New York City police officers recognize we have a job like no other, one with extraordinary responsibilities and challenges. But policing is still a job, with many of the dynamics any working New Yorker would recognize, albeit in more intense form. Many workers, for example, have multiple bosses looking over their shoulders.
But New York City police officers have a whole legion scrutinizing and second-guessing our every move: in addition to the NYPD brass, inspections units and the Internal Affairs Bureau, we have a federal monitor, an inspector general, a Commission to Combat Police Corruption, five NYC district attorneys, and the state attorney general. And for complaints by the public, we have the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Ask yourself: if someone walked into your workplace to complain about how you were doing your job, how would you want that complaint handled? Would you want a fair process, one in which your boss considers both sides of the story, looks objectively at all the facts and considers the full context of the situation? Or would you want your boss to automatically take the complainant’s side, looking for any possible way to punish you?
Unfortunately, the latter situation is what NYPD police officers experience at CCRB.
As the mayor and City Council speaker prepare to appoint a new CCRB chair, they have a unique opportunity to correct the pattern of injustice within the agency and return it to its City Charter mandate, which requires a fair and independent process “in which the public and the police department have confidence.”
Before police officers even report to CCRB for investigator interviews, we feel as though the decision has already been predetermined.
When an allegation is proven baseless, CCRB investigators often go to great lengths to penalize police officers for conduct neither intentional nor material to the case at hand. Investigators overzealously pursue discipline for incidental administrative errors, including unclear or missing entries in our activity logs, misremembering details from months-old encounters or forgetting to offer a business card.
One would expect CCRB’s board members — who make the agency’s final recommendation to the NYPD in each case — to counterbalance investigators’ zeal. However, board members act as little more than a rubber stamp for investigators’ determinations.
Based on the Police Benevolent Association’s review of nearly a year of voting records, we’ve found that when an investigator recommends substantiating a complaint against an officer, a majority of board members vote to uphold the recommendation more than 90% of the time.
Some board members virtually never deviate from the investigators, siding with their recommendations in 98% to 100% of cases in a given month. Even one of the police commissioner’s appointees — whose law enforcement experience is supposed to balance the other perspectives on the board — voted against police officers 90% of the time in several recent months.
And those are just the complaints that biased investigators deem substantiated.
The agency has dramatically lowered the bar for filing complaints in recent years, abandoning the requirement that complainants sign a document verifying the truthfulness of their statement. That has triggered a flood of complaints that even investigators and board members know are meritless.
Those meritless complaints are still damaging to police officers’ careers. The mere filing of complaints may trigger heightened performance monitoring or denial of favorable assignments, promotions or transfers. They also remain on officers’ public records forever.
Penalizing cops in perpetuity for baseless allegations is deeply counterproductive. It disincentivizes officers who engage in proactive police work while incentivizing the submission of false allegations. It is also one of the major factors driving record numbers of police officers away from the NYPD in recent years.
Despite these and other examples of unfairness, some activists have called for expanding CCRB’s powers beyond the bounds of the City Charter by stripping the police commissioner of final disciplinary authority.
Given the agency’s track record of extreme bias, how could any reasonable person — especially any police officer — trust CCRB to exercise that power appropriately?
We need a new chair and new board members to root out the pattern of bias and injustice that currently plagues this agency and instill fairness all-around, as the Charter requires. At a minimum, all unsubstantiated, unfounded and exonerated complaints should be removed from police officers’ records as soon as they are adjudicated.
Affording police officers these basic workplace rights is not just a matter of fairness — it is a matter of public safety, because it will help keep more of our Finest on our streets at a time when we desperately need them.
Hendry is president of the Police Benevolent Association.