were guilty of driving under the influence. Seventy-one were guilty of ticket-fixing. One officer, Jarrett Dill, threatened to kill someone. Another, Roberson Tunis, sexually harassed and inappropriately touched a fellow officer. Some were guilty of lesser offenses, like mouthing off to a supervisor.

At least two dozen of these employees worked in schools. Andrew Bailey was found guilty of touching a female student on the thigh and kissing her on the cheek while she was sitting in his car. In a school parking lot, while he was supposed to be on duty, Lester Robinson kissed a woman, removed his shirt, and began to remove his pants. And Juan Garcia, while off duty, illegally sold prescription medication to an undercover officer.

In every instance, the police commissioner, who has final authority in disciplinary decisions, assigned these officers to “dismissal probation,” a penalty with few practical consequences. The officer continues to do their job at their usual salary. They may get less overtime and won’t be promoted during that period, which usually lasts a year. When the year is over, so is the probation.

Today many continue to patrol the streets, arrest people, put them in jail, and testify in criminal prosecutions. But the people they arrest have little way to find out about the officer's record. So they are forced to make life-changing decisions — such as whether to fight their charges in court or take a guilty plea — without knowing, for example, if the officer who arrested them is a convicted liar, information that a jury might find directly relevant.

BuzzFeed News’ reporting is based on hundreds of pages of internal police files that, like all disciplinary records, the department keeps secret, citing a controversial state law on “personnel records.” The files were provided by a source who requested anonymity. They were subsequently verified through more than 100 calls to NYPD employees, visits to officers’ homes, interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers, and a review of thousands of pages of court records.

The Probation Files do not include all officers who received dismissal probation during the years in question. According to the NYPD, of the more than 50,000 people who work for the department, at least 777 officers and an untold number of other employees received the penalty during the five years in question. During the same period, 463 officers were forced to leave or resigned while a disciplinary charge was pending.

But the Probation Files are by far the most thorough accounting of this practice to date. They pull back the curtain on one of the NYPD's most fiercely guarded secrets, providing the most extensive record available of which officers, despite committing serious misconduct, continue to wield tremendous power over New Yorkers’ lives.

New York is one of only three states, along with Delaware and California, that has a law specifically shielding police misconduct records from the public, according to a study conducted by WNYC in 2015. In recent years, the NYPD has doubled down on its stringent legal interpretation of those laws, even as departments around the country face growing public pressure to be more transparent about police misconduct.

In addition to letting some officers off the hook, sources told BuzzFeed News that dismissal probation is also used to punish other officers arbitrarily, for reporting misconduct or just for getting on their supervisors’ bad sides.

"If 10 cops did the same exact thing that was bad, the outcome is different every time. If you’ve complained, forget about it,” said Diane Davis, a former internal affairs investigator who later sued the department for racial discrimination.

Bill Bratton and Ray Kelly, the NYPD commissioners who ran the department during the years covered by the Probation Files, both declined to speak to BuzzFeed News. (The current commissioner, James O'Neill, took over in 2016.)

The law that hides New York police officers’ misconduct from public view is one of the strictest in the nation. When Civil Rights Law Section 50-a was first crafted, state legislators thought they had struck a reasonable balance between the need for criminal defense lawyers and prosecutors to have access to serious misconduct records and the need to protect officers’ privacy. It hasn’t worked that way.

While advocating for the proposed law more than 40 years ago, John Maye, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which at that time represented 3,000 transit officers, complained that “unverified and unsubstantiated” allegations as well as “confidential information and privileged medical records” about officers were being wrongly disclosed to the public and misused by defendants’ attorneys.


So in 1976, state legislators passed a bill that put the decision to release or withhold disciplinary records in the hands of judges. The idea was that judges would exercise independent discretion, withholding records that served no public interest, and releasing records that people charged with crimes needed in order to be able to defend themselves.

The state law says that “personnel records of police officers ... shall be considered confidential.” Over time, the NYPD, other departments, and police unions have fought to expand what qualifies as a personnel record. For the most part, courts have agreed with their arguments.

For decades the outcomes of disciplinary trials were made available — if someone knew where to look for them — on a clipboard on the 13th floor of police headquarters. In May 2016, the Legal Aid Society, the largest public defender organization in the country, filed a public records request for all those outcomes. Suddenly the clipboards disappeared. The NYPD, which initially claimed it was saving paper, now says making the disciplinary findings available even to that limited degree was a violation of the 1976 law. Legal Aid sued the department for the records’ release. The case is pending.

Those trials are nominally open to the public, but the schedule and location are not announced and the results are not disclosed. As a result, ordinary New Yorkers have essentially no way to know what goes on in the small, drab room on the 11th floor of headquarters at One Police Plaza, where officers accused of serious misconduct, such as stealing property, false arrest, or excessive force, can fight the charges.

With little outside scrutiny, some officers told BuzzFeed News the internal trials are merely a “kangaroo court,” rife with favoritism, racism, and pressures to just plead guilty. Some said they did not fight their charges out of fear they would face harsher punishment.

The hearings are overseen not by an independent judge but by a top police official who serves at the pleasure of the police commissioner. After hearing evidence, the trial administrator makes a private recommendation about whether the officer should be found guilty and what the punishment should be.

But the police commissioner decides what to do with that recommendation. There are no rules governing that decision. If the trial administrator found the officer’s misconduct serious enough to merit dismissal, the police commissioner can overrule that recommendation.

Every day, New Yorkers accused of a crime have to decide whether to take their chances in court or to plead guilty in exchange for lesser penalties. Without a good reason to question an officer's account, many defense lawyers will advise clients to take a plea deal, since juries are more likely to take the word of a cop than that of a defendant. Statewide, more than 98% of people charged with felonies that result in convictions plead guilty rather than go to trial.

Proof that the officer in question had been convicted of lying could shift that calculus. But that proof is all but impossible to get before the defendant must make their decision.

Prosecutors are obligated under federal law to hand over evidence that might exonerate a defendant, though what exactly that includes, and when it must be produced, is up for debate.

Defense lawyers who want to see for themselves what’s in an officer’s disciplinary record must clear several hurdles. First they have to convince a judge that there is something in the officer’s file that’s directly relevant to the crime the defendant is accused of. That is a hard argument to make without already having seen the file. As a result, defense lawyers say they’re flying blind. Dan McGuinness, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer who has worked in the New York courts since 2006, told BuzzFeed News all he can do is google around for news stories or lawsuits that mention the officer, hoping something has seeped out into public view. “Our hands really are tied,” he said.

There could be so much more “beneath the surface,” McGuinness’s law partner, Adam Perlmutter, added.

If defense lawyers are able to persuade a judge to review the records, there is still the question of whether the judge will approve their release.

Even when ordered by a judge to hand over the material, prosecutors often wait until just before trial to do so, defense lawyers said, taking advantage of loopholes in New York’s discovery laws.

That gives defense lawyers little time — in some cases just a few hours — to investigate the information, review evidence, locate and interview witnesses, and determine whether it will help prove their clients’ innocence.

“They want trial by ambush,” John Schoeffel, a Legal Aid attorney, told BuzzFeed News.

Victims of police brutality face the same uphill battle.

The secrecy surrounding discipline can harm officers too.

Outside of public scrutiny, there is no standard for how the NYPD punishes misconduct. Minor infractions may result in a warning in one case and a serious penalty in another.

The police union has pushed to take more control of the disciplinary process and limit the commissioner’s unilateral authority. “We think the disciplinary system is excessive and draconian, but it’s a quasi-military organization, and all of the challenges we’ve made have come back with, ‘The commissioner is the ultimate arbiter,’” said Al O’Leary, the spokesperson for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.

Outside of public scrutiny, there is no standard for how the NYPD punishes misconduct.
One unnamed officer described by the Commission to Combat Police Corruption was assigned to a year of dismissal probation — and suspended for 122 days and docked pay for another 30 — for telling a supervisor that, as a single mother, she needed a couple of days to arrange for child care before being assigned to a new post.

Several current and former officers told BuzzFeed News that the department assigned them to dismissal probation, and transferred them to new jobs, after they raised concerns about illegal quotas or discriminatory treatment. Most declined to be named, citing fears of further retaliation.

it's like Frank Serpico's testimony to the Knapp Commission never happened.

what is the fundamental thing that amuuurica is doing wrong, to be causing so much corruption to not only persist but multiply?

Capitalism?