Misconduct complaints against New York City police officers have risen to their highest levels since 2012, prompting some to put the blame on Mayor Eric Adams’s extremely pro-police mayorship and claim it is deteriorating “the NYPD’s relationship with the community”.
The latest monthly report from the civilian complaint review board (CCRB), the city’s independent police watchdog, tallied 4,262 misconduct complaints filed against NYPD personnel as of the end of September 2023. This is the highest year-to-date tally since 2012, when the CCRB fielded 4,546 allegations of abuse when Michael Bloomberg was mayor and the NYPD conducted hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stop-and-frisk encounters in communities of color under the then police commissioner, Ray Kelly.
In August of this year alone, 588 complaints were filed with the CCRB, the highest monthly tally since October 2012, when 601 complaints were logged. In recent years, the CCRB gained the power to self-initiate investigations and received authority to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct, racial profiling, biased policing, untruthfulness and unlawful stops.
After 2012, violent crime in New York City fell steadily until the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, when an increase in murder, robberies and assaults prompted calls for increased policing. In 2023 thus far, recorded crimes in six of the seven major felony categories have dropped while felony assaults remain high. There were 438 murders in all five boroughs in 2022, compared with 511 in 2011, when the NYPD stopped nearly 700,000 New Yorkers, almost all of them young Black and brown men.
The rise in complaints comes as Adams enters the second year of his unabashedly pro-police, anti-crime mayoralty. Under Adams, policing in NYC has reverted to “broken windows”, 1990s-style quality of life enforcement for “anti-social behavior”, with a major uptick in stop-and-frisk encounters as well as dangerous vehicle pursuits. Crime rates have dropped in New York City in the past year, mirroring a national trend three years after the outbreak of Covid-19 and its associated social upheaval.
There are also concerns about the increasing impunity officers now enjoy within the NYPD’s internal affairs process. Adams’s pro-police mayoralty is directly affecting police discipline: his police commissioners have overturned or reduced discipline in half of the cases where misconduct has been found. Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, reversed IAD rulings at a record rate, reducing or even annulling penalties for more than half of all cops found to have committed misconduct at an administrative trial during her term.
Jennvine Wong, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s special litigation unit, suggested that the NYPD’s increasing tendency to reduce or overturn even minor discipline for officers is problematic.
“When [the] NYPD doesn’t issue any discipline whatsoever, what does that signal to the officer – that they don’t take constitutional violations seriously?” Wong said, adding that the increase in stops and complaints was a reflection of Adams’ insistence on quality-of-life enforcement that is reflected by a doubling of criminal summonses for low-level offenses such as public urination and open-container violations.
“There’s a philosophy that the ends justify the means and more guns have been taken off the streets – but at what cost, if this leads to further deterioration of the NYPD’s relationship with the community?” she said.
The CCRB’s interim director, Arva Rice, echoed the NYPD’s remarks about the independent watchdog’s expanded outreach and jurisdiction as possible factors behind the rise in complaints.
“Regardless of the reason for the ever-increasing number of complaints, it reinforces the CCRB’s need for resources. We need more investigators to manage the expanding caseload and to complete investigations thoroughly and efficiently,” Rice said.
Sewell left this year after refusing to downgrade discipline for the chief of patrol, Jeffrey Maddrey. Maddrey, who let a former subordinate get off scot-free for menacing a group of Brooklyn teenagers with a gun, is a close ally of Adams and the deputy mayor for public safety, Phil Banks, who effectively is the NYPD’s shadow commissioner.
Edward Caban, Sewell’s replacement, has his own lengthy rap sheet of misconduct allegations, including a 2006 incident in which he threatened a detainee with veiled references to Abner Louima’s torture at the hands of another cop in 1997. The NYPD said in a statement to the New York Post at the time that the “decades-old” allegations, “nearly all of which have been disproven or made without merit – do nothing to tarnish his exemplary reputation among the many cops and communities with whom he has served”. The allegation of the threat was determined to be unfounded.
Since taking office, Caban has removed senior personnel from the NYPD’s legal unit charged with holding cops to account and let police officers off the hook for fatal killings and sleeping with a witness.
Adams, Banks and his police commissioners have not tolerated dissent to their approach to policing and crime reduction. This summer, Assistant Chief Matthew Pontillo, the head of the NYPD’s risk management bureau, was forced to resign after criticizing the department’s return to aggressive vehicle pursuit tactics – tactics that have resulted in an increase in bystander injuries and investigations by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.
Pontillo was previously the liaison between the NYPD and the court monitor overseeing NYPD’s stop-and-frisk reforms. He was also reportedly critical of the return of the unconstitutional practice under Adams. Since the current administration took office, stops increased from 8,947 in 2021 to 15,022 in 2022. Recent data indicates that the number of stops in the three months stretching from April through June was the highest it had been in any quarter since 2015. All but 5% of those stops were people of color, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the NYPD three times in the past year to release traffic stop data.
Internal CCRB data indicates there has also been a rise in complaints about stops: as of late October, 515 complaints have been made about NYPD stops in 2023, up from 318 in all of 2022 and 263 allegations in 2021.
In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson said it was “difficult to pinpoint” particular reasons for the sharp increase in complaints against cops: “The important thing is there exists an independent repository for such complaints and a system for the NYPD and CCRB to vigorously, swiftly adjudicate each of them.”
The spokesperson gave a number of possible reasons for the surge in misconduct allegations, citing the CCRB’s increased outreach and ability to generate its own complaints, and a “historic number of felony arrests this year, which is helping to drive down shootings, murders and other crimes”.
Reports indicate a high number of the stops are being conducted by “Neighborhood Safety Teams” (NSTs), Adams’s rebranding of precinct-level plainclothes anti-crime units that were disbanded by Mayor Bill de Blasio, placed in uniform, and rebranded as part of New York City’s reaction to critiques of brutality and illegal arrest during the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. The NSTs were deployed in 32 “high crime” precincts in 2021 with the stated goal of taking illegal firearms off the streets. As of last October, 205 supervisors and officers were assigned to the units.
Adams’s new proactive policing unit has come under fire from the monitoring team that oversees the NYPD’s compliance with a 2013 consent decree restricting the department’s stop-and-frisk program. The NSTs often conduct their stops in an unconstitutional manner, lacking “‘reasonable suspicion”’ for justifying the detention in question, according to a June 2023 report.
“The most absurd thing was when De Blasio said he was ending anti-crime [units], and the exact same thing just kept going on,” said a former CCRB investigator about the conduct of the NSTs, which generated a high number of misconduct allegations. “Nothing has changed today, except [that] less experienced officers are involved.”
The June report found that the NSTs, known internally as the “tan pants squad”, are conducting stop-and-frisk encounters in an unconstitutional manner at a rate that far exceeds similar encounters by patrol officers.
“The Department’s oversight of these unlawful NST stops, frisks, and searches is inadequate at all levels,” the report reads.
Citywide, 27% of all NST stops reviewed had appropriate “reasonable suspicion” that the person detained might have committed or be involved in a crime. Only 63% of all searches conducted during those encounters were legal.
The report singles out the 41st precinct in the South Bronx as the most problematic command: only 41% of all stops, 32% of all frisks and 26% of all searches audited by the monitor were lawful.
Of the 230 car stops citywide reviewed by the monitor, only two encounters yielded a firearm and 97% of all people encountered by NST officers were Black or Latino.
The NYPD disputes the findings of the court monitor’s June report on stops by the specialized precinct-level teams. A spokesperson called the program “instrumental in the reduction of shootings and homicides that the city is experiencing”.
