Today, Explained - Who polices the police?

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

ProPublica's Eric Umansky explains how the New York Police Department's Civilian Complaint Review Board has struggled for decades to hold the NYPD to account. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We had protests, we had pledges, there was a chaz, and then a chop. But what do things look like now that there aren't as many protests or occupations? Now that people are thinking about the election or reopening schools or even the NBA or NHL playoffs. On today's show, we're going to take a look at the struggle to hold the biggest police department in the country accountable. We're talking about the $6 billion and nearly 40,000 officers of the NYPD. Eric Umansky has been writing about the NYPD for ProPublica. More specifically, he's been writing about how civilians can file complaints about officer misconduct. And there

were a lot of those complaints in the weeks of protests after George Floyd's killing, but we started much earlier than that. Last Halloween, my wife, Sarah, and our then six-year-old daughter were walking home from a friend's house. And all of a sudden, they saw basically a few teenagers running and then, bizarrely, a unmarked police car going the wrong way up Court Street, which is a one-way street, so literally zooming against traffic. And then all of a sudden, the car hit one of the teens. This is right literally in front of Sarah, my wife and our daughter. Kid kind of rolled up onto the hood of the car, rolled right off and slammed onto the ground. And then amazingly enough, got up, ran away,

and then the police who were there turned their attention to another group of kids who seemed to have nothing to do with the kids who were running except for the fact that they were all black. They lined them up against the wall of our local movie theater, actually, and began to arrest a few of them. At this point, right, keep in mind, it was also our six-year-old daughter who was dressed as a vampire and completely freaked out. So they came home, and I was sort of just chilling at home.

And Sarah, my wife, said, you should go up there and see what's going on. And so I did. And when I got there, there were three kids who had already been put in a police van. And it was clear some family members were there of kids who had been stopped and actually put against the wall, not arrested, who were upset. And one of those mothers tried to get one of the kids who was arrested

to share his parents' phone numbers so that she can say, like, so I can tell your parents that you've been arrested. And one of the cops, plainclothes cops, started getting in her face and yelling at her and telling her to back the fuck off. I mean, I remember it very distinctly. At this point, do you have any idea what these kids might have done? Does anyone have any idea what these kids who have been arrested might have done?

No. At that point, it was completely unclear. And the truth is, I then didn't really know what to do. I had given my phone number to one of the kids who had been stopped but not arrested. And just sort of like, I don't know, that's a best practice, I suppose, if you're a real reporter, which I'm not. I'm really an editor. And I went home.

And about 15 minutes later, that kid actually FaceTimed me and was like, you should come to the local precinct, which is literally on my street two blocks away, because my friends are arrested, the parents aren't being allowed to see their kids, and you should just come. So I was like, okay. So I came and I ended up hanging out

with the parents outside the precinct for three plus hours, where indeed they were not allowed to see their kids. They actually hadn't been contacted by the NYPD. It was friends and family who had told them their kids had been arrested. And, you know, I don't know what the rules are about any of this stuff. Are you allowed to drive the wrong way down a street? Are you allowed to hold kids for hours without calling their parents? But you forgot, are you allowed to run over a kid and then not do anything about it? Are you allowed to run over a kid and then not do anything about it?

Are you allowed to run over a kid and not doing anything about it? Yeah. And the whole thing was just bizarre. And you have to keep in mind, I mean, these parents are sitting there fretting all night. One kept saying, my kid is school the next day. What am I supposed to do? It started being like midnight and then past midnight. And another mom there actually kept saying she was upset with herself. She kept saying, I knew I shouldn't let my boy go out on Halloween. A bunch of black boys

walking around together. That's a bad idea. I shouldn't have let him do it. And he just kept begging me. And you're like, you know, and basically, you know, the cops weren't really paying them any attention. The parents, they didn't sort of come out and really sort of talk to him and explain the situation. The most helpful cop, and there was one helpful cop, was basically on a smoke break and was like, how are you guys doing? What's going on? And, you know, went inside of his own volition to find out what was happening. And then the kids were allowed to leave well past midnight at about 1 a.m. They were given no paperwork. There was nothing. They weren't charged with anything. They weren't told they were being charged with anything. And it was just sort of like, you know, we probably have the wrong people.

You can go home. And that's it. These kids were arrested, held in jail for a while, and then let go, never really finding out what they were arrested for? So eventually, and the kids had been asked about it, there was a robbery in a nearby park. And a kid had had his cell phone stolen and apparently had kind of been beaten up or kicked in the process. And, you know, the police had said that these kids, quote unquote, fit the description.

But, you know, again, these kids didn't actually look anything like the kids who were running. If those kids had anything to do with it, I have no idea. And, you know, one officer, a sort of senior officer, came out and it was basically acknowledged that they didn't have the right kids. He was like, look, I'm sorry, everybody. I know that this is a hassle. We're just waiting for headquarters to process the paperwork, and we're letting you guys go. It was clear he was like our bad, right, without formally apologizing. So that's the end of that night. And I went home and I was like, what happens now? Is somebody responsible for checking out whether

this was appropriate? Is there some check on this system? And on a very basic level, like, what the hell happened? So I did a very basic thing, which I just called the NYPD. And I said, this is what I saw, this is what my family saw, can you help me understand what the deal is? And the NYPD's spokesman, by the way, is a former New York Times police reporter, a guy named Al Baker, who's very nice, and said, yeah, let me check it out. I said, great.

And he came back to me and said, look, you know, I checked it out. I don't know what your wife saw, but a police car did not hit a kid. I said, well, my wife saw it. And he said, I understand. I am telling you that the people involved, you know, say it didn't happen. And, you know, memory is a difficult, complicated thing. And I went back to my wife and I said, please say this didn't happen. And she said, I am 100% sure it happened right in front of us. It happened. And I thought, well, I'm going to look like an asshole here. But nevertheless, I'm going to go canvas the neighborhood and stores nearby and restaurants nearby to see if you can find

other witnesses. And so that's what I did. I just walked around the neighborhood. And eventually I walked into a restaurant and I said, hey, I'm looking to see if you guys were open and if anybody saw this weird thing on Halloween. And the guy said to me, you mean where the cop car ran into a kid? I said, yeah, that. And that was the first of three other people I spoke to. And eventually I went back to the police and I said, look, I now have four people, including my wife, who saw, they all said they saw exactly the same thing. A police car going the wrong way down a one-way street and hit a kid.

So I want your on-the-record response to that. They said, okay. And sent me a response that said an unknown male who had fled the scene ran across the hood of a stationary police car. Let me just sort of translate that, which is to say, the car didn't hit the kid, the kid hit the car. And I said to them, I'm going to be really clear. I have four people who saw this, including my wife. And I'm going to include your response. I'm going to put it right against the fact that four individual people saw this. Five, by the way,

if you include our six-year-old daughter. And they said, yeah, go for it. And I was kind of dumbfounded. That is brazen. And to me, it sort of raised this more fundamental thing of like, if you sort of feel like you can do that, if you have that sense of kind of impunity, where you can just say, don't believe all four or five of your lying eyes, you should believe what we're just telling you without, by the way, any evidence. They didn't provide any evidence. They provided a statement. Well, that's really troubling and sort of suggests the kind of mindset of impunity. And I did a tweet thread about it. And when I did the tweet thread,

this agency I hadn't really heard much about called the Civilian Complaint Review Board that does exactly what it says, reviews civilians' complaints of police abuse, said, thanks for this, we're investigating. And quite frankly, I sort of patted myself on the back and felt like, you know, impact, That's what investigative journalists are supposed to do. And thank you very much, everybody, and have a good night. And then I actually met with somebody from the CCRP, and I was like, yes, so tell me how you guys work. And he was like, so listen, we are completely

independent. We do our own investigations. We come to our own conclusions. And then, well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Then the police commissioner has complete and utter discretion to just ignore or overturn everything we find. And I was like, what? Say that last part again? After the break, the CCRB's decades-long battle to hold the NYPD to account. Thank you. in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Terms and conditions apply. Eric, before we get to what happened to this kid who got hit by the unmarked police car, tell me about the history of this civilian complaint review board, the CCRB. So about 70 years ago, a coalition of community activists and community organizations basically got together and said, we're fucking sick of the police abusing black and brown residents. And we need to create a mechanism

for accountability here. And the city kind of was like, for a little bit. and I think this is quite telling, was consisted of 100% top NYPD officials with no actual civilians on it. The civilian part was, yes, yes, there are civilians who are making the complaints, but the board isn't actually civilians. And that central tension of, yes, it's civilians, but the NYPD really kind of holds the string behind the scenes,

has been a dynamic now throughout its whole life in, you know, ways that is evolved, but that you can very much see the original DNA. And what the other thing you can see is that it has long been a subject of intense scrutiny and pressure from not only the police, but police unions in particular. When in the 1960s, Mayor Lindsay moved to actually make it a civilian board, the unions forced him to actually roll it back. And, you know, some of what they said was just explicitly racist. You know, you had this one union leader who said, I'm sick and tired of minorities constantly griping. Hmm. Who won that fight? The unions. The unions. And then, you know, about 25 years later, Mayor Dinkins, David Dinkins, who was the first black mayor of New York City, actually moved to make it, again, a civilian board because it was literally a unit of the police department. And at that point, the unions organized off-duty officers who, I'm not even sure basically is the right word, who literally rioted.

Thousands of cops stormed through the barricades and ran on top of cars as they charged the stairs of City Hall. Their message rang loud and clear. We must go! We must go! We must go! We must go! And held up all sorts of signs that were very clearly racist. Like one said, fire the washroom attendant, referring to Dinkins. And that kind of outburst and the riot, which by the way, one of the speakers at it was somebody whose name will ring a bell, Rudy Giuliani. The mayor's arch rival, Rudy Giuliani. Yeah.

The reason the morale of the police department of the city of New York is so low is one reason and one reason alone, David Jenkins! But those changes actually held. It became an independent entity, which is to say it no longer was part of the police department. And it got more authority under the law, but the sort of culture and the politics of it have still stymied it over the years. Okay, so the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the CCRB, is sort of a joke in its incipient stages, but it's mandated by law. And after these hard-fought battles, it's more autonomous. It actually has civilians on it, but it still struggles against the very powerful NYPD.

And surely it's a very powerful union. How has it operated in the past few months when we've seen, you know, NYPD officers ramming protesters with their vehicles or shoving a young woman to the ground or pepper spraying people who aren't even resisting? Right. So you have a record number of abuse complaints that are coming in to the CCRB. They got hundreds from just the protests. And it now has about 200 staffers, and they're trying to go through this stuff. But what they're facing is massive, you can come up with a variety of words for it. One would be obstruction by the NYPD, which means in practice, you know, one of the things that we've all seen is really critical is video footage, for example. And officers in New York City are now required to wear body cam footage. But increasingly, the NYPD is not sharing it at all. When they do share it,

they're redacting footage that, for whatever reasons they deem appropriate, and they're taking an increasingly long time with it. And all of that creates enormous difficulties for civilian investigators to actually come to conclusions on cases. And so the system is completely gunked up now. The way I've described it is like a big river coming in, and at the end of the day, there's this tap, and you turn it on, and a drop comes out every once in a while. So what's the likelihood that a record number of complaints that came out of the protests will be addressed? What's the track record? So I looked at that question and just to give you a sense, I looked at 3,000 allegations, complaints about use of force in 2018. I looked at 2018 because it allows some time to go through the system.

So what happened to those 3,000 complaints of use of force? They turned into 73, quote-unquote, substantiations, which is to say the CCRB was able to figure out and conclude that mistreatment occurred. And the worst that happened to any officer was nine officers who faced, get ready for it, loss of vacation days. So 3,000 accusations, allegations, 73 substantiated, nine officers lose vacation days? Yep. And that's the most significant punishment. That's the nine officers that face the most significant punishment. Yep. That's how it currently works. So the one shot civilians have of holding the police department that they pay for to account is virtually toothless. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying. I mean, you know, there are these other mechanisms that exist in, you know, on paper too.

You could sue the NYPD. That is very difficult to do. And by the way, if you happen to get some money, it's the city that's paying it out, not the officers, not getting the officers punished. And, you know, then every seven blue moons, there is some criminal charges that is extraordinarily rare. Like when someone gets killed by cops, maybe.

I mean, frankly, underline on maybe. But what about this moment? I mean, if the CCRB can't hold the NYPD to account when it seems like the whole country, if not at least the city, is demanding it, who? Mayor de Blasio, right? Is he going to do something about this? About police brutality? About unchecked use of force? Yeah, a number of people said to me, look, this is on the mayor at the end of the day. And you see this dynamic, I think, in a lot of cities, which is, you know, the United States, there is obviously a long history and culture of civilian control over the armed forces, over the military.

And we don't really even think about it. Of course, the police are under civilian control. I mean, they work for, you know, local authorities. But then you look at actually how it really works and you're like, no, they don't. They don't really truly answer to the mayor. For whatever reason, mayors have been incredibly reticent to enforce that civilian oversight. And, you know, I can't get into mayors' minds. I know that unions are very powerful.

I know that there's concerns, and you've seen it in lots of places, that, you know, the police essentially will step back from doing their jobs and then you're screwed. And, you know, there are all sorts of fears about how police could screw with you. And at the end of the day, many, many mayors have said fears about how police could screw with you. And at the end of the day, many, many mayors have said, like, I'm not going there. Is it a done deal? You know, is there no going back from the NYPD dictating what the CCRB gets to investigate and doesn't get to investigate? Is there no going back from mayors living in fear that their police departments might turn on them if they try to impose reforms?

No, I don't think it's a done deal at all. I mean, if you look at, for example, the CCRB's history, one of the interesting things here is that when civilian officials do stand up and say, you know, in Arabic, like, enough, right? They actually often do get results. So just the other week, the CCRB said, enough. Officers need to come to interviews, and we're going to make us think about this. And the NYPD backed down 30 years ago when

Mayor Dinkins said, I am going to make this an actual civilian board and not a part of the police department. The police unions fought really hard, and then what happened is Dinkins won, right? So I don't think it's at all a fait accompli at all. And people should not presume, in fact, that the history of this is it's sort of ever thus. In fact, if you think about it in the long arc, it's been getting more authority over the years. But it's just that when you look

at it, there's still so far to go. Yeah. What came of the complaint that was filed over the kid who got hit by the car that your wife witnessed last Halloween. Right, so this is going to be very not surprising. That complaint is still open and is, you know, like 3,000 or so other complaints is in the we're currently investigating file. And the NYPD's party line is, that never happened. The NYPD, to be totally honest, just stopped responding to my emails about it. Eric Emanski is an editor at ProPublica.

You can find his reporting on the NYPD at ProPublica.org. It's worth noting that there has been at least one significant reform to policing in New York since the widespread protests earlier this summer. The state repealed a statute known as 50A that prohibited the release of reports on officer misconduct that previously got in the way of investigating complaints. As a result of that repeal, something like 320,000 previously sealed complaints against the NYPD were released online today. That's 320-something thousand complaints that were filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the CCRB, that were closed after an investigation and now reopened for the world to see. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. Thank you.