In the Media

In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new policy for automatically publishing body camera footage within 30 days when police officers kill or seriously injure someone. The step, he said, would give the public more assurances that they would actually see video captured in serious cases of police force, an implicit but often unrealized aim of the transparency program. But more than two months since the policy was implemented, old questions remain about who controls what footage is released, how it is edited and, ultimately, the narrative it creates.

Following the lead of police departments across the country, the NYPD has issued its own "discipline penalty matrix" that outlines specific punishments for instances of police misconduct.

The document comes at the recommendation of an independent panel convened by the NYPD in 2018 to improve the department's tangled and opaque disciplinary system. While both the Civilian Complaint Review Board and the NYPD itself conduct investigations into police misconduct, the NYPD Commissioner alone has the sole authority to punish or fire an officer.

The New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio crafted an $88.2 billion budget for the current fiscal year in what was one of the most contentious budget negotiations in years, coming amid a pandemic-caused recession and a resurgent racial justice movement that sought to “Defund the NYPD” and redirect some of its massive resources to social services in communities of color.

Local authorities continue to fight the public over making disciplinary records public. However, the public’s fighting back.

This week, The Legal Aid Society filed an amicus brief against the efforts of five police unions to block public access to the disciplinary records after Albany repealed Section 50-a which made records and accounts of police misconduct unavailable to civilians. In the brief, members of The Legal Aid Society state that the police’s latest attempt to block Section 50-a is emblematic of the culture cops have created.