Five years ago, I led a charge to obtain details of police misconduct from hundreds of police departments across New York, made legally public in the state in 2020.
I knew that police could try to dodge, obstruct, and reject the public’s right to that information, but I was still unprepared for the delays and disregard for transparency we’ve encountered from some police departments since the beginning.
I sent out the first batch of Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests in the days following the repeal of section 50-a of the state’s Civil Rights Law, which made police misconduct documents subject to public view in June 2020. This was just weeks after George Floyd was killed during an encounter with police officers in Minneapolis.
At the time, I was employed at MuckRock, a nonprofit that helps people navigate the public records process. As part of my work there, I had requested lots of materials from all kinds of government agencies and helped others do the same, so I knew a few things about how police departments circumvent transparency.
Still, I was not familiar with the struggle that so many families and fair law advocates faced to get these records. Immediately after section 50-a’s repeal, colleagues in the government transparency arena and I had conversations about the risk of some police departments deleting their records — I felt an urgent need to get out ahead of that possibility.
June 12, 2020, the day of the repeal, was a Friday, and I spent the following weekend — one that was already filled with personal obligations — crafting requests, contacting lawyers, and collecting contact information for hundreds of police departments. If we didn’t get the requests out as soon as possible, I worried, some of these records may never be seen again.
I feared that despite the legislature’s gesture toward transparency, some “bad apple” police officers would continue to patrol without accountability, further degrading public trust and undermining the important work of their public safety colleagues. I loathed the very real prospect that the long fought fight by so many families for justice would see its fruits destroyed.
Five years on, some of that concern still persists.
The barriers to police transparency
After my requests for records went out, police departments began sending us letters with excuses of all kinds. That would become a constant drumbeat over the next year or so. Meanwhile, I started working with a consortium of New York media outlets, including the USA TODAY Network, to create a public database of the records departments were handing over — a collection that now includes thousands of documents.
Dig into our database at data.democratandchronicle.com/new-york-police-disciplinary-records/.
Some departments never acknowledged we’d issued them a legally-binding request for misconduct information — some still haven’t. Other agencies claimed they had too many records to reasonably be able to provide them.
Still others argued that the repeal didn’t apply to issues of misconduct that happened before the law passed or that they weren’t required to provide details of incidents in which an internal investigation found the officer to be free of culpability, flouting very clear portions of the law (New York’s highest court has since clarified that departments cannot categorically withhold retroactive or so-called “unsubstantiated” misconduct records from requesting media or residents.)
Almost immediately, one New York senator published a letter bemoaning the receipt of my request, presumably devastated that, now that the law made such records public, the public would actually use its right to access.
It’s taken five years, but many of the cases obstructing access to these materials have worked their way through the courts. Fortunately, most have landed on the side of transparency.
An ongoing fight to publish NY’s police records
I now work directly with the USA TODAY Network to continue adding records to the database and report on the stories found there. Last year, we reported about an alarming trend of police officers crashing their duty vehicles on New York streets, sometimes injuring or killing civilians. This year, we partnered with students at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School to look at an array of misconduct incidents found in the data, including guns left unattended, illegal police searches and a rash of unprofessionalism and failure on the job in one Finger Lakes city.
The USA TODAY Network hasn’t let police departments forget their burden to provide these records under state law. We’re in ongoing court battles with police departments that have refused to provide records.
No one thinks that the often long hours and dangerous circumstances of policing constitute an easy job. It’s precisely because of the importance and power that police have in our society that we, the journalists — stewards of the First Amendment and shepherds of an informed democracy — are compelled to keep up this crucial fight.
We’re committed to continuing to listen to those who have suffered under police abuse and to help protect the integrity of our laws and the people who are tasked to uphold them.
Have you had trouble obtaining police misconduct records in New York? Tell us about your experience using the form below. A reporter may reach out to you as part of our continuing coverage.
Beryl Lipton is police data coordinator for USA TODAY Network-New York.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Our 5-year fight to publish NY’s police misconduct records, and what we’ve found so far
Reporting by Beryl Lipton, New York State Team / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
