This report was originally published on April 16.
By Kendall Taggart and Mike Hayes
Today BuzzFeed News is making public one of the New York Police Department’s most fiercely guarded secrets: a database of disciplinary findings for about 1,800 NYPD employees who faced departmental misconduct charges between 2011 and 2015.
This
information has been closely guarded for years, and completely
off-limits since 2016, when the NYPD removed them from public view,
citing a controversial
state law that shields police officers’ misconduct. As a result, New
Yorkers who are charged with a crime have no simple way to find out if
the officer who arrested them has a misconduct record that might affect
their credibility with a jury. Officers who have faced disciplinary
charges have limited information about how their punishment compares
with those of other officers in similar situations. And taxpayers as a
whole have no way to assess how their police department is policing its
own.
Many other large departments, in states such as Illinois and
Florida, routinely make this information available. “The public has a
right to know what our public officials are doing, and this is
especially true with our police officers, who have the power to shoot to
kill, use force, and deprive people of their liberty through stop or
arrest,” said Samuel Walker, a national policing expert.
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