Civilian Complaint Review Board report says NYPD needs to be better prepared for future large-scale protests
NEW YORK -- The watchdog agency for the NYPD has filed its final report on officer misconduct during the 2020 protests.
The Civilian Complaint Review Board says the Police Department needs to be better prepared for the next time New York City faces large-scale protests.
The CCRB's final report found not only that some officers responded inappropriately to protestors, but also that the department as a whole failed to follow many of its own procedures, which made it nearly impossible to even investigate certain claims of misconduct.
Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets in 2020, calling for police reforms in the wake of George Floyd's death.
Now, nearly three year later, the CCRB says the NYPD was ill prepared and ill trained for the massive demonstrations.
"We had cases where officers didn't know who their partners were, didn't know who their bosses were, and the bosses didn't know who their subordinates were. It was a very chaotic situation and a paramilitary organization needs to have command and control over its forces," CCRB Executive Director Jon Darch said.
Of the 800 complaints the CCRB received against officers at the protests, the agency has substantiated misconduct against 146.
But among those, the NYPD commissioner has only imposed discipline on 42.
"There were also 59 complaints we were unable to identify the officers involved in the misconduct, so it's just unknowable how many of the officers who we had complaints against should have been disciplined," Darch said.
The NYPD is objecting to the CCRB's characterization of its response to the protests, with the department saying, in part, "CCRB's report is devoid of any meaningful acknowledgment of the unprecedented violence, property destruction and chaotic reality that the protests and riots, coupled with a global pandemic, created for the city."
"When you're in a last-minute situation and there's rioting all around you, looting all around you, sometimes things don't always go by the book," said Paul DiGiacomo, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association. "We were short manpower in these situations. There were cops and civilians being injured all around us. Stores were being looted and that has to be taken into account when second guessing everything we do."
The NYPD says more than 22,000 officers were deployed in a single day at the peak of protests and "99.37% of NYPD officers did exactly what was expected of them."
"The NYPD should be training and retraining its members of service on how to respond to incidents like this," Darch said.
The police officers' union said the report is trying to pin the blame on individual officers for management-wide failures, while the New York Civil Liberties Union said the report shows why the NYPD cannot continue to have a monopoly on disciplining its own officers.