Police Thyself, Says DOI to NYPD

By AHAQIR ISHAQ

The Inspector General of the Department of Investigation in a wide-ranging report on Thursday accused the New York Police Department of, in effect, failing to police itself by not disciplining a large number of officers involved in cases of unnecessary use of force.

The findings, focusing on 179 verified non-lethal cases of excessive force between 2010 and 2014, showed that one of every three officer were let off the hook. The report also said that the police rulebook lacked clarity on what constituted excessive force.

The report came out as Police Commissioner Bill Bratton released unprecedented new guidelines for reporting and tracking use-of-force encounters by police. The guidelines, promoted with great fanfare, were designed to curb such incidents that recently have brought scrutiny to the largest police department in the nation.

The reforms also requires officers to interfere if their comrades appear to use excessive force

Before now, there was no centralized form of recording use-of-force cases and no department-wide system monitoring them, according to the DOI.

Inspector General Philip K. Eure said that the Police Academy training program doesn’t focus enough on de-escalation. Out of 468 classroom hours, only four and a half hours are used to teach de-escalation, less than one percent of the curriculum.

One of every six cases was escalated by officers, said the DOI report.

DOI Commissioner Mark G. Peter called the findings “disturbing” and called for “long overdue changes.”

“Long term reform of police practice requires an unblinking view of the past,” Peters said. ”Our investigation demonstrates real problems, including failures of discipline, monitoring and training. But those same findings will also support the necessary changes to come.”