Once-Secret Trove Reveals 324K NYPD Misconduct Complaints

NEW YORK CITY — A previously-secret database details 324,000 misconduct complaints made against NYPD officers over three decades.

The New York Civil Liberties Union published the massive trove Thursday after a change in a police secrecy law and a court victory.

The database covers more than 30 years of misconduct accusations kept on file by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency tasked with probing police abuse.

In total, the database contains 323,911 complaints about 81,550 different officers. Of those, only 0.03 percent — or 8,699 complaints — led to a NYPD officer’s punishment.

“Until now, the police accountability process has been at the discretion of the NYPD, which determines which CCRB investigations result in discipline and what information is revealed from that process,” said Christopher Dunn, legal director of the NYCLU, in a statement. “History has shown the NYPD is unwilling to police itself. The release of this database is an important step towards greater transparency and accountability and is just the beginning of unraveling the monopoly the NYPD holds on public information and officer discipline.”

Another version of the database was recently made public by ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization. ProPublica and the NYCLU requested the data after the state repealed 50-a, a privacy law used by the NYPD to block release of complaints against officers.

Police unions sued to stop the release, prompting a judge to temporarily block NYCLU from publishing the data it obtained. ProPublica, which wasn’t in the lawsuit, forged ahead and released thousands of files.

But that database only covered active-duty NYPD officers who had at least one substantiated misconduct accusation against them — roughly 4,000 officers out of 36,000 on the entire force.

The NYCLU database includes all complaints — whether substantiated, unsubstantiated or unfounded — except for those currently under investigation. It goes back until before 1985.

The data shows misconduct accusations against officers are common, but they are rarely verified.

Roughly 21,000 complaints were substantiated by the civilian review board, according to the data. That’s 0.06 percent out of more than 300,000.

About 20,000 officers were named in five or more complaints.

And only 12 officers were terminated or dismissed by the NYPD over a misconduct complaint, the dataset shows.

The NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database can be found here.