Independent
Agency Gets New Powers to Prosecute New York Police Officers
Lawyers
for the independent agency that investigates allegations of police abuse in New
York have been given wide new powers to prosecute officers in misconduct cases
under an agreement city officials reached on Tuesday.
The
changes follow a period in which the Police Department has withstood an
onslaught of corruption cases and increased scrutiny on several fronts,
including its surveillance and stop-and-frisk practices, the integrity of its
crime data and its use of force in policing Occupy Wall Street protests.
Details
of the agreement were contained in a memorandum signed on Tuesday by the
department and the independent oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review
Board.
The
changes are intended to shine light on a police disciplinary process that
critics have long said is murky and secretive.
The
agreement means that board lawyers, instead of police agency employees, will
act as prosecutors in cases in which board members have substantiated
wrongdoing by officers and have recommended that the most serious kinds of
internal, or administrative, discipline be handed out.
From
2007 through 2011, the board substantiated an average of 200 cases annually
that it referred to the police so officers could be put on trial by
departmental lawyers before an administrative judge who also was a Police
Department employee.
“I
think this is a question of, for me, the C.C.R.B. felt like a toothless tiger,
the place where people went to make complaints about the few bad apples out
there, but they did not know what happened since the prosecution was not done
by the C.C.R.B.,” said Christine C. Quinn, speaker of the City Council.
The
speaker announced the agreement with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Police
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and the board.
Ms.
Quinn said the agreement, which mirrors one sought by the Giuliani
administration in 2001, “not only gives teeth, but gives transparency to a part
of the process that New Yorkers feel is opaque.”
Under
the agreement, Police Department employees will still serve as judges in
misconduct cases, and Mr. Kelly will retain his powers as ultimate arbiter in
such matters, with the ability to accept or reject a trial judge’s
recommendation.
What
is different, several officials said, is that Mr. Kelly must make his rationale
known to the board, in writing, in cases in which he deviates from the judge’s
recommendation. Then the board can appeal his ruling.
“And
all of this can be reported publicly,” Ms. Quinn said.
She
said the staffing needs for the board, which was separated from the Police
Department in 1993, would be addressed in the city’s budget process.
Dick
Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union, an advocacy group, who has
been pushing for four years for board lawyers to be prosecutors, called the
development a milestone, forcing greater accountability in the way the Police
Department polices itself.
In
a vast majority of cases, he said, the department had not followed the board’s
recommendations that officers guilty of misconduct be given the most serious
penalty. From 2002 to 2010, he said, the board recommended that 2,078 officers
receive the most severe penalty. That suggested discipline was given to only
151 officers.
“Public
confidence in the police to keep New York safe and secure is high,” Mr. Dadey
said. “But that confidence doesn’t extend to the way the department handles
those officers who are charged with violating the public trust when they use
excessive force, abuse their authority, or are discourteous and use offensive
language.
Before
the agreement, a police commissioner could opt not to send any substantiated
cases to trial. But the cases of wrongdoing substantiated by the board that
make it to trial are only a small part of the function of the department’s
trial room. Internal Affairs Bureau cases and other matters brought directly by
the police make up much of the work, and in those cases departmental advocates
will still work as prosecutors.
Patrick
J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, took issue
with both sides of the disciplinary process — the board’s role and the
department’s internal disciplinary process.
“Our problem with the C.C.R.B. has always been
first, their predisposition that police officers are always wrong, second,
their inexperienced investigators who conduct faulty investigations that arrive
at improper conclusions, and now those wrong conclusions will be prosecuted at
these kangaroo trials,” Mr. Lynch said in a statement.
The
union fought over whether the agency should get new powers when Mr. Kelly’s
predecessor, Bernard B. Kerik, sought to reinforce the public’s confidence
during a turbulent time more than a decade ago. Though the city prevailed in
court, the “Bloomberg administration never re-took up the possibility,” Ms. Quinn
said, until now.
The
announcement came on the eve of a speech on policing issues that the public
advocate, Bill de Blasio, who, like Ms. Quinn, is planning to run for mayor,
was set to deliver on Wednesday at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In
recent years, in fact, he and Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick drafted
legislation on the issue.
Assemblyman
Hakeem S. Jeffries, a Democrat who represents Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown
Heights, said the agreement should be seen against a host of other police practices,
like the “out of control” numbers of streets stops, mostly of minorities, that
officers carry out each year.
Ms.
Quinn said she would push for a change in state law to address the issue of
police trial-room judges being police employees.
Daniel
D. Chu, the board president, said: “This agreement is a milestone in the
history of civilian police oversight in New York City. Public confidence in the
disciplinary process will be strengthened by having the C.C.R.B., an
independent agency, prosecuting these cases.”