Report: NYPD Ignoring Reform Recommendations From Inspector General
April 2, 2019, 3:31 p.m.
The NYPD rejected more than a third of the reforms pushed by its own Inspector General's Office last year.
Mayor Bill de Blasio speaking at the NYPD's graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden
Pushing the NYPD to reform itself can feel like a sisyphean task — even for the independent city office tasked with police oversight.
According to a new report from the Department of Investigation, the NYPD rejected more than a third of the reforms pushed by its own Inspector General's Office last year. Out of 42 detailed recommendations for improving the department offered by the NYPD IG Philip Eure, just six have been fully implemented, and 16 were rejected outright by the NYPD.
The bulk of the rejections concerned a report issued last February that found police officers are frequently failing to report use-of-force incidents, despite the supposed department-wide adoption of a dropdown tool meant to track such incidents on arrest reports. One sample of 2017 data concluded that officers did not properly enter use of force incidents in more than 55 percent of cases, but rarely faced discipline for their errors. (As an example: two officers who arrested a teenage delivery worker claimed they didn't use force; after surveillance footage released earlier this month proved that to be false, the department found no misconduct on the part of the officers.)
That report was accompanied by 25 discrete recommendations for improving this system, such as putting a supervisor in charge of reviewing use-of-force documentation, giving officers a deadline for completing the forms, and adding a section to the tracker for injuries caused by police force. It also included guidance for breaking out the use-of-force data to show the demographics of individuals targeted by police force, as well as the commands and officers with the highest rate of incidents.
But the NYPD rejected eleven of the recommendations from that report — including each of the suggestions noted above. More than a year after the report was released, the department has partially or fully implemented just four of the recommended reforms, according to the DOI's report.
"Tracking NYPD's implementation of our recommendations is vital to sustaining reform," Eure, who was appointed in 2014 amid fierce opposition from NYPD leaders, said in a statement. "Going forward, we will continue to build upon our mission to increase public safety, protect civil rights, and increase the public's confidence in the police force by conducting investigations and making recommendations aimed at improving NYPD."
The analysis of the NYPD's frequent rejection of reform recommendations also touched on two other reports issued last year by the Inspector General: related to chronic understaffing within the department's sex-crimes unit and the way the NYPD interprets data on police misconduct lawsuits.
The DOI determined that only four of the endorsed reforms in those reports have been fully implemented. One recommendation to expand in-house training of Special Victims Detectives was initially rejected by the NYPD, but is now "under consideration."
A police spokesperson told Gothamist that the department had made changes over the years in areas identified in the office’s reports, adding that “the NYPD takes every recommendation from the [Inspector General] seriously, and reviews them carefully.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who supported the creation of the watchdog office, did not respond to a request for comment.
