Jessica S. Tisch, New York City’s new police commissioner, faces an uphill climb to reverse the department’s chaos, dysfunction and scandals. So far, she’s wasted little time trying to make an impact, shaking up the NYPD upper ranks and moving 500 officers from desk jobs to the streets.
Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Council could give Tisch a big assist: fill four empty seats on the beleaguered Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), which has labored to conduct routine business. It’s disgraceful that, since late last year, the independent investigator of police misconduct has struggled to achieve a quorum at its monthly gatherings.
Undercutting the 15-seat CCRB and dialing back police accountability were the fruits of an official campaign of indifference in recent years. It’s appalling. We have a moral obligation to fill those seats, and they should be filled now.
In this era of attacks on the rule of law, the message to the police rank and file has been clear: the ends justify the means; that crime fighting excuses the use of unethical methods. To suggest otherwise is pure hubris, because the CCRB and discipline crisis has played out in the open for years. That reality unfairly hamstrings Commissioner Tisch and city taxpayers to the presumption that the NYPD cannot, and will not, be held accountable.
So it goes that CCRB statistics show misconduct complaints ballooned from 3,123 cases in 2021 to 5,310 complaints last year – an astonishing 61 percent increase in three years. Moreover, NYPD misconduct lawsuit settlements in 2024 alone cost taxpayers $82 million, according to the Legal Aid Society.
The numbers are the direct result of actions by two of Tisch’s predecessors, Keechant Sewell and Edward Caban. They aggressively reduced punishments in the NYPD disciplinary protocols and killed more than half of substantiated CCRB cases, some involving serious misconduct, including chokeholds and beatings deemed likely criminal by the CCRB.
The mayor shoved the CCRB over a tipping point last summer by forcing out Arva Rice, an outspoken advocate of aggressive case review whom he installed in 2022 as interim CCRB chairperson. She was replaced last month by new interim chairperson Mohammad Khalid, who is the City Council’s designee representing Staten Island.
There has been muted outcry from the public and New York’s political class about horrific police behavior or the dismantling of the CCRB, an important check on the NYPD. For instance, there has been relative silence over a terrible police shooting in September on the Sutter Avenue subway platform, where officers firing at a man with a knife also hit two bystanders, leaving one with brain damage. And a court-ordered study last year found the police continue to be lax in punishing officers who illegally stop and frisk overwhelming numbers of Black and Latinx people on the street.
In the current tough-on-crime atmosphere and truly alarming high-profile violent crimes, I suppose talk of police oversight or criticizing NYPD tactics is out of fashion; a political death sentence or the new “third rail” for elected officials. Regardless, we have a moral obligation to stand up for the important work of the CCRB.
Advocating for independent review and calling out aggressive police tactics begs an important question: Why, for so long, have NYC elected officials and taxpayers deferred so egregiously to the NYPD and their labor unions? Most police officers do not live in the five boroughs, so their clout at the polls is muted, at best. Voters in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn formed the coalition that elected Adams and the current racially and ethnically diverse City Council. They didn’t sign up for unchecked police power.
In recent years, Sewell and Caban went even further than former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the wink-and-smile discussion on police discipline. With the tacit approval of Adams, a former NYPD captain, they pushed tropes that romanticized policing as a noble cause. Their policies and public statements made it clear that police deserved protection in the city’s urgency to aggressively deter crime. As a result, the usually vocal police unions have been mostly silent as discipline cases plummeted and police overtime pay skyrocketed.
NYPD’s slack disciplinary practices may have, in fact, figured into Commissioner Sewell’s exit after only 18 months on the job. She quit soon after push back from the mayor’s office over her attempt to discipline Jeffrey Maddrey, then chief of department, for injecting himself in a friend’s criminal inquiry. In an unrelated case, Maddrey resigned last month after a lieutenant accused him of coercing her into sex.
When he took office, Adams pledged to dial back aggressive police tactics. The mayor and the City Council can belatedly begin to deliver on this promise by making filling vacancies on the CCRB board a priority. Average New Yorkers and the new NYPD commissioner will greatly benefit.
David R. Jones, Esq., is President and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York (CSS), the leading voice on behalf of low-income New Yorkers for more than 175 years, and a member of the MTA Board. The views expressed in this column are solely those of the writer. The Urban Agenda is available on CSS’s website: www.cssny.org.