Publishing thousands of police discipline records that New York kept secret
propublica.org
propublica.org
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.
Let’s call a spade a space.
It’s corruption, all the way up and down.
>> 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.
Of the requests made, about 26% are resolved in 30 days or less. 46% requests still outstanding after 90 days.
So yes, its pretty clear NYPD delays or doesnt respond to requests for body camera footage.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
You would have to research the case law to see if courts will enforce this. Anyone can say anything they want.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right
No idea if that's even applicable in this instance though, as this is "Terms on a website" (my wording) - which would probably be a contractual obligation.
> ...on a stand-alone basis.
As I read it, you could publish half of the data with a blurb about how it's only half the data, and where it came from. So it's not stand-alone.
Then you do the same thing with the other half. And please, cross-link them.
To me, that sounds non-optimal for getting the data widely used. :(
This feels like a heavy hammer for that purpose, but it seems pretty straightforward to read between the lines on these terms.
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.
(But they do have a lot of influence on how big of a budget the city government gives them, using that tax revenue.)
https://gizmodo.com/nypd-union-doxes-mayors-daughter-on-twit...
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/nypd-officer-letter-to-m...
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.
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.
I’m not sure we’ll get to absolute confidence. But at least knowing we have a complete data set and sound, valid process.
The issue is that I think most of us agree when it gets to the level you describe, perhaps that's not a job worth doing.
It's easy to see how it gets to that point though. Friends in the union might not care who is in the wrong, and selective retelling of the facts can get other union member up in arms about the "raw deal" their fellow member is getting, so it's probably easier for the union to just protect all but the most egregious behavior against non union people. I imagine that's just how the incentives work out.
The problem is that in addition to representing the line workers, the union also manages the entire department. It controls everything except setting the department's budget.
It would be like the C-executives of GM being part of the United Auto Workers union. There would be zero accountability for anyone, and the interests of the shareholders would not be represented well.
Unions must exist in an adversarial relationship with management - it keeps all parties honest. If the union takes over management, you get a disaster.
That's 34 people who should be off the streets - so that's notable.
It would also be interesting to find the count of claims where the board was unable to get evidence it was entitled to.
As long as there's zero accountability or transparency, there will always be the remote possibility that there are good cops out there being complained against, but that should be an argument for greater accountability and transparency, not for assuming the best and waiting for the next time a police officer murders someone on camera to do the same thing again.
No, this narrative is disgusting. People don't punch people in the face, choke them, hit them with nightsticks, spray them with tear gas and pepper spray, shoot them with rubber bullets, and fucking murder people, because they're "imperfect humans, as we all are". You wouldn't cut anyone else this kind of slack, stop putting police officers above the rest of us.
People don't report officers because they "violate some rule within their complex policing guidelines", for the simple reason that people don't know all the complex policing guidelines. People report officers because they do stuff that is obviously illegal (or should be).
What's unexpected here are how few officers have received any sort of disciplinary action.
They are also only records where the complaint has been substantiated by the [tilted towards police] Civilian Complaint Review Board, so only the most egregious and well-documented complaints are present. If you got the crap beat out of you, but no one else saw it and the officer says you fell down the stairs 8 or 10 times, that's not a substantiated complaint. If there's video footage of your beating but the NYPD declines to turn the footage over to the CCRB, then that's not a substantiated complaint.
I guess you would also need to go make a complaint and see what the odds of it being taken are.
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.
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.
Maybe these guys:
... four police officers of Lakewood, Washington were fatally shot at the Forza Coffee shop ...
Escalation is not a logical policy.
This, in and of itself, tells volumes about what that statistics would show if it were available.
But even anecdotes are telling. The ones that are most telling are the anecdotes of whistleblower cops, and specifically how their colleagues treat them after. You'll quickly notice a pattern - as soon as they interfere with one "bad apple", pretty much the entire PD/SD starts actively obstructing them, and it can get pretty extreme. To see just how extreme, and just how many people can get involved in such a witch hunt, look up Adrian Schoolcraft.
I would be surprised if the average American had a dozen interactions with police in a given year, not to mention dozens of instances of police misbehavior.
Can you share a bit about your life? What context do you have for dozens of instances of police abuse?
Or that most people who are happy will not compplain, i.e. refuting a straw man, since nobody said they would?
I didn't say any of that, why do you make things up on my behalf?
Plus some ominous addendum about voting, without saying what that would mean in practice in this context, i.e. voting for whom over whom. Why do I care more about what you're actually saying than you do? Would you say that's also true for the silent [sic] majority who only votes awesomely, for whom you presumed to speak?
>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).
Followed by my reply:
>In two decades I’ve had a handful interactions and witnessed quite a few more in Seattle - zero malfeasance observed. Most people who are happy with the police will never be loud about it, but they do vote.
The implication here is that there is a significant group of people who had (seen) virtually zero bad behavior and yet will never speak up thus never contributing to any such computation, thus making the "estimate the actual amount of malfeasance" entirely unsound.
Everything else you read into this is entirely the product of your imagination.