NY State Police: 6 takeaways from 20 years of misconduct records

A new database documenting 20 years of misconduct investigations at the New York State Police shows that very few allegations of excessive force are ever substantiated by the department, and when misconduct is found, serious repercussion is rare.

The database, created by the New York Civil Liberties Union, provides sweeping and unprecedented insight into allegations of wrongdoing within the department, examining over 18,000 misconduct allegations over two decades. The publication of the data was made possible through the June 2020 repeal of the former Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which protected police discipline records from public disclosure.

"I think the overall story that is told is pretty unambiguous," said Ify Chikezie, a NYCLU staff attorney. "The State Police is unaccountable. There are many instances of misconduct, many instances of use of force and not many instances where we see officers being disciplined."

Here are findings the USA Today Network pulled from the data.

Few use-of-force allegations against NY State Police are substantiated...

The data, obtained and published by the New York Civil Liberties Union in the course of a lengthy legal battle with the state, reveal that only 7% of misconduct investigations involving an officer's use of force found that misconduct occurred. For allegations involving discrimination based on race or religion, only 5% of those investigations found that misconduct occurred.

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...But nearly half of all misconduct claims held water

Overall, 41% of all misconduct allegations were deemed to have merit, substantially higher than the percentage for allegations involving use-of-force and discrimination. Additionally, findings of merit for other categories remained lower than the overall average, including the rate for allegations of illegal searches (at 9%) and of verbal abuse (23%).

What does discipline look like? In most cases, just a reprimand

But even where misconduct is deemed to have occurred, the consequences may not be so severe. According to the database, over half (52%) of documented misconduct resulted in a only a reprimand for the officer or a counseling memo.

Officers in documented misconduct cases were terminated only 2% of the time and demoted only 1% of the time.

"I think it is telling, and I think it does reveal that many officers are not receiving any sort of real punishment or consequences for using force or other forms of misconduct against New Yorkers," Chikezie observed.

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400 officers involved in at least five use-of-force incidents

The database also includes information about troopers' uses of force, shedding light on over 5,000 incidents over a span of 20 years.

Nearly 400 troopers were involved in at least five use-of-force incidents, and those officers were responsible for almost half of the total use-of-force incidents collected in the dataset.

Most use-of-force incidents triggered at traffic stops

A substantial portion — one-third — of the use-of-force incidents occurred during the course of a traffic stop, and 10% occurred during a mental-health call.

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NY troopers in Rockland, Orange frequently used force, data shows

Troopers in Rockland and Orange counties had the second-highest number of documented use-of-force incidents, behind only the policing district covering Washington, Warren and Saratoga counties.

State Police 'value transparency,' but fight for NY 50-a records ongoing

Despite 50-a's repeal in 2020, many police departments continue to withhold records of misconduct, arguing that the public should not know about cases where the department has exonerated an officer's conduct through an internal investigation.

Acting State Police Superintendent Steven Nigrelli said in a statement that his agency "values transparency."

"NYCLU published its interpretation of the records it received for the NYSP," he said.

The NYCLU case against the State Police is now before an intermediate appeals court, where the nonprofit is seeking to obtain case records underlying the thousands and thousands of data points that form the misconduct database.

"Understanding how these processes work, when and why complaints go unsubstantiated, is very much a key part of what the legislature intended to make public and how we can better understand these accountability systems," noted Bobby Hodgson, a NYCLU attorney who has spearheaded many of the organization's police transparency efforts.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: NY State Police misconduct: 6 takeaways from two decades of records