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NYPD Pledges Release of Body Camera Footage Policy This Month


mayor hosts press conf cam

De Blasio with a body camera (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayor's Office)


The New York City police department is set to finally publish its formal policy regarding the release of body-worn camera footage, nearly seven months after every uniformed patrol officer was equipped with a body camera. While the signature reform has been touted by Mayor Bill de Blasio as a means to improve policing and to provide transparency and accountability to the public, there have been no clear guidelines on how the department determines when to release footage to the public and the press.

Indication of the impending announcement, given to Gotham Gazette by an NYPD spokesperson, comes amid questions about the death of NYPD Officer Brian Mulkeen in a ‘friendly fire’ incident last month – including when the city will make public the body-camera footage of officers involved in the shooting, which apparently occurred as Mulkeen wrestled with a suspect who was also killed by responding officers.

In March, the NYPD completed the roll out of body-worn cameras to every uniformed officer on patrol, roughly 20,000 in total, and began assigning another 4,000 to officers in specialized units. In the Mulkeen incident, all of the officers were equipped with cameras and had them activated, except for Mulkeen, according to news reports. While there are detailed guidelines on how officers must use those cameras, there is no formal policy on how footage is released to the public or the press.

NYPD spokesperson Devora Kaye told Gotham Gazette that policy will be posted to the department’s website by the end of the month. Kaye did not provide any further details about what the policy will include or who was consulted on creating it.

The NYPD first began a pilot program to equip a limited number of officers with body-worn cameras in April 2017, after the settlement of a lawsuit over the department’s policing tactics, specifically the unconstitutional manner in which officers employed street stops known as stop-and-frisk. The camera program was launched under the supervision of a court-appointed special monitor, Peter Zimroth, who has continued to assess its efficacy. In July 2018, a federal judge ordered the police department to begin recording all encounters, not just the more serious ones that officers had been recording thus far.

The body-worn camera program was to be fully implemented by the end of 2019 but was expedited last year by de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O’Neill. But, while the two have repeatedly said they support greater transparency in how the police operate, critics say they have been hesitant to act unless pushed to do so or become more secretive, as has been the case with the city’s narrowed interpretation of a state law related to the public release of officer personnel records.

As early as December 2014, Mayor de Blasio emphasized the need to balance privacy and legal concerns as the city sought to implement a pilot body camera program. “I think part of this is seeing how it works in practice and helping us refine that balance...We're dealing with a lot of unexplored territory in this issue that the public...the media, and we in the police profession, and the courts for that matter, don't fully understand. We're going to all learn together,” he said, quickly noting that an early issue that emerged was the Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

In April 2017, the mayor noted that the program continued to be a “work in progress” for the police department. “It will build out over time. We are reserving the right to make adjustments in the policy as we go along,” he said.

At a January 2018 news conference, when the city announced the accelerated implementation of the body camera program, police officials were reluctant to commit to time-bound policies for release of footage or a policy around doing so, emphasizing again that they believed it was too early to make such decisions. “I think what we are trying to do is gather the experience to inform that policy,” said Assistant Deputy Commissioner Nancy Hoppock.

In the wake of several high-profile officer-involved shootings, police reform advocates and the families of individuals killed by officers have repeatedly raised alarms about the department’s culture of secrecy and the apparent absence of a universal standard for releasing body-worn camera footage, and no public indication as to when such a policy would be forthcoming.

Such concerns were again raised last month, after Officer Mulkeen and a civilian, Antonio Williams, were killed in the Bronx in an attempted arrest gone wrong. Mulkeen had chased Williams after a street stop, and when the two struggled as the officer tried to restrain him, several fellow officers showed up and opened fire, killing them both.

At an October 8 news conference on the latest crime statistics, Commissioner O’Neill said the department would release some footage of the incident. “We’re in discussions, this is an active investigation with the Bronx DA’s office,” he said, adding that the department was “going to end up releasing some of it but certainly not to the point where right before Detective Mulkeen gets shot, just to what led up to it.” (Mulkeen was posthumously promoted to Detective by the NYPD.)

The previous week, the mayor defended his administration’s “consistent” approach in terms of working with district attorneys first and noted the complexities of releasing body camera footage.

“[T]his is what we said from the beginning about body cameras, that we have to, in each instance, make sure that the release is appropriate and that begins with dealing with the District Attorney’s Office,” he said, in his weekly appearance on NY1’s Inside City Hall on September 30. “And as you see, the release of footage has happened consistently in the days after an incident. But there are...legal considerations that have to be accounted for and then we proceed to release the footage.”

But the police department has not always been forthcoming or consistent, as the mayor claims. In a June ruling in a lawsuit brought by New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a judge ordered the department to release all relevant footage from the 2017 shooting death of an unarmed, mentally ill Bronx resident at the hands of police. An earlier collection of footage the department had made public excluded certain officers who were at the scene.

The NYPD had initially sought to prevent releasing the body-camera footage under the protection of Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights law, which the department and city lawyers have argued prohibits officers’ personnel records from public disclosure. But the department later reversed its position, indicating it would release the footage. That did not, however, stop the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police officers union, from filing a lawsuit on those grounds. The suit was struck down by a state appeals court in February this year.

Advocates continue to deride the fact that the NYPD itself is creating the policies around disclosure. Kesi Foster, an organizer with Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of advocacy groups, said the department’s current policies are “substandard and are designed to protect abusive officers instead of the public.”

“We have no faith that the NYPD's expected revision of their policies will change this since body cameras can never be a tool for transparency or accountability while the NYPD owns the footage, controls release of footage and unilaterally dictates related policy,” Foster said in a statement. “Despite promises from elected officials that body cameras will create stronger accountability or reform policing, it’s clear in NYC and across the country they are another tool for officials to protect police departments from transparency and control the narrative around interactions between residents and police officers.”

There is broad agreement that the department needs to have a detailed formal policy on handling the release of footage to the public and the news media. Before the initial launch of the body-worn camera program, the NYPD in 2016 conducted a survey of police officers and the public, and commissioned a subsequent report on the public feedback received by the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project.

“A majority of respondents (57%) either agreed or strongly agreed that the NYPD should be required to show footage of a person’s interaction with an officer to a news or advocacy organization upon request, noting that recordings were public documents, and that making footage available would promote transparency and accountability,” the report noted. Those who believed footage should not be released pointed to privacy concerns or the effect it could have on police investigations.

Groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and more than a dozen media organizations urged the department to formulate a written policy and to ensure that exemptions to the city’s Freedom of Information Law are only applied narrowly for maximum access. Additionally, the report noted, 51% of respondents said the police department should release footage of high-profile incidents – including a serious use of force or custodial death – “as soon as possible” while 25% said footage should be released after an internal department investigation.

Even a report from the Police Executive Research Forum, published in 2014 and commissioned by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, notes that “Agencies should have clear and consistent protocols for releasing recorded data externally to the public and the news media.” The report is linked on the NYPD’s website.

The NYPD patrol guide minimally addresses these issues. Its eight-page body-worn camera policy details when and how officers should use their cameras, protocols for activating them, and circumstances when doing so would adversely affect their duties. It specifies which activities, individuals, and locations officers may not record – protests and other forms of political activity, victims of sex crimes, the inside of a medical facility, to name a few. And it outlines how the footage must be stored, maintained, and reviewed.

But it only briefly refers to how the footage can be made accessible to outside parties, including oversight and investigation agencies and the public. For instance, the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau handles requests for footage from the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which monitors and probes abuse of power and misconduct by officers. Those requests are not always handled in a timely manner, however.

For instance, in December 2018, about 8% of CCRB investigations had pending requests for body-worn camera footage (the number was never higher than 12% for any month last year). In September of this year, however, that number was at 30%, after hitting a high of 37% in June, according to the CCRB’s latest monthly statistical reports.

“Oversight agency access to body-worn camera footage has the potential to revolutionize civilian oversight of police across the country,” said Ethan Teicher, a CCRB spokesperson, in an email. “Currently, the CCRB requests body-worn camera footage from the NYPD in order to use it in agency investigations, and does so because this evidence is crucial to the CCRB’s oversight function.”

The patrol guide explicitly provides instructions to refuse access to body camera footage when initially requested. “Requests by a witness or victim to view a BWC recording must be declined and referred to the appropriate prosecutor handling the case. Requests by civilians to view a BWC recording that is not related to a criminal case must be declined and referred to the Legal Bureau’s Document Production Unit,” it reads.

City Council Member Donovan Richards, who chairs the Council’s public safety committee, is hoping the upcoming policy will provide greater transparency and access to body camera footage.

“In a perfect world, they would be much more transparent – which they are not as of now – in terms of releasing body camera footage immediately after events, as fast and expedient as possible,” he said in a brief interview at City Hall. He cited the recent police-involved shooting in Fort Worth, Texas, where an officer fatally shot a woman inside her own home. The shooting occurred on Saturday and the body camera footage was released quickly after, forcing the officer’s resignation within two days of the shooting. (He was charged with murder just hours later.)

Richards said he wants to see a policy that details time-bound releases of footage. “Things are always going to be under investigation and it needs to be a policy that enables us to get access to body camera footage much faster. So we're going to look for timelines. That's what I'm most interested in seeing,” he said. He is also pushing for an oversight hearing in November on the issue of body camera footage where the new policy would likely be up for discussion. 

Richards did not commit to advancing legislation mandating timeframes should the policy not include any. “We will always use the power of the committee to push the NYPD to be more transparent and more accountable to the public. And we will use the full weight of our committee to do that,” he said.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Note - this article has been updated. 

With 'Broad City' Stars, Charter Revision Commission Hits Airwaves to Activate Voters


broad city charter revision ad

Abbi & Ilana of 'Broad City' fame in Charter Revision Commission PSA


When trying to gin up public attention on seemingly mundane government minutiae, a bit of star power never hurts.

Most New Yorkers probably don’t know that they can vote this fall -- starting with the launch of early voting on October 26 -- on fairly significant changes to city elections and governance, so the team behind the ballot proposals is enlisting two people known for New York City pride.

As early voting and November fifth’s Election Day approach, the 2019 Charter Revision Commission is ramping up efforts to inform voters about the series of ballot questions and encourage them to head to the polls, and they’ve recruited “Broad City” television and comedy stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson to help get the message out.

In the next phase of the commission’s public education campaign, a new public service announcement will launch Tuesday that features Glazer and Jacobson talking up the City Charter and opportunities to vote on changes to it.

The Charter Revision Commission, tasked with proposing changes to the city’s seminal governing document, has placed five questions on the ballot, with a total of 19 proposals contained within that would change how elections are conducted, enhance the powers of a police oversight agency, strengthen ethics laws, provide dedicated budgets to the public advocate and borough presidents, and make tweaks to the city’s budgeting and land use processes.

To ensure a robust response to the ballot questions, in what is expected to be a very low-turnout election, the commission launched its campaign aimed at reaching voters through ads on buses and subways, television, radio, print, and digital. The commission is spending between $1-1.4 million on the entire campaign. The spot featuring Glazer and Jacobson seeks to add a bit of buzz to the more traditional ads that have been published thus far. The PSA, for which Glazer and Jacobson volunteered their time, cost $16,000 to produce and will run on TV and digital media through Election Day. 

The comedic duo is seen sitting together in a living room, reading the City Charter and imagining, in their typically absurd brand, voting on benefits to give New Yorkers, like a government-issued personal force field for anyone who steps foot in Times Square.

But then they turn to the charter.

“Did you know on November 5th, we can vote on other cool stuff? Like, we get to amend our city’s charter,” Glazer says.

“Our constitution!” Jacobson responds.

They list two of the more significant proposals – ranked choice voting, which would radically change election administration, and improving police accountability, through strengthening the authority of the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

“You can vote on that!” the two comedians say, echoing the signature line of the charter commission’s awareness campaign.

“This election is happening during an off-year so we want to do everything possible to make sure that New Yorkers know that these proposals are on the ballot,” Charter Commission Chair Gail Benjamin said in a statement about the ad, which Gotham Gazette previewed. “That’s why we were so excited to have Abbi and Ilana join us in this campaign. We know that when they talk, people listen.”

Benjamin and the Broad City stars are hoping that New Yorkers say ‘Yas Queen!’ to voting, if not all five ballot questions.

[Read: Charter Revision Commission Gives Final Approval to 19 Proposals in 5 Questions to Appear on November Ballot]

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - This article has been updated.

There are NYPD Oversight Measures on the Ballot - How Significant are They?


police academ gra

(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


New York City may soon take several steps toward strengthening the power of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, or CCRB, the agency responsible for investigating misconduct allegations against police officers.

Voters have the opportunity to approve or reject a package of CCRB-related measures on this fall’s ballot, just months after the Board played a consequential role in the high-profile trial of Officer Daniel Pantaleo, resulting in his firing by NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill.

The 2019 New York City Charter Revision Commission has placed five “yes” or “no” questions on this fall’s ballot, one of which includes five proposed CCRB reforms. Perhaps the most controversial of the five is expanding the jurisdiction of the Board to include investigating some instances of suspected lying by police officers. It is a step police reform advocates say is important but which has limitations that illustrate the city’s caution toward tightening the reins on police misconduct.

The ballot question, which will be the second of the five presented to voters during early voting or on Election Day, also includes expanding the size of the Board and changing certain appointment processes; giving the CCRB a budget large enough to hire staff of a certain size relative to that of the NYPD force; providing the CCRB executive director subpoena power; and requiring that the police commissioner provides written explanation to the CCRB when the commissioner “intends to depart or has departed from discipline recommended by the CCRB” or by one of the NYPD’s top internal trials officials.

The proposals, which will pass or fail together, could significantly impact the performance of the Board in its work to hold officers accountable in cases of alleged excessive force, abuse of authority, and other specifically-outlined examples of possible misconduct. They are being put before voters, along with other changes to city elections and governance, during what is expected to be a very low-turnout election and amid heightened attention, both in New York City and nationally, toward police misconduct, transparency, and consequences for officers who break their pledge to protect and serve the public.

In sum, the reforms amount to changes that CCRB officials and police accountability watchdogs believe would help the board operate more efficiently and independently.

“I think on the whole they are good for the agency and will help to advance civilian oversight of certain disciplinary aspects of the NYPD, those that fall within our jurisdiction,” said Fred Davie, the chair of the CCRB appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, in an interview with Gotham Gazette.

The CCRB is a police oversight agency made up of civilians that falls outside the NYPD but is part of the disciplinary framework for officers accused of certain kinds of misconduct. Agency staff and the Board it reports to are empowered by the City Charter to investigate complaints of officers using unnecessary force or abusing their authority as police and recommend discipline to the police commissioner.

Davie said there has not necessarily been a proliferation of false statements made by officers during the course of the Board’s investigations, “but where there might be, we should be able to investigate that and then work out the appropriate discipline to recommend to the police commissioner.” That power is currently beyond the Board’s reach.

The false official statements provision is the only one that actually expands the Board’s jurisdiction. The rest have to do with CCRB operations, though they also have the potential for significant impact.

On the proposal related to guaranteeing a CCRB budget tied to NYPD headcount, Davie said it will provide a baseline in budget negotiations and “increase the agency’s stability and effectiveness.”

The proposed changes to the size of the Board and structure of appointments to it would limit the influence of the mayor -- who also appoints the police commissioner -- and give the City Council far more power in selecting appointees, including the chair. It would also add an appointee by the public advocate.

The Charter Revision Commission this year was chaired by an appointee of City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and was balanced with other appointments made by the mayor, public advocate, comptroller, and borough presidents, with no one authority having a majority (though all but one are Democrats). It tackled a wider range of charter issues in its public hearings than previous commissions appointed by mayors, including some targets that have never before been touched.

The commission ultimately came up with 19 proposals in the form of five ballot questions dealing with elections, the CCRB, ethics, the city budget, and land use, all of which are expected to be approved by voters. There has been little public push for or against any of the five sets of reforms, other than a coalition organized to seek passage of ranked-choice voting for certain city elections, which will be question one on the ballot.

The potential changes to police oversight, many of which have long been supported by reformers, are modest enough to have avoided a concerted public effort to defeat the proposals, particularly from the labor unions representing NYPD officers. The Police Benevolent Association, the largest police officer union, did not return a request for comment for this article.

False Official Statements
“The proposed reform related to the CCRB obtaining authority to prosecute officers who lie during the investigation process is by far the most important charter amendment for voters to look for this [fall],” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, an attorney at Legal Aid Society with experience litigating police transparency matters.

The CCRB was established in its current all-civilian form (former NYPD officers are regularly appointed by the police commissioner) in 1993 to investigate complaints made against officers from outside the NYPD. Over the years its budget has increased and its authority expanded to allow it to prosecute substantiated cases in a police trial setting.

Its jurisdiction is restricted to “FADO” -- unnecessary force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, and offensive language -- complaints, which must be made by civilians in order to be investigated. The charter amendments would, among other things, expand that jurisdiction to include lying to CCRB investigators.

But the reform does have significant limits. It applies only to the police officer(s) originally under investigation and not to any other officers who may provide false testimony related to the inquiry. Even if the CCRB has proof that an officer lied to its investigators, it has no ability to initiate a new case on the matter.

This means that police witnesses who lie to protect a colleague under investigation or to shield their own behavior, when not the subject of an ongoing investigation themselves, can do so without recourse from the CCRB.

Currently, when the CCRB has evidence of an officer lying, it refers the case to the NYPD’s internal affairs bureau where it gets dealt with out of public view. Because of a provision in the state’s Civil Rights Law known as Section 50-a, any discipline issued by the police department, including any action against dishonest officers, is sealed.

Limits of CCRB Proposals
Gail Benjamin, the chair of the Charter Revision Commission that created the ballot proposals, told Gotham Gazette the body was limited in how much it could expand the authority of the CCRB to investigate misconduct because of a catch-22 involving the complaint-initiated nature of the agency’s mandate.

“Because the CCRB can only investigate based on a complaint and a complainant, if there are other officers, somebody else would have to complain about them in order for the CCRB to have jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, as I said, is only over FADO and other officers would be outside of that," she said in an interview.

A State Supreme Court ruling from February determined that the City Charter barred the CCRB from initiating an investigation or gathering evidence without first receiving a complaint. But because this is an issue of the City Charter and not state law, the Charter Revision Commission had the authority to deal with it.

“To the extent that that is a limitation of the Charter then the Charter Revision Commission could have looked at altering those provisions in order to expand the CCRB’s mandate, but didn’t in this case,” said Michael Sisitzky, lead policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), in an interview. He said he is not aware of any state law that would prevent the CCRB from beginning an investigation without a civilian complaint.

“I can't say that that was an issue that came up. What came up was how to affect the greatest change. I'm not sure what would have happened if it had,” said Benjamin.

“I'm not sure we would even have the jurisdiction,” she added. “It's a very complicated question to change and pull out one thing."

“I think to me the emphasis was on materiality,” Carl Weisbrod, a commissioner appointed by de Blasio, told Gotham Gazette in a brief interview. “The person who is being looked at at the CCRB is the officer who is under investigation, and that I think was the rationale.”

‘We haven’t seen that willingness’
The commission’s relatively narrow expansion of the CCRB’s jurisdiction is in some ways characteristic of the history of resistance to bringing police oversight outside of the purview of the police department itself.

From the early days of investigating civilian complaints in the mid-1960s when the powerful Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association fought to keep the function within the NYPD, to earlier this year when Gotham Gazette reported on the secret effort by de Blasio administration officials to lobby commissioners to scuttle the provision related to officer lying -- attempts to create a police accountability framework independent of the NYPD has met resistance. Only after a second vote and a change of heart this year did the commissioners move to place false official statements on the ballot in its circumscribed form.

Other measures sought by police reformers never made it onto the ballot. Things like bringing school safety agents and other peace officers under the jurisdiction of the CCRB were proposed but never taken up. High on the list for reform advocates was codifying the CCRB’s administrative prosecutorial unit (APU), through which the CCRB prosecutes cases of misconduct when the Board is seeking the highest forms of discipline.

Currently governed by a memorandum of understanding, the CCRB’s APU provides a layer of oversight that can have large consequences. It was the APU that brought charges against Officer Pantaleo for Garner’s death, which led to a guilty verdict by the NYPD trial judge and Commissioner O’Neill to dismiss Pantaleo from the force this summer.

Only one provision in the APU agreement was picked up by the Charter Revision Commission to be codified in the Charter despite advocates pushing for more. Under the proposed amendments, the police commissioner will be required to explain in writing to the CCRB in any instance when deviating from a disciplinary recommendation, as is currently required under the memorandum of understanding.

“I think it’s disappointing on the one hand that we haven’t seen that willingness to take on expanding the CCRB’s mandate,” said Sisitzky, especially on the issue of peace officers and on strengthening the board’s “ability to actually make discipline stick.”

“But I don’t want that to take away from the fact that there are important changes being proposed to the CCRB as part of this ballot measure that we support and want to see enacted,” he said.

Layers of Accountability
To reform advocates, the changes made to give the CCRB greater sway in the Sity Charter are important but limited in their impact because state law gives the police commissioner the ultimate authority to discipline members of the force.

“The CCRB is ultimately not given more teeth in terms of being able to enforce penalties, but allowing an independent agency to conduct investigations into false statements made to that agency is still an important way for the agency to have increased authority to hold officers accountable,” said Sisitzky.

NYPD officials have expressed concerns about the package of amendments and said that the system of referring cases of misconduct to the department’s internal affairs team works well, especially in instances of false official statements. “Currently, the CCRB has been integrated into this framework and makes referrals to Internal Affairs when it suspects an officer has made a false statement during its investigation,” wrote Al Baker, the NYPD’s director of media relations, in an email.

“Going forward, it is imperative for the integrity of our criminal justice system that a uniform standard remain in place when assessing the serious issue of officer credibility," Baker added.

According to police reform advocates, however, the current system is not doing enough to curtail police lying to the CCRB. “The fact that false statements made it into the ballot is incredibly important because false statements are given in almost every police killing and misconduct case our members have worked on,” said Joo-Hyun Kang, director of the advocacy coalition Communities United for Police Reform, in an interview.

Over 130 cases of police making false official statements to CCRB investigators were referred to the NYPD between 2014 and 2018 (nearly half of which occurred in 2015 alone), according to a report provided by the CCRB. That figure includes only the cases where the CCRB had enough evidence to prove an officer lied without initiating a separate investigation into the matter.

Officer credibility is also a concern for New York City prosecutors, who often rely on police testimony at trial. WNYC reported in April that district attorneys in all five boroughs kept files of police dishonesty and Bronx DA Darcel Clark recently released a large portion of her office’s files to Gothamist following a Freedom of Information request.

City Council Member Joe Borelli, a Republican representing parts of Staten Island and a candidate this fall for New York City Public Advocate, is opposed to expanding the authority of the CCRB in many ways, saying he’s voted against giving the agency the power to prosecute misconduct and supports limiting the scope of “what it can do unilaterally against police officers.” Borelli told Gotham Gazette he would be voting against the CCRB ballot proposals.

But he backs the measure to allow the CCRB to pursue cases of police lying, he said. “If that was a stand-alone bill I’d probably support that,” he said in an interview.

“Because what is the point of having a court if you can’t validate a statement people make while they are swearing...before it. That to me is not a problem,” he said.

Layers of Obfuscation
In the interview, Borelli ruminated on whether police witness testimony in CCRB investigations was that important. “With all the video evidence we have now of most incidents with body cameras, usually the fact pattern is pretty established,” he said.

But establishing the facts through video evidence is a difficult task for the CCRB, Board representatives have said, and one that has led agency officials to push for other reforms on the ballot.

CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche testified before the Charter Revision Commission in March about the need for the agency’s highest ranking staff to have subpoena power. Currently, the CCRB chair can sign subpoenas after a vote of the Board, at times creating a period during which material evidence may be lost.

Many of the subpoenas the Board issues are to government agencies or businesses for evidence, especially video surveillance, which don’t necessarily have a system for preserving recordings, according to Davie, the Board’s chair. The Charter Revision Commission proposal will allow the CCRB to delegate its subpoena power to the executive director so the agency can more quickly respond to and acquire potential evidence.

The CCRB also has trouble obtaining body-worn camera footage from the police department, noted CCRB communications director Colleen Roache, despite the Charter-mandated duty to cooperate with the Board’s investigations. Since the complete rollout of body-worn cameras to NYPD patrol officers in March, month-to-month between 29 and 37 percent of CCRB investigations have pending footage requests with the NYPD. Roughly 13 percent of cases are pending for more than 90 days. The NYPD has not put forth publicly any formal policy for releasing body camera footage to the CCRB or the public at large.

“The step that has been taken helps,” Davie told Gotham Gazette, referring to the false statements ballot proposal. “It’s a step in the right direction, and if expanding it makes our ability to do our job better then of course we would not be opposed to that.”

Another layer of obfuscation is Section 50-a, the part of state law that prevents public disclosure of police disciplinary records, which the Charter Revision Commission does not have the power to suggest changing via ballot referendum. Because of Section 50-a, the public has no ability to see the outcome of CCRB investigations, even when it substantiates complaints of misconduct.

“If we should ever be able to repeal 50-a, [the false official statements amendment] might even add a little more transparency,” said Davie. Davie has never taken a public position on Section 50-a “other than recognizing the challenges it poses to the agency,” according to a CCRB spokesperson, but he will be testifying at a State Senate hearing on a bill that would repeal the law taking place in Manhattan on Thursday.

Amending the City Charter to allow the CCRB to go after officers under investigation who lie, he believes, will enhance the agency’s abilities to serve its mandate. “I think that it adds integrity to the process. It adds another level of accountability,” he said of what the commission has proposed.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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