NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- A new report found that nearly half of NYPD officers caught lying to the Civilian Complaint Review Board over a 10-year period weren't disciplined by the police department.
In a report released Monday by LatinoJustice, the civil rights group said the NYPD only disciplined a handful of officers for making false statements to the police watchdog between 2010 and 2020.
The group examined 144 cases involving 181 officers “who lied to the CCRB” and found the NYPD “utterly failed to take lying by officers seriously, refusing to discipline officers in the face of incontrovertible evidence that they lied.”
According to the report, of the 169 cases that had been resolved by the NYPD as of March 15 of this year, the NYPD issued no discipline at all to 80 officers (47%), issued instructions or a command discipline to 42 officers (25%), and docked the vacation days of 43 officers (26%).
No officers were fired, and only four were suspended or put on probation for cases in which the CCRB found they lied, the report found. An additional 12 cases were either pending or involved officers who left the force before the disciplinary process was complete.
“The NYPD’s refusal to take action when its officers lie has serious consequences,” the report warned. “Officers who learn that there are no consequences for lying will continue to do so. People who are never told that an officer testifying against them is known as a liar cannot receive fair trials.”
LatinoJustice senior counsel Andrew Case told the Daily News, “The problem isn’t that a large number of officers lie to the CCRB.”
“The problem is that the department ignores and excuses those officers who do lie,” Case said.
In a statement to the Daily News, the NYPD said the report was “rife with inaccuracies.”
“The report by Latino Justice, an advocacy organization, is by no means an objective examination of the facts,” the department said. “It is rife with inaccuracies and fundamental misunderstandings of the processes between CCRB and the NYPD. Among the many falsehoods in the report is the assertion that an officer denying an allegation to avail themselves of due process is itself a ‘false statement.’ Another basic error is to blame the NYPD for failure to act on cases that have not been turned over by CCRB due to CCRB’s delays in completing investigations or failures to move forward with prosecutions.”
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