Above photo: By Andrew Burton/Getty Images
SAMANTHA SEDA’S CLIENT, a 16-year-old foster child from Far Rockaway, New York, had no criminal history when he was arrested in September, accused of having pulled out a gun and fired one shot in the air. Even though he had no priors and no relatives who could post bail, a judge set the amount at $100,000, and as he sat in jail for over a month, the boy lost his spot at the foster home where he had been living.
Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.
The arresting officer, she learned, had been sued several times, and in the 1990s, he had been part of a group of officers working a narcotics operation that was accused of planting drugs on people and stealing drugs from suspects. Some of the officers went to trial and were convicted on felony charges, but most settled, costing the city some $1.2 million in damages to their victims. The officer she was researching was acquitted in court, but he had been named in connection with at least nine separate misconduct cases and had settled at least two, she told The Intercept.
Intrigued, Seda looked into the second officer, a sergeant who claimed he had watched her client pull out a gun and shoot it. He was also named in a pending lawsuit, in which a driver alleged the officer had stopped him, assaulted him, and arrested him with no legal justification.
“I thought, wow, that’s outrageous. Two cops in one case that are dirty,” Seda said. When she looked into the third officer, another sergeant who said he had found a gun on the street after her client ran, she was almost expecting to find something.
And in fact, that officer had also been sued, for assaulting a young black man moments after he walked out of his sister’s house. That lawsuit alleged the officer had thrown the boy to the ground and “roughed him up” before arresting him and taking him to the police precinct, also without legal justification. The boy was never charged with anything — but his family sued the city, demanding $100,000 in damages.
The accusations against the officers didn’t automatically imply their guilt in those cases, Seda said, but they certainly raised red flags.
Seda took her findings to a judge and argued that they undermined the credibility of the officers in question — and he promptly dropped her client’s bail and released him until trial. But only months earlier, the case might have played out quite differently.
Tracking Police Misconduct
In the past, when Seda wanted to learn more about an officer connected to one of her cases, she would scour legal databases and news archives in search of any relevant information. If she somehow knew an officer’s history would matter to the case, she might file a public records request for complaints filed against him or try to subpoena public agencies for that information — a cumbersome process for a public defender handling dozens of cases, and one with no guarantee of success. “It would have been very hard and it would have taken months,” she said. “It may have never happened.”
Most police misconduct goes unreported, particularly in less extreme cases and in more disenfranchised communities, but complaints filed with police departments and civilian review boards, as well as lawsuits, can point to significant histories of abuse tied to specific officers and precincts. In most cases, however, a citizen who becomes the victim of police abuse has next to no way of knowing if that officer is a repeat offender or has a history of targeting certain people, say, or sexual harassment.
As is the case with most police departments across the country, the NYPD does not disclose internal disciplinary records to the public. Even though cities spend millions in public funds to settle lawsuits filed against officers, the public has little access to what the settlements reveal about problematic officers and precincts. Meanwhile, the officers themselves rarely face consequences and often return to the streets quickly, their histories shielded in anonymity.
But that situation is beginning to change — as a growing number of police accountability groups are starting to bypass the departments by aggregating and distributing misconduct history databases on their own.
Earlier this year, Seda was trained in using the Cop Accountability Project, a database created by New York’s Legal Aid Society that pools civil rights lawsuits, criminal court decisions, and a variety of other public and private sources like attorney notes and social media content to compile misconduct profiles on nearly 9,000 New York City officers. The database assembles a wealth of information that could otherwise take months to gather, as well as some that wouldn’t be available anywhere else, and it has proved to be a game-changer for the attorneys using it.
In the past, individuals could file public records requests with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is normally the first recipient of citizen complaints regarding police use of force, abuse of authority, and other misconduct. But since October 2014, when the New York board’s executive director was fired and accused of releasing records protected by law, the CCRB has denied all public records requests on the grounds that they violate New York’s strict privacy protections for law enforcement officers. A spokesperson for the board declined to comment on the change in policy or the former chief’s departure but wrote in an email to The Intercept that the CCRB “believes that transparency and accountability builds trust between police and the community it serves.”
The CCRB also recently launched its own Data Transparency Initiative, an interactive online data tool that includes information on more than 190,000 allegations of police misconduct, involving more than 63,000 victims and some 36,000 NYPD officers. But unlike the Legal Aid database, that data paints only a macro picture of the issue and cannot be connected to individual officers or incidents. Legal Aid’s Cop Accountability Project began as an informal, handwritten list of officers Legal Aid lawyers knew had a history of misconduct. Over the years, as lawyers amassed information to help build stronger cases for their clients, the list grew into a spreadsheet, then eventually into a cloud-based relational database that recently became available to Legal Aid attorneys through a mobile app.
“We are essentially trying to find a way to collect data to document events that government doesn’t want documented in a public way,” Cynthia Conti-Cook, one of the curators of the database, told The Intercept.
Although it keeps growing every day, the database is by nature incomplete, Conti-Cook notes, and lacks access to any internal documentation the NYPD may have on its officers. In fact, Legal Aid is currently fighting the city in court to open up officer misconduct files to public records requests. The group has also been fighting a New York law known as “50-a,” which protects officers from exactly the kind of scrutiny and accountability the public is demanding by guaranteeing the confidentiality of all law enforcement personnel records, essentially blocking any judicial review of officers’ histories and possible patterns of misconduct.
In a statement released last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined some proposed amendments to 50-a. The NYPD did not respond to a list of questions from The Intercept but referred us instead to a recent official statement by Commissioner James O’Neill expressing support for de Blasio’s proposed reforms. “I believe in transparency. I also believe that making information about disciplinary proceedings public will help us build trust with the community,” O’Neill said.
But police accountability advocates were quick to point out that the proposed changes were just a way to kick the can down the road; they were “not substantive” and fell short of a “genuine commitment to full transparency.” “If the administration is serious about police accountability,” the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote in response to the mayor’s statement, it will “just start releasing records.”
Until that happens, the Legal Aid database remains the most comprehensive accountability tool available to lawyers.
“What the Legal Aid Society is doing will not replace legislative reform, no matter how large its database grows,” Conti-Cook wrote. “Defender-driven data, while filling a gap in access to records, is not the ultimate solution.”
Yet for all its limitations, the database has already achieved a lot. Lawyers in Legal Aid’s network have successfully used it to “change the narrative in the courtroom about what happened during a specific encounter between a client and an officer,” Conti-Cook explained in an academic paper presenting the project. “Expanding the definition of police accountability data from official disciplinary complaints to other sources that similarly document misconduct events has changed who controls the definition of misconduct, and therefore who controls the narrative of what is happening between police and the communities they serve.”
And those victories haven’t stopped in the courtroom. In response to the Legal Aid database, the NYPD itself has expanded the definition of misconduct it uses to manage risk internally to include allegations raised in lawsuits in addition to the department’s internal affairs bureau and the city’s civilian review board. These investigations remain inaccessible to the public, but they are now informed by a broader set of sources.
Perhaps most importantly, beyond tracing individual officers’ histories of misconduct and singling out the so-called bad apples, the Cop Accountability Project has also highlighted broader trends in New York’s police-community relations.
The database revealed, for example, that between June 2015 and May 2016, a single Brooklyn precinct — the 75th Precinct in East New York — was sued in federal court at least 47 times, more than double the amount of any other precinct. The second most sued precinct was the 73rd, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In total, over that time frame, NYPD officers were sued in federal court 966 times. The NYPD is sued about 4,000 times a year, mostly in state courts — a dramatic increase in litigation that in 2014 alone cost the city $216 million in settlements. The increase in lawsuits marks an opposite trend from that noted by New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which reported that from 2006 to 2015, the number of complaints steadily declined, from 7,663 in 2006 to 4,461 in 2015 — possibly suggesting that a growing number of citizens, frustrated with the redress process available to them, might be resorting to suing the police.
The Legal Aid database also showed that the 10 precincts with the highest numbers of lawsuits were concentrated in Brooklyn. Citywide, 82 percent of plaintiffs filing lawsuits were black, while only 2 percent were white. Thirty-three percent of the lawsuits were filed over encounters that took place on the street, and 47 percent alleged excessive use of force, with 64 percent of those cases requiring hospitalization.
The analysis also gave a breakdown of the charges officers made against the plaintiffs, which were overwhelmingly for “resisting arrest” and “disorderly conduct,” two of the vague charges regularly used in questionable police stops.
Legal Aid made those findings public as part of a push for greater police transparency, but the bulk of the database is currently available only to lawyers within the group’s network. As word of the database’s existence spread, other attorneys began reaching out to Legal Aid for access to its data, sometimes contributing more information from their own records. In one case, a judge even suggested that an attorney seek access to the database, prompting the officer’s attorney to also demand to see the file Legal Aid had on him.
Conti-Cook said the entire database has not been made public because it is built, in part, on confidential sources and information that’s protected by attorney-client privileges. But the goal, ultimately, is to distill the majority of the data that is in the public record and open up access to all New Yorkers.
“We’re dreaming of a website,” she told The Intercept.