In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020, New York State repealed a law that for decades kept the disciplinary records of its police officers secret.
The New York Times and New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom, have since gathered over 10,000 such files from around half of New York State’s nearly 500 law enforcement agencies. The documents, most of which are from the past 10 years, provide a window into how some officers at the state, county and local levels have avoided accountability in court despite relatively clear evidence that they broke the law.
The files also highlight vast discrepancies in how departments have handled misconduct. Offenses considered fireable in some departments were handled with letters of reprimand in others. In some departments, officers who repeatedly committed misconduct were allowed to keep their jobs; in others, officers were fired or forced to resign.
Thousands of officers who committed misconduct remain on the job today.
While major New York news outlets have written about the records from larger agencies, including the New York Police Department, which began releasing its files in 2021, those from the State Police and local departments have received less scrutiny.
The New York Times and New York Focus are examining cases and patterns from these records. The first article in our series, published Tuesday, explored cases of officers who drove drunk.
What type of misconduct is included in these files?
Infractions vary from mundane violations of department policy, such as arriving late to work or failing to register for a vacation day, to serious offenses such as using excessive force, inappropriate behavior and abuse of authority.
Unlike some other states, New York has no statewide requirement mandating that outside agencies such as district attorneys’ offices or the state’s attorney general investigate allegations of misconduct. Though the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services maintains a public list of officers decertified for misconduct since 2016, the list tracks only officers who faced termination or resigned.
These cases are rare, the files show, and in almost all other instances, allegations of misconduct were internally investigated by departments and then placed in personnel files and disciplinary logs.
Departments have counseled, reprimanded, censured, suspended and even occasionally demoted their officers behind closed doors.
How do departments conduct internal investigations?
The files indicate that there are no statewide standards. Some departments conduct lengthy investigations and create hundreds of pages of files, while others confine the findings of disciplinary investigations to a few sentences on a single form.
Some departments keep transcripts of disciplinary interviews with officers accused of misconduct; others do not document if any such interviews occur.
Records also show that departments followed different practices when citizens filed complaints saying that officers had committed misconduct. In some departments, citizens were interviewed and notified of the outcome of cases. In others, citizens were asked to fill out forms describing their allegations but were never notified of the outcomes.
Disciplinary investigations often occurred weeks or months after an incident. Information from disciplinary investigations is protected, meaning it cannot be used against officers in court.
Why did it take years to obtain these files?
Shortly after the law, known as 50-a, was repealed, reporters and civil rights groups filed requests for records with various police agencies. The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society sued a number of large agencies who refused to release their records, including the New York Police Department, the Rochester Police Department and the New York State Police.
Days after the law’s repeal, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle became one of the first news outlets to request records from all of the state’s police departments. For this series, The New York Times and New York Focus began requesting these records in June 2023.
More: Search D&C’s New York police disciplinary records database
In September 2024, the state modified records laws to require agencies to notify current and former employees before the release of personnel records. Civil rights groups criticized the change, noting that departments may not have contact information for former officers and that already burdened records officers would now be forced to send hundreds of communications before fulfilling some basic requests.
The change, along with staffing shortages in several departments, has led to lengthy delays in fulfilling some requests.
Who provided files as part of this investigation?
In addition to requesting files directly from police departments, The New York Times and New York Focus spent the past two years requesting records from county district attorneys’ offices. Many of these offices collected records to comply with the state’s expanded discovery laws, and in some cases, district attorneys’ offices provided records even when local departments denied they existed.
In a number of instances, these requests uncovered records from smaller agencies — village and town police departments, and county sheriff’s offices — that were known to prosecutors but largely overlooked across the state.
The New York Times and New York Focus filed more than 800 records requests over the past two years. Reporters for New York Focus have filed dozens of administrative appeals — the first step in challenging the denial of a request — and, in three instances, filed lawsuits to further challenge the failure of departments to provide the records. The New York Times has sued the Erie County Sheriff’s Office to force the disclosure of over a decade of misconduct records.
Overall, our investigation has so far obtained records regarding 235 departments collectively containing over 8,000 sworn officers, according to state data.
Why focus on the State Police?
This investigation also focuses on the New York State Police, which, with over 5,000 sworn officers, is the second-biggest law enforcement agency in the state, behind the New York Police Department. The agency has yet to make its body of misconduct files public.
Our reporting found that the agency routinely provided county district attorneys’ offices bulk access to records about current officers, sometimes providing files via compact disc. The New York Times and New York Focus uncovered thousands of the department’s records related to 1,200 officers in seven of the agency’s 11 divisions. (Records from one division, obtained from a district attorney’s office, were first reported by WKBW-TV in Buffalo.)
New York Focus has worked with MuckRock, a nonprofit news organization focused on requesting and sharing public records, to make a body of records related to hundreds of State Police officers public, and they plan to continue making more records available to the public.
If you’re interested in articles in this series, sign up for Staying Focused, a newsletter by New York Focus.Sammy Sussman is an investigative reporter who writes about police and policing in New York State as part of The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: How The New York Times obtained 10,000 police disciplinary records