Five Borough Defense

by Cynthia H. Conti-Cook
Associate, Stoll, Glickman & Bellina, LLP
Re: Testimony to the Government Operations Committee Hearing regarding Int. No. 1025 – A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the City of New York, in relation to requiring the Corporation Counsel to submit quarterly reports to the City Council detailing the number and disposition of civil actions filed against the New York City Police Department.

Unless this amendment includes reporting requirements connecting the precincts and officers involved to the costs of civil rights lawsuits, the City Council is poised to miss its opportunity to gather the data it really needs in order to begin managing NYPD liability.

Fiscal responsibility requires the City Council to act – last year at least $80 million was paid out in civil rights lawsuits against NYPD. Since 2002, the City has spent over half a billion dollars on claims against the NYPD. A fraction of those claims are settled for $250,000 or more – the majority are claims of repeat routine misconduct often by a handful of officers at a handful of precincts.

But there’s no reporting or oversight mechanism by which the NYPD keeps track of repeat routine misconduct resulting in civil rights lawsuits by precinct or by individual officer. While civil rights attorneys know from experience that officers and precincts named in their lawsuits are likely to have a history of multiple lawsuits, this information, available and on public record, is simply not reviewed by the NYPD. For example, I took 50 officers from a Brooklyn precinct sued by our firm. From those 50 officers, we know that at least 13 of them have been sued in at least 3 or more other federal lawsuits, several were named in 4-6 other lawsuits. Without knowing the source of the civil rights lawsuits, the City Council cannot begin to act on the cost of NYPD liability.

Requiring the NYPD to track its civil rights liability will be inexpensive. In addition to the data already being available in filed civil rights complaints, the technology already exists to connect precinct and individual officers with the City’s civil rights costs. Pursuant to a consent decree with the US DOJ, the City of Los Angeles created Training Evaluation and Management System [TEAMS] to track its officers and precincts civil rights liability. The City Council could simply require the NYPD to adopt the LAPD’s TEAMS II system.

Connecting civil rights lawsuits to precincts and officers will (1) limit future liability by revealing leadership or training issues at the precinct level or revealing early at-risk behavior of individual officers which can be addressed with retraining or discharge, (2) foreclose the City’s potential municipal liability for failing to have a policy addressing the issue of officers and precincts with lengthy civil rights lawsuit histories, and (3) improve police practices by supplementing COMPSTAT performance evaluation of precincts and officers with civil rights statistics and 4) most importantly, give individual members of the Council a fuller factual understanding of the precincts so they can have informed discussion with their commanding officers.

Without a meaningful oversight mechanism, there is no way that the City Council can begin to act on the cost of NYPD liability.

*So the hearing was covered on NY1.

Note that the reporter inaccurately describes the bill as already having language that would require precincts’ and officers’ civil rights liability record to be tracked - BUT IT DOESN’T!!!! That was the whole point of my testimony!!