The police department’s public site for tracking officers’ discipline is shockingly unreliable, a ProPublica analysis found. Cases against officers frequently vanish for days — sometimes weeks — at a time.
ProPublica examined more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database’s contents and found that, since the fall of 2022, the number of discipline cases that appear in the database has fluctuated often and wildly. Try to pull up the record for a disciplined officer and the site sometimes spits back, “This officer does not have any applicable entries.”
Since May 2021, at least 88% of the disciplinary cases that once appeared in the data have gone missing at some point, though some were later restored. As of this week, 54% of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.
The repeal of Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law in June 2020, which had shielded all police discipline records from public view, was intended to offer the public, including journalists, a way to scrutinize the quality of police departments’ self-policing.
The repeal of Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law in June 2020, which had shielded all police discipline records from public view, was intended to offer the public, including journalists, a way to scrutinize the quality of police departments’ self-policing.
https://www.police1.com/legal/articles/pds-cannot-automatically-withhold-disciplinary-reports-involving-unproven-complaints-ny-court-rules-NivEwo9H3ohK2RJW/