[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, a new step in police accountability in New York City, the Legal Aid Society has launched Law Enforcement Lookup. A database of police misconduct records open to the public. The Public Defender Organization says that this is the most comprehensive public database of its kind in the city to date. It arrives roughly two and a half years after the New York State legislature voted to repeal a law called 50A, which maintained the secrecy of police disciplinary records.

With us now, Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's, Cop Accountability Project, which maintains Law Enforcement Lookup or LELU. Hey Jennvine, welcome back to WNYC. Glad to have you back with us.

Jennvine Wong: Thanks so much. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us first, what information are included in this database? What makes it the most comprehensive public database of police disciplinary records as you're describing it?

Jennvine Wong: There's a lot of different sources of data in here. We have information that is public from court records. We have the payroll information. We have also pulled information from the NYPD roster itself. We've pulled information from public lawsuit data, information from the CCRB, and additional information that we've obtained through submissions from civil rights and criminal defense attorneys, as well as foil requests, public records requests for things like investigator closing reports of CCRB investigations and other NYPD misconduct records.

Brian: What isn't included?

Jennvine Wong: As well as correction staff, officer staff, [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Correction officers too. People who work at Rikers, for example, and what isn't included? Any disclaimers you want to add to make sure people know exactly what to use it for and what not to?

Jennvine Wong: Sure. There's a vast trove of information out there, and what we have gotten is still a limited set. For example, some of the records that we have may have been disclosure letters from DA's offices that may not be up to date to, for example, October 6th today. However, they may have been up to date as of November of 2021, for example. As far as the CCRB records go, we have a request that was made to the CCRB, and those records are coming in on a regular basis, on a monthly basis. We are far from having a complete set of misconduct records, but we do have, I believe, nearly, I think 450,000 records in our database right now, and we've pulled them from various different sources.

Brian Lehrer: How do you hope the public will use this database? I'm thinking about a police encounter, hypothetically that would lead somebody to want to look up the police officer who they had the encounter with, and of course, the instances when you're the victim of police misconduct are likely happening in a more heated or fast-moving way. Maybe not a calm conversation where you can ask, can I please have your name and badge number so I can look you up, or anything like that?

Jennvine Wong: That's right. That's actually really funny that you say that because the Right to Know Act actually does require officers to provide a business card to civilians in these encounters. Actually, with that law, any civilians should be able to look up an officer that they have an encounter with, but the way I see the public using this, there's a myriad of ways that regular civilians could use this information. I think the most important thing about this is that this is pretty transformative transparency here because we've made this information easily accessible to the public.

When the state holds all of the information and it's in a black box, then the public is necessarily disempowered when they don't have access to it, and so by putting this information out there, we're hoping to empower the communities that we serve and the public at large. If you imagine that you live in a neighborhood that sees heavy police presence, officers can often get reputations by word of mouth because of the way that they treat residents.

All LELU does is provide some insight into whether there are recorded incidence of misconduct or not, and whether or not that officer has been disciplined before, whether or not the investigations into any prior misconduct was done in a way that was complete, sufficient, impartial. Whether or not investigations were done consistently, and so really, it provides information, and information is power.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have time for a few calls about the Legal Aid Society's new Law Enforcement Lookup, a searchable public database of police disciplinary records. Your questions are also welcome, ask questions, not only stories for our guest, Jennvine Wong, staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society's Cop Accountability Project, which maintains that database, which is what? Just about to go online. Am I seeing this right? It's not quiet. It'll be on Monday.

Jennvine Wong: It's actually online now. It's accessible @legalaidnyc.org/LELU, and it's embedded right there on the page. Like I said, we are constantly updating this, and so we may have more information next week and we'll have more information at the end of the month and next month, and so it's a project that continues to grow organically, and it's a real collaborative effort across the Legal Aid Society.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you have a story or a question or comment, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. I saw on the Gothamist write-up of this because I know you shared a lot of this with Gothamist before it went online, our reporters, Samantha Max, and by the way, listeners, Gothamist has a new look starting today. Looks great, and it's more user-friendly than the old site.

If you haven't checked out Gothamist in a while, you might want to do that, but per Samantha Max's write-up on the site, you can also use this database to look through judicial records, gather through discovery and public records requests such as lists of officers who district attorneys have deemed to have question of credibility, and find news articles written about officers accused of misconduct. Are there particular ways that you search, like if you want to find a news article on an officer versus if you want to find something that came up in a case through the discovery process, or do you just search their name?

Jennvine Wong: At the very top of the tool, what you'll see is you'll see a dialogue box. Where you can just put in an officer's name. One thing that we did not do is we did not try to create officer profiles, and the reason why is because there are so many different sources of data, and there lacks a unique identifier across all the different sources. Things like officers' badge numbers change throughout an officer's career, and so rather than doing that, and in the interest of transparency, we said we're going to put all the information out there.

The user is going to be responsible to verify that the records that they're looking for are actually related to the officer that they're looking for. We provide some tips and tricks on how to cross reference those different data points so that an individual user can do that on their own, but if you're looking for particular records, the way that we have our database set up and this lookup tool set up is that there are different tabs, and each tab has a label at the top that'll prompt you as to what information can be found in that tab or table.

When you go into the tab, you can search within that tab itself, or you can search across all the different tabs at once. On the top dialogue box, you can put in Officer John Doe and all the Officer John Doe's that match your search will come up across all of the different tabs, and then you can click through each tab and dig into the data sources and take a look at what we have. We have, like I said, complete CCRB investigator closing reports for over 4,000 cases.

We also might have some NYPD internal misconduct records. If you go to the District Attorney Judicial records tab, you might find a judicial ruling or you might find a DA letter. Then you'll click on the media tab for any archived media articles that might name that officer.

Brian Lehrer: 212-433-WNYC. Here's Miles in Rockland County calling in, a retired police officer he says. Hi, Miles. Thanks for calling, you're on WNYC.

Miles: Hi, Brian. Hi, how are you doing? Long time listener, big fan. Fully support the database. I think it's a great idea, but in the interest of transparency and fairness, I think if you're going to do this with records of force complaints or complaints against police officers, why not have all criminal records readily available? That way people in neighborhoods can see if their neighbors are repeat offenders for say narcotic sales, violent crimes. I just think there's a disparity here. I'll take my answer offline.

Brian Lehrer: Miles. Thank you very much. Well, that's an interesting challenge for you at Legal Aid, right Jennvine, because I think your work on behalf of shielding civilian's criminal records from employers and landlords and so forth in certain circumstances, right?

Jennvine Wong: That's correct. There's a really big difference here. We're talking about private citizens versus public servants. We're talking about police officers who occupy a unique role in our society. Their salaries are funded by taxpayer resources. These are public funds so they're public servants and so the public has a right to know where these funds are going to and whether or not the accountability processes that they expect to happen are actually happening and whether or not these are investigations that are high quality and whether or not they adhere to the NYPD's disciplinary matrix for example.

Police officers are people who have a lot of authority and they're granted by a lot of authority by the public and so it's just not the same. I think what we're doing is we're comparing apples to oranges. We're talking about private citizens versus public servants.

Brian Lehrer: Christian in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Christian.

Christian: Hey, Brian. Thanks for having me, I just wanted to say I think this is a really great project as someone who is a community organizer and an activist as well as a social worker. Interestingly enough, what the last caller just said is the biggest challenge that we're always going to get. Well, police officers should have access to every single person's private information in their neighborhoods, but that's not the same thing and we are supposed to be able to have images of you and your badge numbers especially if we're face-to-face across a ticket line and you decide to swing a baton at me and damage a lot of nerves in my arm or break someone's collar bone.

This database is something that is a wonderful tool for accountability because the authority of most officers seems to put their arrogance above that which they are doing, which is a job that was born out of slavery. Police protect property not people and we have to start waking up to that and we also have to level ourselves and be humble, because that arrogance is really dangerous, especially in society and especially in a world where you're carrying a gun and a civilian facing you is not.

`

Brian Lehrer: Christian, thank you for your call. I don't know that we need to go all the way to modern policing was born in the enforcement of slavery or police workers protect property not people, there are so many people who would disagree with that, I know it's a debate, but I don't know that we need to go there in order to conclude that this lookup database is a good thing for police accountability.

Jennvine from Legal Aid on that does a police officer need to have been found, guilty is a technical term, need to have been found to have committed some kind of misconduct or brought up on formal charges in the department or cited by the CCRB with a conclusion, the Civilian Complaint Review Board with a conclusion that they committed some misconduct or actually cited by a court as not credible in their testimony or do they only need to be accused to wind up in your database?

Jennvine Wong: There needs to be some ultimate finding and I think in the interest of transparency, if we're talking about real meaningful transformative transparency and an actual meaningful commitment to transparency and shifting away from a culture of secrecy and selective transparency, then our interests and the public interest is clearly around really putting all the information out there or as much information as we possibly can.

I'll tell you the reason why, because transparency surrounding processes like misconduct and investigations and proceedings give the public a really unique and necessary insight into the legitimacy of those investigations, into whether or not our accountability processes are actually working. The public will gain a better understanding of policing of NYPD policies and procedures and officers who may have been exonerated of misconduct allegations, they may well find themselves to be vindicated by the official record indicating that they did not do any wrongdoing.

For far too long, these records have been shielded in secrecy, they have been put into a black box where people were not able to access them and so we need to really shift the culture as a first step towards accountability and that's why it's important to have all of these records available.

Brian Lehrer: In this police accountability database that Legal Aid has launched, what about body worn camera footage? Can you find that and look at it?

Jennvine Wong: No, we are not able to provide body worn camera footage. I mean, that's a separate issue and I think a separate conversation that we've had before Brian, but we are not able to include that. That's unfortunate and maybe one day we will, and maybe the city will actually be a little bit more pro-active about sharing that.

Brian Lehrer: Some people worry that one of the reasons for high crime rates these days is so many police officers are pulling back they say from more encounters that could protect public safety because there are so many things like this now where people are treating police officers as suspicious and maybe not following police orders on the street or interested in getting them investigated because they're police officers. Foes this in your opinion have the potential to harm public safety in that way?

Jennvine Wong: There was actually a study that was done about whether disclosing records and being more transparent about police misconduct records would actually harm officers and that survey, the survey results were released in March, 2020 and overwhelmingly there was a total lack of data when it comes to the claim that officers will be harmed as a result of disclosures. This was also something that was discussed at length during the debate and when repealing 50-A and this was something that was considered at length during oral arguments before the second circuit when the police unions were fighting against the release of CCRB records including unsubstantiated allegations.

In all those cases, I think there's an agreement that there isn't really a lot of evidence to support that and again I think it's really important to have all of these allegations out there to have narratives of the allegations out there also so that the community can determine for themselves if NYPD policies are sufficient, whether they adhere to community standards, whether or not they disagree with them so these are all reasons why it's really important to have this out here and I think in this instance public trust and public interest in these records is really paramount.

Brian Lehrer: What about a database where people can find praise for really good cops? Listener is tweeting this, "My mother had a store, a cop helped her after robbery, She asked if there was something she could do for him, waving her arms at all the things in the store, He declined to take a gift but asked if she would write his Captain. That, that would help him." What about a public database for good cops?

Jennvine Wong: That already exists. The NYPD officer profile portal, they list many more commendations and awards and training than they do actual misconduct and so that already exists. We do link to that in our portal. It's in our application as well. It links directly to the NYPD roster and so people can find a complete record if they need to, but one thing that has been hidden from the public are misconduct records and disciplinary cases.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, is it possible to say what percentage of NYPD officers wind up in this database based on credible complaints of misconduct?

Jennvine Wong: I haven't really looked at that but I that's a really big data lift I would say and I could talk to our data team about that, but what I can say is that we wouldn't even be able to begin to look at that until we had this meaningful transparency from the NYPD. Like I said, we don't really have a complete record of misconduct so it's quite hard to tell at this point. We have a lot of records but I think really what that says is that it's a testament to how hard it's been to get these records and how police secrecy law 50-A had really kept the public in the dark about these records for so long.

Brian Lehrer: There's no way to say for example, like to the earlier caller who said most cops or whatever word he used I don't remember the exact word but implying that most cops are prone to misconduct. There are other people who would say, we have to weed out the misconduct where it exists but it's a tiny percent of New York City Police officers who would wind up in a database like this with credible accusations against them. You have no way to put a percentage terms rough estimate on that.

Jennvine Wong: It's really tough to say because for example when you look at the NYPD officer profile portal, when they talk about disciplinary history the only thing that they're listing are allegations that have risen to the very highest level of what are called charges and specifications. The reality is that the majority of NYPD discipline, the bulk of that results from settlements, negotiated plea agreements, a lot of NYPD misconduct that doesn't result in charges and specifications and therefore do not result in a departmental trial and so wouldn't be included in the NYPD officer profile.

That means that there are significant abuses of authority such as wrongful stops, frisk searches that may be eligible for what I guess "would be lesser command discipline" would not rise to a level of department trial,but would not be included in the NYPD officer profile portal. With that being said, that means that there is so much information out there and what we have is only the tip of the iceberg. I don't think that I could credibly tell you what the percentage is because we just don't feel that we have the full picture in order to make that assessment at this time.

Brian Lehrer: Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society's COP accountability project which now maintains the Law Enforcement Lookup database. You want to just tell people one more time how to actually access it if they do want to look up a police officer or an incident?

Jennvine Wong: Sure. They can go to legalaidnyc.org/LELU and they will be able to see LELU embedded right there in the middle of the page with some information surrounding how to use the tool if they forget.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Jennvine Wong: Thanks.

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.