CRIMINAL JUSTICE
The Challenge of Changing Police Culture
Roughing up civilians once helped a cop’s career; de Blasio, some experts say that’s changed
A peaceful 1998 vigil for Matthew Shepard in Midtown Manhattan turned into a violent standoff with NYPD offi cers on horseback injuring marchers.
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
As local, state, and federal
governments grapple
with reforming policing
in the wake of global
protests responding to four Minneapolis
police offi cers killing George
Floyd, an African-American man,
police unions are commonly seen
as a signifi cant obstacle to changing
that profession. But little attention
is paid to the culture in police
departments that may reinforce
racist biases and ignore or perhaps
even reward some forms of misconduct.
“The NYPD has a troubling practice
of failing to meaningfully discipline
their offi cers for misconduct,”
Molly Griffard, an Equal Justice
Works Fellow at the Legal Aid Society,
said in a statement. “The practice
is so widespread that it has
created a culture of impunity and
signals to offi cers that they will not
be punished for egregious behavior
such as brutalizing civilians, lying
on the witness stand, planting evidence,
or making retaliatory false
arrests.”
Legal Aid has compiled police
disciplinary and misconduct records
fi rst published by Buzzfeed
in 2018, data from open records
requests and from New York City’s
Open Data Portal, and records
from federal lawsuits in its Cop Accountability
Project, or CAPstat,
database. The records represent
LGNY
just a few years of data, but they
show that when uniformed NYPD
employees from police offi cers to
senior leadership are accused of
serious misconduct or named in
civil rights lawsuits, if they suffer
consequences, they are limited.
Attorneys who represent plaintiffs
in civil rights cases against
the NYPD and the city point to one
recent example.
In 2014, Terence Monahan, now
the chief of department and the
highest ranking uniformed police
offi cial, was assessed $25,000 in
punitive damages for his conduct
in arresting four people during the
2004 Republican Party Convention
in New York City. Punitive damages
are intended for particularly
egregious conduct and are meant
to punish a defendant.
“He was personally involved in
a number of mass arrests that
he himself ordered,” said Jeffrey
Rothman, an attorney who represented
multiple defendants in what
came to be called the RNC cases.
“It didn’t hold him up.”
Monahan was an assistant chief
in 2014. He was promoted to chief
of patrol in 2016 and won his current
position in 2018. The NYPD
did not respond to an email seeking
comment, but Mayor Bill de
Blasio defended Monahan during
a June 23 press conference.
“I don’t know the details of that,
but I do know Terry Monahan really,
really well,” the mayor said. “He
has been one of the chief agents of
reform in recent years in the NYPD
in terms of moving it from a punitive
entity in the sense of heavy
emphasis on arrests and stops to
a police force that has consistently
not only used a lot fewer stops,
used a hell of a lot fewer arrests.”
Among the strategies the de Blasio
administration has used for
police reform is to reduce the opportunities
for police-public interaction.
That has meant reducing
stop and frisk from nearly 700,000
stops in 2011 under Mayor Michael
Bloomberg to 13,459 in 2019.
Arrests have been reduced by
180,000 in 2019 compared to 2013,
Bloomberg’s last year in offi ce.
If there has been change in the
NYPD’s culture, history suggests
that change is recent.
In 1998, Thomas Graham was
the deputy inspector running the
department’s Disorder Control Unit.
When a vigil for Matthew Shepard,
a 21-year-old college student who
was murdered in Wyoming, drew
thousands of marchers who were to
march on Fifth Avenue from 59th
Street to Madison Square Park,
police fi rst tried to stop the vigil
altogether then blocked marchers
who moved to Sixth Avenue and
continued heading downtown.
Eventually, hundreds of marchers
were penned on West 43rd Street
➤ POLICE CULTURE, continued on p.54
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