Introduction
On May 29, 2020, a group of friends attended a Black Lives Matter protest in Brooklyn.
While they processed down Fifth Avenue between Bergen Street and Saint Marks Place, a lieutenant and several police officers from the 72nd and 78th Precincts of the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrived at the protest.
Immediately upon exiting from an unmarked vehicle, Lieutenant Eduardo Silva approached the protesters, yelling at them to get onto the curb and “indiscriminately pushing approximately five protesters, some of whom had their backs turned to him.”
At least one of the people the lieutenant shoved fell to the ground; another stumbled forward, turned around to see who pushed him, and was shoved again by Lieutenant Silva.
The lieutenant also (though this part is disputed) “struck another unidentified protestor with an asp.”
He never turned on his body-worn camera.
The police officers with Lieutenant Silva engaged in similarly—if not more—aggressive behavior. Immediately after an unidentified officer “caus[ed] [a protester] to fall into a parallel parked vehicle and then to the ground,” Officer Adib Algahiti appears on body-worn camera footage yelling at the protester, still on the ground: “Get up, stupid. Bitch ass pussy.”
Nearby, Officers Luis Melendez and Krysta Cosenza arrested a woman who appears in cell phone footage seconds later in handcuffs, crying out: “I’m not okay. They smashed my face on the ground.”
Other officers, according to witnesses and Lieutenant Silva, used their batons to push protesters out of the street.
This incident was reported to the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) through its online portal three days after the protest.
The CCRB reviewed cell phone and body-worn camera footage and conducted interviews with officers, witnesses, and victims.
It filed its closing report about thirteen months later, on June 30, 2021.
The report concluded that the majority of claims were substantiated,
meaning that the investigation established that the alleged conduct both occurred and violated NYPD rules.
The CCRB recommended a range of penalties for the various officers involved, including prosecution by the Administrative Prosecution Unit (APU).
The APU is deployed in “serious cases” to conduct a trial that may end in a range of penalties, including termination from the police force.
But by the end of the saga, two of the officers involved had retired and thus received no reprimand, several others received no formal NYPD penalty (against CCRB recommendations), and only one—Officer Algahiti—received any formal penalty at all.
The CCRB recommended bringing charges against Officer Algahiti, and he eventually received command discipline and forfeited ten vacation days.
Five years ago, relaying this story would have been impossible. Under New York law, police misconduct records were hidden from the public, and the CCRB was limited in the amount of information it could disclose. But in 2020, the New York State Legislature voted to repeal Civil Rights Law section 50-a (50-a)—commonly known as the police secrecy law—making police personnel information disclosable under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).
Almost immediately, a police union lawsuit attempted to stop the repeal; the Second Circuit rejected its challenge in February 2021.
Several years and multiple lawsuits later, many of these records are publicly available, though their release continues to be contentious.
This Note investigates the immediate impact of 50-a’s repeal, analyzing NYPD misconduct records to explore whether officers engaged in less misconduct after their personnel records became publicly accessible. To do so, this Note uses a version of regression discontinuity design known as interrupted time series (ITS).
Part I includes three sections of background on NYPD misconduct and transparency. Section I.A traces the NYPD’s history with misconduct and corruption, culminating in the establishment of the CCRB. Section I.B describes how 50-a became law and was incrementally expanded, and section I.C portrays the milieu within which the law was repealed—namely, the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in New York City. Part II goes on to describe existing police misconduct research, the methodology of this Note’s analysis, and the results of the ITS model. This Note primarily tests whether NYPD officers were, as advocates had hoped, less likely to engage in misconduct after 50-a’s repeal. Then, it investigates whether the repeal of 50-a had any second-order effects beyond changes in police behavior, manifested through public awareness of misconduct that could, in the future, contribute to more accountability for police harm.
Finally, Part III discusses the implications of these findings for transparency scholarship and policing policy. This Part focuses on the fact that transparency—though important—cannot on its own remedy the breakdown of citizen-government trust that accompanies persistent misconduct, nor can it increase police accountability solely through the fact of being technically available to the public.
When coupled with more actionable systemic reforms, however, transparency has the potential to increase citizen participation in policing oversight, as well as ease challenges for people bringing legal cases against officers or departments. This highlights the importance of holistic, rather than piecemeal, changes to policing in New York and beyond.