At some point, history may show us that after years of aggression, after so much brutality that suggested so little fear of consequence, it took the looting of Chanel and the reversion of SoHo to a wasteland to disable a law that has made real police accountability so difficult in New York City. It required a political class moved by fear — of disorder and desecration — rather than compelled by the logic of justice, which had been obvious for so long.
The law, known by its identification in the state’s civil code — 50-a — was originally intended to shield good cops from vigilantes. But in practices it has protected habitually delinquent police officers for decades. However unlikely it would have been just a month ago, 50-a now faces the overdue prospect of erasure. On Monday, high-ranking members of New York’s state legislature committed to overturning it along with a spate of other bills that would that signify a similarly radical change to what the law has tolerated from the police.
For several years, there has been no work more vital to ending police brutality than abolishing laws and policies that weaken transparency and soften repercussion. Chief among them are the statutes, like 50-a, that enshrine police misconduct in secrecy, shielding the personnel and disciplinary records of police officers from public view so that there is often no way for a victim to know if an abusive officer has a history of dubious behavior unless someone has happened to sue him.
Many officers dispatched to the recent protests have concealed their badge numbers with strips of elastic or electrical tape. The department said that these were mourning bands, worn to honor colleagues who have died from Covid-19, but a civil liberties group demanded they be removed so that bad actors could be easily identified.
In some sense, the law makes any attempt at obscuring unnecessary. Protesters who had their masks pulled off by officers or were shoved to the ground would not be able to find out whether they had ever done anything similar in the past anyway.
Two years ago, a BuzzFeed News investigation, based on hundreds of pages of leaked internal police files, revealed that between 2011 and 2015, dozens of officers were discovered to have used excessive force, or fired guns unnecessarily, or fixed tickets, or sexually harassed someone, but kept their jobs regardless. In most instances they suffered only minor punishments. When information like this is kept from public scrutiny, it means that a person who is arrested has no way of knowing if the arresting officer has a record of transgressions, crucial details a jury might find relevant in any potential criminal or civil case.
California used to have the most restrictive law of this kind in the country until two years ago, when the state legislature dismantled it; ever since, that distinction has belonged to New York. Last week, however, as any prior justification for keeping 50-a on the books disintegrated, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that he would support its repeal. In recent months, it hadn’t even come up for a vote in the state legislature.
Over the past several years, it had fallen to a relatively small group of advocates from the Legal Aid Society in New York and a group called Communities United for Police Reform to lobby for the repeal of 50-a, a campaign that has failed to capture public attention in the way that bail reform managed to do, for example.
More dispiriting to advocates still was the incongruity in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s position. Although he ran for office on an agenda of police reform, he has not only neglected to make any impassioned effort to repeal the law, but has worked instead to expand its power. He has managed to earn the disdain of the police department while at the same time enraging the liberal electorate, never more so than during the protests.
“It’s certainly as bad as it was under Giuliani and Bloomberg,” Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, said of the law’s application. “And in some cases it is actually worse.”
Even now, amid such dire and dramatic urgencies for change, the mayor has resisted speaking out in ardent favor of a full repeal of the law, maintaining instead that the statute should be amended and “replaced.’’ He has argued that personal information, like the home address of an officer, should never be made easily available. Few would suggest that it should. But to the extent that any such safeguards are actually possible in the age of Google, other elements of public-information law, where redaction is common, already address the problem.
Privacy regulations around police conduct originated for the most part during the high-crime era of the 1970s, at the insistence of police unions. At the moment it came under review in 1976, a prosecutor named Joseph P. Hoey was virtually alone in opposing the legislation — on the grounds that it could eventually sow public mistrust.
Mr. de Blasio’s unwavering defense of the police department, as officers have plowed into protesters and freely dispensed pepper spray, surprised many New Yorkers. But in his commitment to the “blue wall,’’ the code of secrecy for which 50-a is the foundation, his loyalties have been quite clear. Four years ago, the Legal Aid Society sued the city in order to obtain a summary of claims and disciplinary actions against Daniel Pantaleo, the officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner in 2014.
Mr. Pantaleo remained on the force for five years after the tragedy. When a judge ruled in favor of Legal Aid, the city did not honor the decision and release the documents, but instead chose to appeal it. Mr. Pantaleo was eventually dismissed, but not before paperwork pertaining to the case was leaked to the website ThinkProgress, indicating that there had been a litany of misconduct complaints filed against him including charges of abusive stop-and-frisk tactics. City officials did not respond passively. To the contrary, a city watchdog agency opened an investigation to uncover the identity of the leaker and then forced the person to resign, a decision supported by the mayor.
Even now, many questions about the Garner case have gone unanswered. Last year, Alvin Bragg, the state’s former deputy attorney general and one of the directors of the New York Law School’s Racial Justice Project, sued the city in the hope of acquiring some of those details: which officers were actually present at the arrest, what their histories were and so on. The de Blasio administration moved to dismiss the petition earlier this year.
The airing of mass grief and fury that has erupted now has once again revealed the modern American city to be a locus of self-delusion. Smug in its refinements, convinced of its enlightenment, it has sanctioned barbarism in the name of order and civility over and over, marrying earnest rhetoric to insidious accommodation.
The dynamic works at the personal level as well, in the psychology of a familiar urban type — the devoted progressive who, in the sacred name of localism, will arrive at the farmers’ market every Saturday from the first blueberries through root-vegetable season, but fail to show up for the small-bore elections and community proceedings that can genuinely lead to change in the way that municipal police departments are governed.
All week long, as protests and rioting have continued, major cultural institutions and businesses in the city have sought to align themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement. A few days ago, the Laundress, a line of upscale detergents with a flagship store in SoHo, already ripped apart, sent out an email to “The Laundress Community,’’ articulating the responsibility it felt “to put an end to systematic racism.’’ The work was there to be done all along.