nytimes.com
Re “Independent Agency Given New Powers to Prosecute City Police Officers” (news article, March 28):
The changes presented — that lawyers for the Civilian Complaint Review Board will now be permitted to prosecute cases of alleged police misconduct — fail to address the heart of the issue.
First, New York Police Department personnel will still act as judges in these cases, and the department’s commissioner will remain the final arbiter.
More important, the concerns with police practices that have recently come to light and that are cited in the article — surveillance, stop-and-frisk tactics and dubious integrity of crime data — cannot be resolved by prosecuting individual officers.
The central problem is not the wrongdoing of “the few bad apples out there,” as Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, suggests, but department policies, like stop-and-frisk and an aggressively enforced quota system, that foster harsh and arbitrary conduct by police officers on the street.
What New York truly needs is an outside independent agency with the authority and resources to monitor and assess such policies and to hold the department’s leadership accountable for its effects on the city’s quality of life.
ROBERT GANGI
Director, Police Reform Organizing Project, Urban Justice Center
New York, March 28, 2012
Director, Police Reform Organizing Project, Urban Justice Center
New York, March 28, 2012
| Police Brutality and Misconduct | Police Department (NYC) |
| Civilian Complaint Review Board | Search and Seizure |
