In response to the release of the NYPD’s new website with an “Officer Profile Dashboard” the Justice Committee released the following statement from Executive Director Loyda Colon: Just as they did with the NYPD “disciplinary matrix” in January, the NYPD and de Blasio administration are pulling yet another public relations maneuver aimed at valorizing the police department and distracting from demands for accountability, and trying to pass it off as transparency. What is transparent is that this new website with its “Officer Profile Dashboard” is a shameless stunt.
The “Officer Profile Dashboard” is a deceptive attempt to create a digital hall-of-honor for officers that highlights arrest records and commendations. When reviewing this information, New Yorkers will do well to remember the NYPD’s long history targeting low-income Black, Latinx, and other communities of color for excessive stops and arrests and rewarding abusive officers - such as Edwin Mateo and John Connolly who were promoted after killing Mohamed Bah and John Collado respectively.
For each officer, users can find NYPD awards and recognitions for officers dating back decades, yet the de Blasio administration and NYPD have chosen to only release information about incidents for which the Police Commissioner imposed a final guilty finding in administrative charges (and currently only from 2014 on). In other words, an entire universe of incidents – including those involving racial and other discriminatory profiling, most police sexual abuse and a wide range of other misconduct – is missing, although nowhere on the website is this made clear. This is nothing more than an attempt to continue to shield the NYPD’s decades-long history of abuse and unwillingness to discipline officers who kill, brutalize, and harass Black, Latinx and other New Yorkers of color.
Now that they do not have 50a or the police union’s lawsuit to hide behind, the NYPD and Major de Blasio are desperately trying to find new ways to hide NYPD misconduct and failure to discipline. (If fact, nothing in the unions’ lawsuit would have barred the City from releasing the data in the dashboard.) Rather than continue this pathetically obvious charade they should immediately publish full disciplinary data as demanded by the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who took to the streets to repeal 50a.”
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