The leader of the independent agency charged with investigating police misconduct reported by New Yorkers ended his career this week after admitting that yes, sometimes he uses the word “pussy,” but only when it applies to cowardly people.
Richard Emery, the chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, resigned yesterday after the CCRB’s executive director, Mina Malik, filed a lawsuit against him.
Malik claims that Emery argued with her and another female attorney last fall, and told them, “I don’t know why everyone is acting like a bunch of pussies.” She also claims that Emery began to diminish her role at the agency and was preparing to fire her because she reported his conduct.
“I did use the word ‘pussy’ with respect to saying that people acted cowardly, but it was not referring to Mina or the other woman,” Emery told the Post, explaining that he was merely urging his subordinates to take a tougher line with the NYPD, and that Malik was "trying to control an agency like an Eastern European totalitarian dictator rather than an executive director."
"Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth," Emery helpfully added.
“I was talking about the cowardice. I use animal metaphors and they don’t have anything to do with sex,” Emery clarified for the Daily News.
The police unions have wanted Emery fired because he referred to them as “squealing like a stuck pig,” and because his law firm represented plaintiffs suing the police as he chaired the CCRB.
Advocates for police reform wanted Emery fired because of his friendship with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton, who hired his son as an analyst in the Intelligence Division.
Under Emery’s tenure the number of substantiated complaints made against officers rose by almost 70%, mostly thanks to cell phone videos. And the average time it took for the CCRB to investigate complaints against officers dropped from 271 days to 77 days.
Yet the NYPD has routinely overruled the CCRB’s punishment recommendations—and the entire process is shrouded in secrecy, protecting both bad cops and the CCRB's embarrassing internal politics.
Abusive police officers are often defended by the City’s Law Department and their histories are shielded from the public. If you capture police misconduct on your smartphone you’re more likely to see a swift and substantive reaction from the NYPD if you send it to a news organization and forget the CCRB altogether. The NYPD Inspector General’s Office has yet to meaningfully challenge the NYPD on these issues. When the IG and the CCRB wrote that the NYPD had a chokehold problem, the NYPD begged to differ, and destroyed legislation that tried to correct it.
In his second CCRB meeting as its chairman, Emery, who was appointed the day that Eric Garner was fatally choked by an NYPD officer, said he felt “completely at sea.”
“It’s so ridiculously complex and there are so many factors playing into this. And then there’s this ultimate overriding authority that makes all this work kind of meaningless. So we have to come to a system where discipline is discipline and it’s not just some kind of recommendation to a higher authority.”
Today the CCRB is still just a “recommendation to a higher authority.” Until that higher authority is forced to answer to a truly independent agency, the CCRB will forever be New York City's slapstick answer to police misconduct.
