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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. This Wednesday, May 4th, is an important day for police accountability and the rights of peaceful protesters in New York City. It's the deadline for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which oversees the police department, to finalize its recommendations for disciplinary measures against officers accused of police misconduct, and there were many, during the protests of May and June 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd.

Now Christopher Werth, WNYC's investigative editor, is out with a detailed deep dive into those investigations so far, and why so few cases have actually been completed against officers alleged to have gone violent during those protests. Christopher reports that CCRB investigators have dubbed this Wednesday's deadline the "May 4th Apocalypse." Let's find out why and where this important oversight process stands here on May 4th Apocalypse minus two days. Hi, Christopher. Always great to have you on.

Christopher: Hey. Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into what's new here, can you remind us of the types of incidents that sparked misconduct allegations during those demonstrations two years ago?

Christopher: Yes. I think a lot of listeners probably remember the videos that surfaced from those protests, but we saw what the CCRB would categorize as use of force. We saw officers pushing, hitting protesters with batons, even cars in one instance, and abuse of authority. Those were the two big categories of complaints that were filed with the CCRB. Abuse of authority is just an officer using their authority in a way that defies the police handbook.

Brian Lehrer: The CCRB says it received over 750 complaints about police interaction stemming from the demonstrations. Out of that large number, 319, you report, fell under the CCRB's jurisdiction. The agency says that those complaints contained over 2,000 allegations involving 500 police officers that they've been able to identify. That's a lot of cases. Was the agency simply overwhelmed? Is that the main reason that they may not meet this statute of limitations deadline of this Wednesday on all of them?

Christopher: No. I think the way that they were overwhelmed is that the agency received a flood of cases all at once. On May 31st of 2020, the agency received 300 complaints within 48 hours. That's unprecedented. Over the long course of the year, the agency actually received fewer complaints than it had the previous year, which is probably due to the pandemic, but it's that flood of cases that came in all within several weeks of each other. Then in talking to investigative staff at the agency, it's the nature of the cases themselves. These investigators had a very difficult time in identifying officers.

In a typical complaint, for example, you'll have an arrest report and the arresting officer is on the documentation. You can then go and pull that arresting officer's body-worn camera and other details from that arrest. Here you had protesters and police officers who were roving over several blocks within areas of the city and the arresting officer wasn't always the person on the paperwork, and it became very difficult for investigators to identify those officers. In fact, what the data shows is that so far with the cases that have been closed, roughly a third of those have been closed with the officer being unidentified, meaning that the case is closed.

Brian Lehrer: Ha. Like some cop did something to me but I can't tell you his badge number or his name?

Christopher: Yes. Can't tell you the shield number. Then when the investigator went to look into it and requested bodycam footage from those specific instances in certain areas during protests, still were not able to identify officers or even to find out which officers were on the scene for those protests. It was very difficult.

Brian Lehrer: Not to shy away from this, but some of your article, and even what you implied just there, is that some of the police officers and maybe the police department brass stonewalled the CCRB investigators and did not give them information that maybe they had that could have identified some of these officers. Yes?

Christopher: Certainly at the very beginning of the investigations. One of the two big problems that the CCRB ran into, apart from the documentation issue that we were just talking about, is that, one, the police department was not handing over the body-worn camera footage that the CCRB had requested. There was a huge backlog that had built up over that summer. Then the second one is that as the pandemic progressed, the NYPD, or at least the unions that represent NYPD members, were refusing to sit for remote interviews with CCRB. Those officer interviews are one of the key elements of a CCRB investigation.

Those didn't even really start until the middle of August, as I understand it, in 2020. That certainly really delayed the ability for those investigators to get those cases going in the very beginning.

Brian Lehrer: How about when they can identify the officers? Are they actually showing up and called into interviews with CCRB investigators?

Christopher: As I understand it, yes. After that initial delay in reaching an agreement as to how those remote interviews are going to take place, interviews have progressed as normal, and now the CCRB is working in person. As I understand it, in-person interviews have resumed as well.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you want to read the full Gothamist story, and I recommend you to it, the full print edition is on gothamist.com from Christopher Werth, who is the investigative editor for Gothamist and WNYC News. Listeners, you can also help him further report this story. Is anyone listening who initiated a CCRB case after an encounter with a police officer in those protests two years ago? Tell us how your case is going. Or if you're a police officer involved, your questions also welcome for Christopher Werth. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Wednesday, the May 4th Apocalypse. Who's calling it that?

Christopher: Investigative staff. That's what it's been nicknamed. Investigators have been, and this was earlier in the year and probably late last year, really cramming to get these investigations done. These investigations, or the process within the CCRB, takes place in several stages. The investigators complete their investigation, they either substantiate or exonerate an officer, and there are a number of other things that can happen to those cases. If it's substantiated then it goes to a three-panel board. It's called the Civilian Complaint Review Board. There are 15 members of that board. Each panel has three members, and they decide whether or not to uphold that substantiation and recommend discipline.

Actually, I want to clarify something from the very beginning. It's not so much that these cases-- there are a lot of them pending that look like they won't be closed by the statute of limitations, but the agency has been cramming really hard. You can see this in the data for the CCRB releases. The panel has just been hearing more and more cases over the last several months to get all of these cases completed. It's highly likely that many of them will be heard by the time Wednesday rolls around, but one of the issues is that, as I said, a third of those officers in those cases that have been heard so far have not been identified.

Brian Lehrer: In your reporting, did you get a sense of the culture that exists at the CCRB and whether that helped or impeded its ability to investigate these protest-related incidents more swiftly in recent years? There have been stories about long-serving employees, even at the management level, who've been fired, they say, in retaliation for speaking out about the agency's policies. This is the agency that's supposed to be independent and conduct oversight on the police department.

Christopher: Yes. There were four senior-level people who were let go at the end of 2020 after all that surge of protest cases had come into the agency. There are many people who say the agency lost a lot of institutional knowledge with those departures. Those four individuals do say that they were retaliated against in their terminations for speaking out. I think the culture within the agency, there is a lot of unhappiness among investigative staff.

People feel like the leadership within the CCRB has not been willing to push back hard enough against the NYPD. Certainly during the de Blasio administration, there's a feeling that the agency, at least its leadership, was willing to kowtow to the mayor's wishes instead of trying its hardest to hold police accountable.

Brian Lehrer: What did Mayor de Blasio's wishes appear to be? I don't know if you look at that very much in the context of this story or any other reporting, but we know in the Friday Ask the Mayor segment in the last year and a half that he was in office, he would come on and consistently defend the NYPD even while saying yes, there were individual cases of misconduct during the 2020 protest, and at other times that got very well documented on video, and saying, "You know, it was really hard. There were so many people in the streets. They didn't know what was going to happen next." Making that kind of structural excuse for some of the police violence that took place.

Do you have reason to believe that de Blasio was trying to hold the CCRB back from holding individual police officers accountable?

Christopher: The long view of this is that we know this has been documented that the CCRB, if it's going to issue a report - certainly during the de Blasio administration this happened. We've seen emails where this has happened - the agency would send its report to the mayor's office. You could see mayoral staff editing those reports and, as the agency or as people within the agency would say, watering those reports down. Early on in the protest cases the executive director of the CCRB, Jonathan Darche, had announced a very tough deadline on these cases. It's remarkable that they're just being closed out now because he had wanted all those cases to be completed by the end of August.

Everyone saw that as a completely unreasonable deadline given all the impediments that you and I have been talking about. It was a feeling within the agency that it was coming under pressure from the mayor's office to close those cases quickly to make it appear as though there was a level of accountability taking place over those protests.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM, HD, and AM, New York; WNJT FM 88.1, Trenton; WNJP 88.5, Sussex; WNJY 89.3, Netcong; and WNJO 90.3, Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey Public Radio, and live streaming at wnyc.org. It's eleven o'clock. A few minutes left with our investigations editor Christopher Werth, who has done a deep dive into the Civilian Complaint Review Board in New York City trying to hold police officers accountable, or in some cases maybe not trying hard enough, as he was just describing, after the 2020 protests in May and June, especially, of 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, and so many complaints against officers for alleged acts of violence and other misconduct.

Let's take a phone call. Mary Ellen in Westchester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mary Ellen.

Mary Ellen: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I just have a question for some-- like a clarification. The English language is not always so clear, so I'm wondering in the name Civilian Complaint Review Board, is it the complaints that are civilian or the review board that's civilian?

[laughter]

Mary Ellen: Who is actually on the review board? Are they civilians or are they police officials, or a mixture?

Christopher: It's both. It's interesting the Civilian Complaint Review Board, it's evolved since its inception in the 1950s. It was just a unit within the police department, so it was not civilian at all. That word civilian only applied to the complaints that were coming in, but it was during the Dinkins administration where it was fully civilianized through legislation. He got a lot of blowback for that at that time. Now it is a civilian board. Three of those members are appointed by the police commissioner themselves, and one of those numbers is on every single panel board. Then the rest are appointees from the mayor's office, from the city council, and then there's one appointee from the Public Advocate's office.

Brian Lehrer: Mary Ellen, thank you. Well, to follow up on her question, it might be worth explaining what type of power the CCRB has relative to members of the NYPD even when they come to conclusions that misconduct took place. It's not altogether uncommon for the CCRB's disciplinary recommendations to be ignored because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the NYPD's top brass has the final say in these cases, not the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

Christopher: That's right. The CCRB, when it substantiates an allegation of police misconduct it makes a recommendation. That word "recommendation," what it means, it recommends to the department that disciplinary action be taken at various levels. It is the police commissioner who makes the ultimate decision about that. What we've seen just in these protests cases with the most serious allegations, because they're classified depending on the type of misconduct, but the most serious allegations, just 42% of them have been concurred by the police commissioner, which is a fairly low rate.

There is a lot of concern about the overall concurrence rate with CCRB, these protest cases aside. It has dropped in recent years despite the fact that in 2021 the department signed a memorandum of understanding with the CCRB that it would start to follow what's called a disciplinary matrix. It's kind of a menu where police officer commits this type of misconduct, they receive this discipline, and the NYPD had committed to following that.

The data is a little incomplete, but it looks as though the NYPD has not really been keeping up its end of the bargain on that. I know that the CCRB is in the middle of discussing changes to that disciplinary matrix that would reduce the disciplinary measures on some acts of misconduct.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, and important for oversight and accountability. Last question. Do you know if Mayor Adams, who portrays himself as the both-end mayor, the fight against crime and the police accountability mayor, has said anything about how he'll strengthen the power of the oversight capabilities or enough staffing or whatever is needed at the CCRB? Has he said anything?

Christopher: Yes. After the story came out, I reached out to the mayor's office this morning. We'll do a follow-on on how Adams responds to that. On staffing, it has come up that the staffing is actually quite-- it's lower than it should be compared to what the staff levels should be in order to maintain oversight. I'm told that some of those hires are starting to go through, but I think one of the biggest points of contention is on that body-worn camera issue.

The way that our system of oversight works is that the CCRB has to request all of that footage from the NYPD. It does not have direct access like, say, Washington DC or Chicago have forms of direct access where oversight investigators can go and search the database of body-worn camera footage. The people I've talked to-- this isn't necessarily in the story so much, but they say that that could be fixed. What investigators have said is that the NYPD treats all that footage as its own property, whereas it was actually-- the whole program started from the stop and frisk litigation, the Floyd litigation, that the judge had ordered a pilot program to be put in place to increase oversight ability.

Then that became a full-blown body-worn camera program. What we haven't seen is the accountability side of it. It's very hard for the CCRB at times to get this footage when it needs it. I've been told that legislation within the city council, for example, could help improve the CCRB's access to that. What I'm interested in is whether Mayor Adams or Speaker Adrienne Adams are interested in moving that type of legislation forward.

Brian Lehrer: Look forward to what you get for that follow-up story. Listeners, you can read WNYC and Gothamist investigative editor Christopher Werth's full investigative report on how police haven't been held accountable for the allegations of misconduct leveled against them in the 2020 post-George Floyd killing protests here in New York City. Read the full version at gothamist.com. Chris, thanks for sharing this reporting with us.

Christopher: Thanks, Brian.

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