 My name is Cynthia Gordigua. I'm the marketing director at ProPublica. Welcome to cracking the blue wall of silence, how we investigated the NYPD. Tonight's event is brought to you with generous support from McKinsey and Company. For more than a year, ProPublica has investigated abuse and impunity inside the New York City Police Department. This project called the NYPD files showed how a veneer of civilian oversight realize the reality that America's largest police force largely polices itself. Among other issues, the series uncovered that the NYPD frequently withholds evidence from the civilian complaint review board, which investigates complaints against NYPD officers. NYPD commissioners have total authority over discipline, which is often used to set aside recommendations from that civilian review board. And high ranking commanders are promoted despite a history of complaints and misconduct allegations. Also as part of this project for the Public Committee to Searchable Public Database of Police Discipline Records that New York had kept secret for decades. So with us to talk about these and other issues, we have reporters Jake Pearson, Dr. Sanders, Joaquin Sapien, deputy managing editor Eric Humanski, news developer Derek Willis and Molly Simon, a Scripps Howard Foundation research fellow at ProPublica. And our moderator for tonight, New York Times Law Enforcement reporter, Ashley Southall. Ashley Southall's work at the Times focuses on crime and policing in New York City, a beat she started in 2016. More broadly, she studies the efforts to create what Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration says will be a smaller, safer and fairer criminal justice system. We're honored to have her leader conversation today. I'll be back in a bit for the audience Q&A, but first I'll throw it over to our moderator, Ashley. Thank you, Cynthia. I'm very glad to be here discussing a very important topic to the city of New York and to that trust between the police and communities they are supposed to serve. Eric, I just want to start with a basic question. Why is it so rare for officers who receive complaints to be disciplined? Hi, Ashley and hi, everybody. So the way I've thought about this is you start off with what can be a big river of complaints. There are thousands of complaints that come in every year to the CCRB. And by the way, there are a lot of people who don't even know to go to the CCRB. And then what happens with all of these thousands is you keep having these diversions. And the first diversion, for example, is after people make a complaint and investigators think it's valid and so forth, and they start looking into it, they have to rely. The Civilian Oversight Board has to rely on the NYPD for cooperation to share evidence. They have no direct access to things like body-worn camera footage. They have no ability to look in electronic records and pull out a rest report or anything like that. They need to go to the NYPD and ask for it. Often, the NYPD doesn't provide it. Let's say you then get past that. Then you have the question of what rules actually are civilian investigators looking into. In other words, you can have something that could be very problematic activity and yet isn't against the rules. What internally investigators call it the lawful but awful problem, because it's actually the NYPD who gets to decide what the rules are. So then if the NYPD shares evidence, if the investigators find something has violated the NYPD's rules, then it goes to a board. And the board, in turn, is made up. One of the members is appointed by the police commissioner. And that person, that appointee of the police commissioner, actually a story just came out in the city showing that those appointees vote against affirming a case about 50% of the time. And then if it makes it past that, it goes to an NYPD judge who can make their own decision. And if it gets past all of that, it then goes to the police commissioner who, even if the case had passed all of that, can decide, no, I'm just going to overturn this and there's going to be no discipline. And we've detailed that. And so that's how you start with about 3,000 allegations and their allegations of misconduct and abuse. And you can end up with a few lost vacation days at the end of it of a few officers. And you have to run this enormous conflict. It sounds like a lengthy process where at the end the police commissioner can just do what he feels is satisfactory, even overruling the decisions of a judge. What can you found that officers are not only not disciplined but they are promoted? Why do we see officers getting promoted that who have these misconduct allegations what do they play any role in that promotion? So the answers in many ways, similar to what Eric just described in that a lot of the power to promote also lies in the hands of the police commissioner. And, you know, there was a time at which there was a kind of a promotion board in which, you know, a few different high ranking officers would review the track record of those who are up for promotion above captain. But even then what we were told in interviews with probably with dozens of officers was that, you know, for the most part like your promotion depends on who you know and what kind of relationship you have with the top brass. And if the top brass likes you, you're likely to get promoted. If they don't, they might use a misconduct allegation against you. And, you know, when we first got the data that was sort of the, you know, the spine of the service that we were able to provide for our readers, one of the first questions we wanted to ask was, well, who were the highest ranking officers with the most complaints? And there was one officer who really stood out because he was promoted to assistant chief and he actually had the most substantiated complaints against him of anyone above the rank of captain or deputy inspector. And something like 16 separate allegations that had been substantiated against him. 77 different complaints. Most of them had to do with strict searches. He'd been sued multiple times. Settlements in those lawsuits came to a total of about half a million dollars. And none of that stood in the way of him ultimately becoming an assistant chief. And one of the things that we heard over and over and over again in our conversations with officers who knew him and knew that he had this reputation of really aggressively strip searching people which was what was the subject of those complaints is that he had a close relationship with the police commissioner at the time, Jimmy O'Neill. And so those things were overlooked. And he wound up, you know, becoming one of the highest ranking officers in the department. So we sort of thought that his tale was quite telling. And he also came up in the department at a time in which, you know, aggressiveness was something that was really admired by his fellow officers. And, you know, that played into him being this kind of, you know, real tough on crime cop, somebody who came up in the comp stat era where statistics on arrests and things like that were really valued. And so that played into it too. So, yeah, the short answer is, again, a lot of this comes down to the discretion of the guys at the top of the department. And, you know, if they like your reputation and your style of crime fighting, you're gonna have a good chance of getting promoted even if you have a track record of complaints. Do the unions play a role in that process? And is there any oversight from anyone, maybe outside of the NYPD? Outside of the NYPD, no. I mean, and as far as the union goes, I mean, it's we, you know, they didn't come up much in the discussions that we had with people about the promotions process. I mean, I have heard of union reps showing up in performance evaluations from time to time. But, you know, for the most part, it seems to be a process that's mostly between the officer and, you know, the police commissioner and maybe the police commissioner's right hand man. You mentioned his lawsuit figure, half a million dollars, and I'm just thinking about what that could do in a city like New York, especially over time or even after this pandemic that we've all been through. Tilbury, you went behind the blue wall of silence. It's notoriously difficult to get police officers sometimes to talk to you and to trust you because there's just kind of this feeling almost of being us against the world. How did you cultivate those sources and why was it important to you to do that? Well, cultivating the sources was a lot of work. Was a series of making sometimes blind calls to people we would identify that were close to the topics that we were interested in. Oftentimes we would utilize an existing source to help connect us to more sources and we had a lot of success doing that. And then, and other times you can find sources through lawsuits and through lawyers who are engaging with the NYPD in various forms. You know, there are a lot of former NYPD officers out there that even if they themselves are not really ready to talk to you or not experts on the issue that you're interested in, they also know people who are currently in uniform or who recently left NYPD who can give you context and help you understand an issue. And the reason it's important is for that last point, if you want to really dig into any type of policing dynamic, whatever it is, it's virtually impossible to understand where a policing tactic or practice is getting things right and where it's getting them wrong without talking to the police officers. You can talk to the community. You can talk to the advocates. You need to talk to those people. They often are on the receiving end of abusive policing practices. So you need to talk to those folks. They often help you get your story started. But when you want to understand how deep something runs and who is instituting the policy that is presenting itself on the streets in front of the people and to the people, you have to talk to the police officers. And some of those conversations are people who you'll be surprised are just as beside themselves with the practices and policies as somebody else might be. Sometimes the people believe that they're doing absolutely the right thing. But as you're understanding those perspectives that you can as a reporter identify where something is going completely astray and where something is actually maybe working for a community, but you gotta talk to the cops in order to get there. Yeah. Why did they talk to you? And what do you say to people who think that reporters are being complicit with the police when we take their word? Yeah, I think that there's a legitimate critique about reporters who blindly take the word of police shops. I mean, we've all seen an example of that when we look back at that initial statement from the Minneapolis Police Department on George Ford. And if you've been in a smaller local newsroom, the kind of local newsrooms that I, that my career, most of my career that I've spent my time in, it's an uphill battle if a police statement comes in and you're the reporter that says, I'm not sure this smells quite right. I wanna ask a few more questions. Most people in that newsroom go, well, the police said it, then it must be true. So I understand that critique completely, but I think it's through the efforts that I just described that that is a completely different process than taking the police word for matter and saying, oh, this is gospel, the police said it. Quite the opposite. I talk to all those cops so I can understand if that's true or not. So I don't take the police perspective and I don't know any reporters at Republican that do and just run with it. We wanna find the truth and whether that's what the police say or whether that's what happened in the community and what they say, we wanna get to the truth. It's interesting that you bring up the George Floyd initial incident report and then what came out later because that same thing happened in New York with the Eric Garner case. It was a medical event and then the next morning, the Daily News has the video showing something completely different. And actually that's all over the country. That's just not New York, that's just not Minneapolis, that's in Jacksonville, that's in St. Louis, that's in LA, that's all over the country that you have those types of hypocrisy. Molly, for those of us in here who are nosy or reporters as we call ourselves, tell us about the database. Where can people find information about officers they've complained about and what happened to their cases? They have the badge number, what other information might be useful? Yeah, so I think it's good for people to know that there is a lot of information out there on individual officers. It just can be sort of decentralized. So of course, one place you can go look now for information if you do have like a specific incident and wanna know what came of it is for public as database, which does have each sort of place of the decentralized spectrum of information you can get it has limitations for the NYPD. But you can go to the pro-publica database to sort of see, figure out what other officers were involved in an incident, what the disciplinary outcome was, whether there was a history of discipline before for an officer. And all you need to do to start looking at that information is like a badge number, like you said. But yeah, if there's, if you have an officer's name and badge, there really is a lot out there that you can start to find out. So a couple of categories that you might think of that wouldn't come right to mind outside of disciplinary records as one, but lawsuits, I think Topher mentioned that is, you can look and see was an officer involved in similar scenarios before? That can be a really interesting way to find out also narratives of past events or past things that someone might have been involved in, other places that you can look for information are like payroll with the city, just to figure out the basics of how long has someone been on the police force. So I think if you have just a little bit of information, there's a lot you can start to look up. I think people see the badge number as a really important first step if you're trying to sort of do an investigation. It's good to know with the NYPD that that can actually change over time. So once you have a badge number, it's really important to figure out someone's name. And then from there, you can start to find out a lot more. And then if you're not seeing what you need on an incident or not learning the information you want, you can always submit a public records request. You just have to know that if you're doing that in New York, you have to have some extreme patience, especially during COVID and how long things take to get back. You have to be willing to wait. But that's another approach you can take if you had an incident and wanna find out what the outcome was or what information might be out there. Thank you. I was nodding when you said, you need to have some patience because man, it can take months to get information from some agencies who will not be named but are clearly the subject of this panel. And sometimes it's just months just to find out that they don't have it or just to get a no can sometimes take months. Indeed, indeed. Molly mentioned some limitations to the data. Derek, can you talk about what it represents and what data isn't out and what are you trying to get? Sure, so it's important to keep in mind that our database, when we first released it last summer, contains officers with substantiated allegations. And I think part of the difficulty with understanding or being able to make sense of a lot of this information is you have to sort of like learn the language or the terminology that the police use in disciplinary proceedings because it was an introduction to this for me. And I assume it is for most people who don't interact regularly with police officers. So, and so the number of officers in our database with substantiated allegations, meaning that the CCRB found that this very likely happened and wasn't as it was described is a very small subset of all the allegations the CCRB receives. And so that the rest of those records and the rest of those allegations, some of those may be unfounded in the sense that like they found no evidence that any of this could have happened or did happen. But some of them are just sort of allegations that they could not make progress on proving or disproving. And the CCRB calls this unsubstantiated which at first when I saw that, like that seems like that has a different meaning and in a lot of different contexts. And so we focused on the substantiated allegations because that's the one where we have the most solid ground up. But now, since we've published our database there's more information that's coming online and coming available including information released directly by the NYPD itself. But that's still a subset of what we could know about discipline in terms of, if the officer hasn't been on the force has left the since left the force disciplinary information basically leaves with them. And so like that's a limitation that's a real limitation in terms of if this is something has happened to you in the past and you're wondering what the status of that is. The other thing is as several folks alluded to is that just simply the time it takes for these for allegations to be acted upon to go through this pipeline that folks were talking about because literally this year, this month you're seeing documents posted by the NYPD that address complaints and incidents that occurred in 2018 and 2017. And so we're talking about years before we see paperwork or even an output from that system. And to my mind that's one of the biggest sort of missing parts of this is that the system we have the information we're getting is already incomplete. It's already a subset, but it's also way behind sort of real time. And that's gonna be a, that has to be a frustration I think for folks who, you know, who are trying to figure out information about incident that may have recently happened to them or someone they know. What else are you trying to get? What else in an ideal world with that? What you log on in the morning and what would you know? So I think part of the thing about one of the things that like you, when you start looking at this data, whether you're a reporter or a citizen, I think you just look at it and say, well, there's gotta be a story behind this, right? Like there's gotta be some more details to this. And oftentimes there are narratives their narrative documentation that is put together either by the CCRB or by NYPD investigators. And again, only a small portion of that is available to us. And so if you want to, you can see the information about, well, this allegation was made or these charges were brought or these penalties were assessed. But it's difficult just from knowing those alone to understand what the context is for those penalties. If you look at sort of like the penalties that are imposed in a lot of disciplinary situations, like there's a lot of time that, you know, as Eric mentioned, like vacation days is the most common penalty. And so, but the range of charges that result in like the same number of vacation days as a penalty is just really broad. And so there has to be some discretion and context built into that, that we're mostly not privy to. And like that would be the thing that I'd want to know. That's what we want to know essentially is what led to this decision, you know, to bring charges and then to bring penalties. Like what's the context there? I'm sure that you and Molly have tried to get some of that information. What has the NYPD said to it? Or have they said anything? Or have they said due to COVID, we'll get this to you a response next year 2023, 2024. Which one? I mean, it's, I think it's some portion of all of those things. Like I said, like the NYPD is posting certain documents now. You see some trial charges documents that come online, but they are literally years old at this point. And so, you know, in terms of bulk access, it is a long way. There might be, you know, Molly and Jake and other reporters might have some more luck with individual requests for individual documents if we know they exist. But that's, you know, like that's still, there's still usually a delay in that. Yeah, to your point, you know, so many of those cases in the trial room go back to like 2015, 2013, it's like, you know, if I'm an officer getting that punishment three years later, sometimes I've been promoted and I've just moved on with my life and just take the money already. I just, what I wonder, for either Eric or Tofer, the CCRB, you know, it's supposed to review the patterns of individual officers, but who is looking at the systematic issues, those patterns that Joaquin talked about, not only with individuals, but with among units and departments and the police department as a whole. You wanna take that, Tofer? Yeah, I'll jump in here. Yeah, so there is one entity that is positioned to do that, but just as you've heard all the frustrations here on this panel about efforts to get documents and how long it takes, even this entity faces those same frustrations and brick walls, it's called the Inspector General's Office. It was started in 2014. It's an agency of the city government in New York, New York City, and its principal mission is to examine practices and patterns within NYPD and to produce reports that would come with recommendations on how NYPD can improve its functions in those areas. And guess what? It can't get records. It sometimes has witnesses that bail on them because NYPD tells them to do so. The bane of any data reporter's existence is that they would get a big batch of data in a PDF form. They send PDFs to the Inspector General's Office and say, hey, here's your data. So that's the kind of cooperation that the Inspector General's Office has had from NYPD. And so much so that they haven't produced a report, a subject matter report in about two years because of the frustrations they've had with records data and witnesses. And that's the office that's set up to do that. Many New Yorkers don't even know that office exists. And it's principally supposed to be the office that would look at patterns and practices. So where the media doesn't do that, it would be the Inspector General's Office. And hopefully they'll produce some reports in this year. They told us recently in a story that we published, but that's the place New Yorkers can go if they have some kind of systematic review they think needs to take place of NYPD. And I would also just chime in here that you also have the question of what happens when there's abuse that is ordered by a commander that isn't just an individual officer. Maybe it's not a policy, but when you look at, for example, the protests last summer after George Floyd's murder and the NYPD's response where it wasn't just a few officers, you had widespread abuse. And you have not only a tiny number of disciplined cases that have come up on that, but non-involving any commanders. It's a situation where accountability, there's almost no accountability at the officer level and essentially none at the commander. It's interesting that you both mentioned oversight bodies. We've talked at length about the CCRB until you've mentioned OIG who are supposed, and there's also the commission to combat police corruption. They're supposed to be able to watch over the NYPD, but in your telling, you have found ways that they withhold information. What reason is the NYPD giving? How are they able to do that? In the case of OIG, they have long taken the position that they do not believe that that body has the authority to look at certain documents. When the body was first created in 2014, they even told them, hey, that's a 50A exemption, you can't look at it. And the Inspector General is a law enforcement agency. It's held under DOI. It has all the same powers that DOI has, but NYPD took the position that, nah, not so much. You don't have those powers. We don't believe it. And there really wasn't anyone to tell them different. And so they just have behaved that way until they were able to reach an agreement fairly recently, that no, no, you do have that privilege, but yeah, we're still gonna keep a close watch on you. I mean, they would even require them to drop their cell phones when they were coming in separate places because they, I guess ultimately didn't trust those folks in that other city agency that is set up to provide them oversight that's meant to help them do their jobs. Who are the people who could step into this and say, look, this is what they get and this is what you give them? And what are they doing or what are they saying? What does any of the NYPD's reasons for not giving information stand up? And at least in terms of law or in administration? If you talk to the people who do the work at OIG, the reasons NYPD provides do not stand up. NYPD will make a different argument based on my reading. A lot of the presented reason from NYPD seem pretty false and hollow. But the person that would ultimately call balls and strikes on this will be the mayor of New York City. The mayor of New York City has the power to look at the commissioner of NYPD and say, hey listen, that body set up to help you do your job better. Give them the records they want. Jake, thanks so far. Jake, I wanted to ask you, since Provolka's reporting, there have been a number of reforms put on the table by the city council, the mayor, the CCRB even. The police hearing is they'll have historically pushed back against reforms like the creation of the CCRB. And they've been successful in many other instances. The repeal of 50A, for instance, was on the table for six years, especially after Garner's death. And it didn't happen until after George Floyd's and the union still fought again. Can you talk about what the next mayor will have to do in order to overcome the union's resistance? Sure, thanks for throwing that one my way. I mean, the unions are incredibly powerful in ways that maybe you don't think about traditionally in New York or as opposed to other police departments across the country. In New York, they have a very vast legal defense fund that they use in all kinds of situations to protect their members when they're in disciplinary proceedings or facing charges, but also to spend on things like to lawyers to fight legislation over or attempts to repeal laws like 50A that would have shielded disciplinary records or what have you. So there are a couple of things that a mayor can do. Obviously the mayor's office of labor relations negotiates with the unions on contracts. And in New York, that happens every two years. There's other ways to reach a deal. There's arbitration via state entity, but the next mayor will have that opportunity. And is that the negotiating table that a mayor can make certain demands that both a fit within the economic framework, however much money they have for these issues, but also have public policy implications that the mayor wants to see play out in New York. So I guess the question is, the answer is, who the mayor picks to negotiate and on what issue an administration or what issues an administration decides they want to take on at the negotiating table is sort of germane. We wrote a story about a month ago about a sort of a clause within the labor contract that has existed since 1985 that obligates New Yorkers, taxpayers to kick in about two million every year to a defense fund that is exclusively used to defend cops accused of wrongdoing in civil lawsuits when the city's own lawyers won't defend them. So in the very small cases when the corporation council, the lawyer for New York won't defend a police officer who gets a pretty verbose legal defense in the course of doing his or her job. Even in those cases, when the city effectively walks away taxpayers are still paying the law firm that represents those officers. So that's been on the books for 30 plus years now and it's an uphill battle when something gets codified but these are the types of things that a mayor who wanted to use the negotiation process to try and affect some sort of change could take on at the negotiating table. Not to say that's easy but that's sort of the type of stuff that we're talking about. You know, essentially that you mentioned they're extreme political power because I was talking to the mayor of Ithaca a few weeks ago now and he was saying that when all of the jurisdictions had to come up with their police reform plans that the police unions from New York went to Ithaca to help push back. Ultimately the plan did go through with a tweak that instead of recreating the apartment there now the police department they're now redesigning it, renaming it and but that is one of the examples of how far the union's power goes. I mean, the next mayor is not just dealing with the police here in New York City in New York City, right? He has to fight them in Albany, Albany. Like, what's gonna take to get through reforms at the state level and even outside of the city when it comes to New York? Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head there. The union's practice sort of and their advocates for their workers they will sort of pull any lever that they can. So if that means contributions to lawmakers that's sort of one thing. I mean, the truth is in New York actually not that many officers live in the five boroughs. So they're actually their voting power. There are a lot of building workers for example in the city or transit workers or hospital workers or often New York City residents. So their power in New York City politics among other things but is in the polling booth. That's not the case with cops in New York as much but they do have the sort of what you might call the moral authority of keepers of law and order in the city that they can use. Anybody who is paying attention last summer saw that in the face of attempts by state and city lawmakers to pass legislation that would curb some of their practices or make bail more lenient. There was a slowdown of enforcement in New York. The unions have ways of communicating to the public and to power brokers and decision makers what the consequences of their actions will be. And it takes some amount of charm and some amount of threat and courage to push an agenda that you want to see in the face of opposition. So that's all abstract but you're right. There are a lot of different levels. There are many different sort of entities that govern this space. It's not just at the negotiating table. There's the legislature's city and state level. There's arbiters and politics to be played. But yeah, you need someone who is savvy in New York which is still a labor town. You need somebody who's savvy in labor politics. Thanks for that, Jake. I'm gonna last question from me. I'm gonna ask everyone, what is the most surprising thing you learned in your reporting on the NYPD? And I will start with Molly. Yeah, I think one of the things that stood out to me when we were reporting on discipline was that even in some of the most serious cases that go before the Civilian Complaint Review Board when an officer agrees to sort of a plea for how much discipline they're going to get. So say, they've done something wrong, that the board has determined that they have done something wrong and they agree to give up, say, 10 vacation days. The commissioner can still, even when the officer has agreed to it, downgrade that discipline because they have total discretion at the end of the day over what happens. And sometimes it just means citing, well, we want this to be aligned with previous incidents that are similar, but that idea that an officer might have agreed, come to the table, come up with a plea and then it still gets changed at the very end of the process was very, very surprising to me. What about you, Topher? In a similar vein, just how little discipline is meted out for officers who are found to have violated policy. We did a pretty extensive look at choke holds and found that the cost for a choke hold which the NYPD and most law enforcement throughout this country has determined as a very dangerous, potentially deadly maneuver is some vacation days. And that the idea that vacation days as a penalty, everyone seems to accept as an equitable penalty given the infraction. Just, it was a challenge for me to understand that. And it took a lot of conversations with people for me to understand how vacation days, because actually if you run a foul of the New York Times, if I run a foul of ProPublica, I'm not gonna get docked vacation days. I'm gonna get suspended, I'm gonna get fired, whatever the case may be, but vacation days is what cops were facing when they could potentially kill somebody out on the streets. Joaquin. So, talked to a lot of cops last year and one of the things that surprised me the most was actually how much they themselves are concerned about modern American police and criminal justice system. And how often they actually wound up echoing some of the criticism that's been lodged against the department. And a lot of these tend to be kind of lower level guys, but for example, we did a story at the end of the year about the policing of prostitution in New York City and we spoke to 36 current and former cops about it and not a single one of them thought that the way that the department approaches this issue made a bit of difference in terms of the amount of sex that's bought and sold in the city. And in fact, they thought that it was many of them that it was such a waste of time that really what they were most focused on, and this is very cynical, was to make as many arrests as they could so that they could earn money from overtime. And some of the officers made quite a lot of money on overtime by making these arrests. One of them made $86,000 and that's last 18 months on the job. And he was kind of laughing his way to the bank but he was like, well, if the department's gonna pay me to do it, I'm gonna do it. And then you had another officer who said, this is why I have no problem whatsoever with the defund the police argument because there is a lot of wasted money here. And this is coming from a current cop. So that surprised me quite a bit. Another thing that I heard that Topher and I heard from some of the officers that we spoke to on the promotion story that we did was that a lot of the officers thought, complaints really should be considered in promoting, in promotions, whether they were substantiated or not. And so it's just interesting to me how kind of different the official responses versus the response that you get if you actually start sitting down with some of these guys and holding some trust with them. So we're getting the signal that it's time to go to audience Q&A but before we do that, I wanna ask Derek or Jake if you wanted to add something to that question or if you were a cop, if you feel like the ground's been covered. Okay, by me, if we put ourselves on the gauntlet and go into the audience. All right, thank you. All right, so thank you. So we're gonna answer some of your questions now. Our first question is, have you seen communities or departments that avoid the problems found in the NYPD file series that better manage disciplinary actions? If so, what do they do differently that results in better outcomes? So I'm gonna throw that one to Molly if you can answer. Yeah, so I mean, after the protest last summer, we did some trying to follow up on incidents of miscontext. So we got a little bit of a sense of things that were going on across the country. I think the sort of long intro to it is like the issues seen in the NYPD are things happening elsewhere too and I don't think there's any place doing this perfectly. The NYPD is so large though that the issues are magnified and it's a department of a scale like none other. But I think there are specific issues in which there are other places doing things better. So a good example is Eric did a lot of coverage on the access to body worn camera footage for the CCRB for the civilian complaint review board. And there's other departments in the country or other civilian boards in the country that have direct access to that. So that they don't have to request it, they can actually, the civilian board themselves just log on to the department's information system and get what they need in order to investigate a case. So that's a very different approach. DC is an example where they can do that, Salt Lake City. Another sort of example that, you know, department doing something a little differently is, you know, in now when the police commissioner departs from a recommendation made by the civilian complaint review board, they have to issue a letter basically explaining why they're doing that. But we've seen in getting an initial look at some of those letters through the CCRB that they're not very comprehensive and not very detailed. Other departments that we've seen those sorts of letters and similar sort of having to explain why you're departing from the civilian board are much more detailed. So in Seattle, it's pages of description on why you're departing. So there are places that do specific parts of the process differently and better, but a lot of the issues are systemic elsewhere. Thank you. Next question is, I'm gonna actually tell this one to Ashley. Can the US Department of Justice investigate to create external agency oversight of the NYPD or any, I guess, any police department such as through a consent decree that something that's sort of in conversation in the city and beyond? Yeah, DOJ could step in and decide to investigate some kind of pattern or practice in the NYPD. We see this on a smaller scale with the attorney general's investigation of protesting practices. The thing about consent decrees is that they usually require some kind of arm twisting or settlement or agreement. So there's either some force and duress or there is some recognition in the department that something is wrong and that some external kind of oversight or help is needed. What would be probably easier and maybe less expensive is for DOJ to incentivize accountability and oversight the way that during the 90s and 2000s it incentivized militant tactics and surveillance. The DOJ, a lot of police departments depend on grants from the federal government and the government can choose what it wants to fund, like body cameras for instance. Thank you. I have a question about the data that ProPublica got. So, I mentioned in my intro that we got this data that had been kept private for decades. So someone wondered what happened that allowed ProPublica to get the CCRB data and have the unions fault that decision for us to publish it. So Eric, I know there's a story there. I'm gonna throw that one to you. Sure, so I'll try to keep the story very short. The unions did indeed fight to try to keep this data secret which as you say had been kept secret for decades as a result of a law called 50A. And what happened with us is that the law was repealed following the George Floyd protests. And in between when the law was repealed and when the unions filed a lawsuit, we made a public records request to the CCRB for this information. And they, unlike many agencies actually had a functioning FOIA department and sent us, they were very responsive and sent us the information. As it happens before the unions got their act together. And then what happened was the unions made an argument that they didn't know we had the data but they convinced the judge to put a temporary restraining order and to shut this, to keep the information private and the judge agreed. And what happened was the city in response said, judge, why do we have to keep this stuff secret? Look, we already sent it to ProPublica. They said that in the filing and once they did that we realized, you know what we need to do? We need to publish this stuff as soon as possible as soon as we can responsibly. And so we had a number of discussions. We worked through the journalistic and legal aspects of it and published it very quickly before the judge could for example, enjoying us. So that was a, from essentially a Friday to a Sunday. And it was a lot of people on the Zoom working very long on a weekend. Yeah, I remember there were a lot of emails spying around that weekend. I was like, what is this? Okay, so the next question is more about the reporting. So, you know, as reporters, what resources did you use to corroborate the information you learned during your investigation or to evaluate the credibility of sources that you were unable to corroborate? So Joaquin, I'm gonna ask you to take that one. Sure. So, you know, documents are obviously critical and we spend a lot of time trying to get our hands on these records. I mean, you know, Eric just described this great score that we had through a very smart public records request through the CCRB and we were able to get a lot of data. But the data really only tells you so much about the complaints. It's kind of very top level information. And so, 40 to those complaints are a longer kind of complaint history and record. And that was more difficult to get. But, you know, there's a lot of, as I had mentioned earlier, civil litigation for one against some of the officers who were the focus of these complaints and the lawyers who do this kind of litigation will often get documents through discovery practice. And, you know, that's one way that we were able to get records that hadn't really come out to the public yet. And then, you know, the other thing that was just absolutely critical is sourcing and trying to, you know, leverage one person's trust into the next kind of over and over and over again. And that's how we were able to get to, you know, dozens of current former cops for some of these stories. Once you talk to one person, kind of persuade them that you're approaching this with an open but critical mind and show that to them, they're, you know, often willing to kind of introduce you to other people or at least make suggestions to others. And, you know, of course, you're always kind of evaluating each person's credibility one at a time. Everybody ultimately has some kind of reason for why they're talking to a reporter. And so you want to think hard about, you know, what their agenda might be and test it as best you can. And, you know, to the extent that you're able to get a sense of that person's reputation and their credibility from other sources as you come to know them. Thank you. So I actually wanted to sort of follow up on that with a question that sort of digs deeper into that sort of sourcing within the police department. We're getting a lot of questions about, like, advice or how do you get people to talk to you? So, Topher, I'm going to throw this one to you. How do you develop sources across the police force, particularly officers, especially concerning sensitive subjects which may implicate the department or their fellow officers? I did have to piggyback right off of what Joaquin said. It's leveraging many of your existing relationships. And people who have even followed your work, you know, both me and Joaquin have a fortunate kind of, you know, career history of having some work that people can see. And so they can make an assessment about you as a reporter through some of your work and the type of fairness and critical, you know, view that you bring your subject matter. Then they'll give you a shot to talk to them. And what they're really assessing, what I found sources really assessing is just, are you straight up person? Are you going to be honest with them? It's not some sense that you're going to write the story that makes them look good or make, you know, bend over backwards to make NYPD look good. They just want to know that you're going to give them an honest listen and you're going to wrestle with whatever they tell you in an honest way. And I do that as a reporter and me and Joaquin were on the phone a lot of times with some of the same people. And they were able to kind of give an assessment of us and then they say, hey, you know, I'm going to connect you with one or two other folks that I know. And once you start to build your network, you're going to treat that way. Before you know it, you've got a number of people talking to you with candor about the sensitive issues. And, you know, a key element of this is that you're, you're not just trying to assess some of the practices you are, but you also want to understand the decision making. And you only can get to the decision making by getting close to the people in the room. People who are in the room at the time those decisions were made. And that can be tough, but it's through this hard work of, of connecting one source to the next source in. And that's, that's how we were able to do that. That's how I was able to do that. Great. So I have a couple of questions here about public records requests. So I'm going to sort of start one with Jake and then see if Derek can follow up. So, I mean, basically, like, how do you get the most out of responses to public information requests from law enforcement agencies like NYPD. So Jake, like, I don't know if there's any best practices for like how you can do that the best. And also the other question was like for ProPublica, how, how much is litigation involved when it comes to getting, you know, public records, when there's sort of a still in wall. I'll take a crack. I mean, you know, I just have a couple sort of guiding principles on, on the use of the public records law, and I'm not revealing any great secret but for whatever it's worth. I mean, one is I try in all cases to be specific, a sort of go fish FOIA request does nobody good doesn't do you any good and will inevitably in most cases sort of lead to a burdensome workload for the people on the other end, which makes them unlikely to fulfill it and it's a harder job for them to fill it so one specificity. To Tofer's point I mean that involves talking to people ahead of time to understand the machinery of a place how the paper flows what sort of document would contain what type of information is that something you need so that's a long way of saying a great deal of reporting going into a records request is helpful to narrow and tailor your request to something that even if you don't know what's on it you know that it would be the type of thing the type of record that might contain the stuff you're looking for. And the other thing I do is I think the approach that records access officers, usually lawyers the people whose job it is to sort of correspond with the public, not just journalists, anybody citizen who wants to file for this public information. There are people to they have bosses. They have job. It's a job for them. They've got rules and regs and I always call ahead of time I even if it's an online portal I try and use directory to find the human being on the other end of the phone whose job it is to interface with me. Johnny Q public who wants information, and I make a good faith effort to connect with that person so that they know me, they know what I'm talking about we're communicating so it's not just a piece of paper demanding information which I frankly feel like even if it was my job on the other end I would bristle out a little bit over time perhaps. And sometimes that can help grease the wheels a little bit. The only other thing to think about especially when you're seeking information from a department that is opaque and reluctant to give up information is that very rarely in government does one government entity only interact exclusively within itself. Very often, they correspond with other agencies. Sometimes they are required to submit data to other agencies. So, again, when you report out ahead of time. What you're looking for and how it might be captured part of that reporting process is thinking about are they required to give it to somebody else. Are they is this something that is shared between agencies because if it is. You can go to the other agencies and sometimes you have better luck, especially if they are not culturally as standoffish as sometimes the PD or a correction officer or the the jails are and get it that way. So, there's no perfect formula but over time I've come to find that those three things have served me well in this in this field. And the only thing I would add is essentially like we have some very smart lawyers who work with us and for us at ProPublica but suing is a is a sharp like it is a it is a move that has costs, not just financial costs but costs of time. And, you know, and it is not necessarily a last resort sometimes it is necessary, but very often like you like it's not, you don't want to use it lightly you don't want to threaten to sue when you're not going to actually do that you don't you. And a lot of times where where our lawyers really help is in the crafting of requests and in the good negotiations that take place that don't involve that don't involve anybody going into court and usually that that ends up with us getting stuff we want faster anyway. Okay, so you have time for one more question. This one's kind of a tough one. It's sort of like, I think we want to end maybe on a note of hope for the audience. I'm getting a lot of questions like what can we do, you know, as regular people who aren't reporters who aren't, you know, officers just as regular civilians. What can we as community members do to demand accountability and transparency from our police departments. So I'm going to throw that out to anyone who maybe has some advice for, like, what power sort of regular person has to kind of push for change. I mean, I can just say that, you know, in New York City. There is a mayoral race, and there's a primary in about seven weeks and you know people as citizens. You know can make their voices heard on on the subjects that ultimately, you know, in the United States police departments policing is under civilian control, and that is how the, you know appropriate setup is, and that is certainly better in practice when citizens demand that it work that way. And the only thing I would add is that we have like this is we have a large police department in New York City right and like there are plenty of places that have large police departments. And for records that and then we have time to look at, to be honest, like, one way to help is to eyeball things to look at things to and to tell and to raise issue, you know, raise questions or raise things that you find not just with journalists but with like Eric was saying with the elected candidates with people who represent you, because like, as much as we like to spend time looking at records. We can't do it all the time and we can't do it with all the records. And so your eyeballs and brains are really useful and helpful. I'm actually going to add to that, but I'm here. You know, I talk about this all the time. There's not only a mayor's race there is a district attorney's race in Manhattan, there are city council seats up for grabs. Well, maybe not for grabs, but there's certainly up for election. And then, and even in city council offices they, there are constituent liaisons and people who you can talk to and be clear about what it is that you want as a member of the public. You know, I find that people who are persistent sometimes get their point across more than those who do it, who say it wants and then turn away. You know, there are some people who, you know, we joke in the newsroom, I get the same letter that Jan ransom get and that, that another reporter gets from the same person who wants us to cover a case so it's, you know, and sometimes we do cover those cases we get around to it or able to find information. The other thing I would just say is to is to keep keep educating yourself on on these issues and how accountability or lack thereof works. Great. Thank you so much for that. That's our time for today everyone. I want to thank our panelists for this excellent conversation and our guest moderator Ashley Southall of the times, New York Times. I would like to give a special thank you to McKinsey and company for their support. And thank you and the audience for joining us tonight and for your very thoughtful questions. This event has been recorded by the way and we'll be emailing the video to everyone who registered so look out for that. And until the next time. I hope you can join us for the next event and have a great evening everyone.