It’s a problem that likely dates back to the department’s inception, but in 2015, the New York City Inspector General released a report that explained why residents were forced to shell out millions every year to foot the bill for police misconduct:
Historically, NYPD has frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification.
“Historically.” And perpetually, evidently. That report found that the NYPD has only sustained two percent of the 10,000 complaints filed against officers from 2010 to 2014. That means only 207 cases ever moved forward, no matter how the Civilian Complaint Review Board ruled.
That’s the problem with the CCRB: it can offer recommendations but it’s powerless to enforce them. Theoretically, it’s an avenue for accountability. In reality, it’s little more than a showpiece NYC and NYPD officials can point to as something indicating they’re taking the problem seriously.
The CCRB can offer recommendations but the police commissioner has the final say. So, the final result is what the NYC Inspector General noted nearly a decade ago: very few complaints are sustained and even those that are rarely result in punishment.
Apparently, this still isn’t enough for the NYPD. According to this new report from ProPublica, the NYPD Commissioner (Edward Caban) isn’t just blowing off CCRB recommendations. He’s also burying complaints so deep even public records requesters can’t get at them.
The CCRB forwarded the case of Brianna Villafane to the NYPD. She was grabbed and thrown to the ground by an officer while engaging (ironically enough) in an anti-police violence protest. The CCRB sustained her complaint against the officer, which meant the next step would be a disciplinary trial by the NYPD, directed by the CCRB’s prosecutors and held in a public forum where CCRB members would present evidence and question the accused officer.
But that never happened. This happened instead:
Exercising a little-known authority called “retention,” the commissioner, Edward Caban, ensured the case would never go to trial.
Instead, Caban reached his own conclusion in private.
He decided that it “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” to pursue administrative charges against the officer, Gerard Dowling, according to a letter the department sent to the oversight agency. The force that the officer used against Villafane was “reasonable and necessary.” The commissioner ordered no discipline.
Rather than face these accusations of engaging in excessive force when policing demonstrations, Officer Dowling was instead promoted to deputy chief of the unit that handles protest response.
And Commissioner Caban isn’t limiting himself to undercutting the accountability process with his retention authority. He’s also ensuring officers aren’t punished for misconduct they’ve already admitted to committing.
For one officer, Caban rejected two plea deals: In the first case, the officer pleaded guilty to wrongly pepper-spraying protesters and agreed to losing 40 vacation days as punishment. Caban overturned the deal and reduced the penalty to 10 days. In the second, the officer pleaded guilty to using a baton against Black Lives Matter protesters “without police necessity.” Caban threw out the agreement, which called for 15 vacation days to be forfeited. His office wrote that it wasn’t clear that the officer had actually hit the protesters, contrary to what the officer himself already admitted to in the plea. The commissioner ordered no discipline.
According to ProPublica’s investigation, Caban has done this exact thing more than 30 times since becoming the police commissioner. That’s 30 times he’s refused to punish officers who had already admitted wrongdoing and agreed to disciplinary action. And he’s only been in office since 2023. As ProPublica points out, the previous commissioner only used this power four times during their first year.
But Caban has that option because of the agreement reached with the CCRB, which made several compromises to satisfy the NYPD and the unions that represent it. One of those concessions was giving the police commissioner the power to unilaterally override CCRB decisions and even officers’ own plea deals with NYPD’s internal legal department.
This is what he’s done with this power:
In 40% of the cases that Caban has retained, he has ordered no discipline. In the cases in which he has ordered discipline, it has mostly been light, such as the loss of a few vacation days. The most severe punishment, ProPublica found, was docking an officer 10 vacation days for knocking a cellphone out of the hand of someone who was recording him.
The problems the NYPD has with officer misconduct will continue. Commissioner Caban has made it clear he’s not interested in accountability. Officers who’ve already agreed to punishment have been told they won’t be punished. Officers facing the disciplinary trial process have been forgiven for their crimes by the man on top. Officers accused of severe misconduct have since been promoted to leadership positions where they can apply the same lack of standards to the people they command.
