De Blasio says NYC police complaints down since he became mayor

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Complaints about police misconduct made to a civilian review board have declined since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, with a historic drop in the last five months, the mayor said on Friday. Amid ongoing protests over the police killings of unarmed black men in New York, de Blasio released data from the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) showing that from July 1 through Nov. 30 compared to the same period in 2013 excessive force allegations fell by 29 percent, discourtesy allegations dropped by 24 percent and offensive language allegations dipped by 20 percent. There also was a 22 percent drop in allegations of abuse of authority, including stop and frisk - the crime-fighting tactic that de Blasio promised to end when he was campaigning. During the five-month period, there was a total of 1,813 complaints of police misconduct, the mayor said in a statement. The declines are the biggest since the CCRB was created in 1993 by Mayor David Dinkins, the city's only black mayor, to investigate residents' complaints about law enforcement heavy-handedness. Since de Blasio took office in January, vowing to improve the relationship between police and the community, overall complaints filed with the CCRB fell 10 percent compared to the same period in 2013. There were a total of 4,510 complaints in the 11-month period. "We're steadily bringing crime down while drawing police and community closer," de Blasio said. The statement comes as protests continued over a Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict a police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner and on the day that Brooklyn's district attorney said he would convene a grand jury to consider charges in the November fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by a rookie police officer. De Blasio on Thursday ordered a significant retraining of the nation's largest police force, in which 22,000 officers will learn non-confrontational techniques for interacting with the public. He said New York City had become a safer place with some its lowest rates of violence in decades, noting that in the four-month period from August through November, the city had its smallest number of shootings and homicides since the same period in 1993. (Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Scott Malone and Sandra Maler)