One officer had his honesty on the witness stand questioned by two separate judges in 2011. The next year, the NYPD busted him for asking colleagues to engage in ticket fixing. A few years later, yet another judge in another criminal case discredited portions of his sworn testimony.
Another officer “misrepresented” his record of military service to his colleagues, and was later caught by department investigators for making false statements about his decision to shut down the music at a community concert. The next year, the department closed a substantiated case against him for failing to notify the NYPD that he was involved in five “domestic incidents.”
A third officer was disciplined in 2013 for speeding through red lights, using NYPD computers to make numerous searches unrelated to work, and failing to notify the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau about serious misconduct or corruption allegations against several colleagues—a responsibility that NYPD officers take on when they join the force.
Those are just a few of the revelations disclosed in a cache of more than 10,000 documents released by Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez in response to a Freedom of Information Law request from WNYC/Gothamist. The records reveal a wide range of misconduct allegations and findings against NYPD officers ranging from dishonesty to brutality to inappropriate associations with criminals.
The release consists of District Attorney’s office letters prepared for defense attorneys and defendants to inform them of past police conduct that could undermine the credibility of officers called to the stand. Roughly two-thirds of the letters, which were generated for upcoming criminal cases between last January and this March, contain some sort of disclosure, including lawsuits, Civilian Complaint Review Board determinations, NYPD disciplinary actions, and honesty assessments made by judges.
In an interview with WNYC/Gothamist, Gonzalez noted that the release was possible thanks to last summer’s repeal of Civil Rights Law 50-a, a personnel records law that previously shielded most police disciplinary records from public scrutiny.
“The system had been more concerned about protecting the privacy rights of police officers than it was about making sure that community members had the information about who was given the responsibility of keeping them safe,” Gonzalez said. “This now treats police officers the way any other witness would be treated in our justice system.”
The release is the latest in a series of similar disclosures from district attorneys on NYPD misconduct over the last two years. In 2019, WNYC/Gothamist broke news that prosecutors across the city maintained secret compilations of such records, and has since pursued their public release through numerous FOIL requests and appeals.
Gonzalez’s release is, thus far, the biggest of any of the prosecutors in the five boroughs, and experts say it may be one of the largest across the country.
“Mass protests and organizing over police brutality last summer led New York lawmakers to repeal the state’s secrecy law on police disciplinary records,” said Gideon Oliver, a public records attorney who negotiated the release on behalf of Gothamist/WNYC. “This is just the kind of mass disclosure that every prosecutor’s office in our state should do to meet that promise of transparency.”
WNYC/Gothamist is making the thousands of new Brooklyn records available to the public here for the first time.
In a statement, the NYPD noted that it has already published an officer discipline database, which is “ever-evolving,” and that the repeal of Civil Rights Law 50-a does not compel the department to publish “all personnel related information.”
“There is no other agency in city government that provides this breadth or depth of information on their employees accessible to the public,” said Sergeant Edward Riley, an NYPD spokesperson.
Riley also pointed out that the vast majority of NYPD officers, nearly 90%, go through their entire careers without a single substantiated civilian complaint or departmental charge, and that it is not uncommon for highly active officers to generate complaints while fighting crime.
How These Documents Compare To Previous NYPD Releases
While the records only pertain to NYPD officers involved in recent criminal investigations in Brooklyn, the scope of the disclosure is, in some ways, broader than previous releases made by the police department itself.
Following the repeal of Civil Rights Law 50-a, the NYPD published several disciplinary databases which include information on officers who were found guilty of or pleaded guilty to many serious departmental violations.
But unlike Gonzalez’s release, those disclosures do not currently include many lower level misconduct findings. They also provide scant narrative detail on internal NYPD disciplinary sanctions that were resolved through guilty pleas.
The NYPD’s public disciplinary database, for example, refers to one officer who was put on dismissal probation, early in his career, after the department accused him of associating with an alleged criminal at an illegal gambling operation and failing to disclose “potentially relevant information” to the department about this connection.
One of the letters from the Brooklyn DA, however, provides more troubling details about that NYPD probe, which resulted in an administrative guilty plea by the officer.
The letter notes that the officer, who was assigned to a precinct in Crown Heights at the time, frequented the illegal gambling club for most of 2008. The letter also makes clear that his failure to disclose information to the department about his associations occurred during an interview with NYPD detectives who were working on a murder investigation.
The Brooklyn DA’s letters also contain information collected by prosecutors themselves, which cannot be found in the NYPD database.
That same officer, who pleaded guilty to failing to disclose potentially relevant information about the gambling club operator, also had portions of his testimony explicitly discredited by a judge in a subsequent case.
Despite these red flags, department records show the officer remained on the force. Currently, he is serving in Queens as a sergeant, a rank the NYPD elevated him to in 2019.
In response to questions about the limitations of the disciplinary compilations the NYPD has published online, the department told WNYC/Gothamist that it plans to publish more disciplinary records extending further back into the past. Its public portal will also eventually include several other categories of lower-level disciplinary decisions, which are currently not available on the police department’s website.
The Politics of Mass Disclosures
Gonzalez insisted the mass document release is not meant to be an attack on NYPD officers. He pointed out that his office had no disclosures to make at all for a third of the officers named in the letters, and added that many others have only been named in lawsuits or disciplined for minor administrative infractions over the course of long careers.
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, said publishing the full universe of records could actually bolster the public’s perception of police officers.
“Often persistent and serious misdeeds of a few in law enforcement can cast a shadow over an entire department,” said Krinsky. “And without the information publicly available, people don't have an ability to form those conclusions.”
“Sometimes just putting all the information out there is the best tool possible to regain trust,” she added.
But such arguments are unlikely to assuage police unions and other law enforcement advocates who have already attacked Gonzalez for a previous, smaller disclosure on officers with credibility issues.
“I would imagine that police officers, who previously have expected this information to be treated with a level of discretion through the police department, would probably be very concerned that disciplinary processes and outcomes are now public knowledge or easily accessible publicly,” said Keith Taylor, a former NYPD officer and an adjunct professor at John Jay College.
While Taylor appreciates the DA’s push for transparency, he worried that the release of such records could have a “chilling effect” on proactive officers.
“A negative outcome might be that you have officers that are less likely to do the more difficult aspects of policing, where they are at risk of having formal complaints made against them,” said Taylor, who served in numerous high-activity NYPD units over his career. “If they were involved in something like narcotics, it might be quite common for defendants to file complaints in order to manipulate the complaint process against the officers.”
Gonzalez argued that while the initiative is intended to provide transparency rather than cause embarrassment, his ultimate responsibility is to the people of Brooklyn.
“It's important that the District Attorney make it clear to the public that the District Attorney serves the community,” he said. “And while working very closely with the police officers and sharing a very common mission in terms of keeping people safe, the District Attorney's obligation is about justice and fairness.”
Editor’s Note: In publishing the Freedom of Information Law documents from the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, Gothamist/WNYC relied on pro-bono technical assistance from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in making redactions.
The database for this story was built by Tarak Shah, a data scientist with The Human Rights Data Analysis Group. Shah issued the following statement on behalf of his organization: “The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is committed to challenging impunity, and we understand that transparency is a key tool for journalists, advocates, and human rights defenders who share that goal. Having been in the fight for human rights for 3 decades, we also understand the risks involved with disclosure. We seek to provide our partners with the technical assistance required to safely and responsibly find and share evidence of the crimes of the powerful. For this important collection, we helped index the letters to make them easier to search through, and redacted information whose publication could have put those involved with investigating this story at risk.”
George Joseph reported this story for WNYC/Gothamist’s Race & Justice Unit.
