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De Blasio And NYPD Oversight Board Members At Odds Over Police Secrecy Law
By
Nick Pinto
Published Mar 12, 2020
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By
Nick Pinto
Published Mar 12, 2020
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A majority of the members of the City’s police oversight body, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, signed a letter on Wednesday calling for the repeal of New York Civil Rights Law 50-A, the law that makes police disciplinary records secret from the public.
“The current version of CRL § 50-a does not accomplish the CCRB’s commitment to transparency and accountability,” the board members declare in the letter. “We support a repeal of CRL § 50-a.”
The letter, addressed to the sponsors of state legislation to repeal 50-A, was authored by Fred Davie, the Chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017, and co-signed by seven other members of the board, which currently has 12 sitting members.
The three board members appointed by the police commissioner did not sign the letter. Neither did Angela Sung Pinsky, one of four mayoral appointees to the board. De Blasio does not support the repeal of 50-A.
In an interview with Gothamist, Davie said that the police impulse towards secrecy is precisely what gave rise to the review board in the first place.
“We have an independent CCRB because the tendency of the police culture was to build a certain set of opaqueness around what transpired when it came to disciplining officers, in some cases taking no or insufficient action against those officers,” Davie said. “It became clear to everybody inside and outside law enforcement who cared anything about accountability and true trust with the community, that a strengthened civilian oversight role was necessary, and sharing more information was necessary. That continues to be the case.”
The CCRB was established to create mechanisms of accountability that promote public confidence in the police, but the secrecy imposed by 50-A often undermines that confidence, the board members write. New Yorkers often make a complaint about an officer’s conduct to the CCRB only to walk away in ignorance, forbidden to know what became of their allegations.
“Oftentimes, civilians are confused as to why an allegation is unsubstantiated, exonerated, or unfounded by the CCRB,” the board members wrote. “But due to CRL § 50-a, the CCRB cannot provide any explanation to the complainant on how it reached its conclusion.”
The letter also notes that across two days of State Senate testimony last fall, the only organizations to oppose the repeal of 50-a were police unions and the NYPD. In those hearings, the NYPD’s, Assistant Deputy Commissioner, Legal Matters, Oleg Chernyavsky, argued against repeal, instead suggesting the law be tweaked to allow the release of some information in cases where allegations against an officer are substantiated, “at the conclusion of a discipline process for serious police misconduct.”
But that doesn’t solve the CCRB’s problem of informing civilians why their complaints were dismissed, the board members wrote. Moreover, if the NYPD is left to decide which misconduct is “serious,” it could do so in a way that keeps some CCRB cases secret, they wrote.
De Blasio has long called for changes to 50-A, though he opposes its repeal, and his administration has fought in court for unprecedentedly expansive interpretations of the law. In 2016, de Blasio announced his support for changes that included further tightening access to police records in court cases while removing restrictions in other contexts “subjecting the full public record of the disciplinary proceeding and the results of such disciplinary proceeding to public disclosure.”
A City Hall spokesperson noted that the letter does not constitute an official action of the Board, but did not respond to questions about the mayor’s position on 50-A, saying only that “The Mayor has been vocal in his advocacy of 50-A reform.”
You can read the full letter below, and you can read our two part series on 50-A here and here.
Letter on 50-a by robbinscm on Scribd
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police accountability
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