DAs Should Name Cops Who Can't Be Trusted, NYC Activists Say

NEW YORK — New York City's district attorneys are reportedly keeping or creating lists of cops who can't be trusted in court — and activists want to know who they are.

Public defenders and criminal-justice reformers pressed the city's five top prosecutors on Friday to release their lists of cops with credibility issues as criminal witnesses. Shielding their names is unfair to defendants, some of whom end up behind bars based on lies, advocates argue.

"How many of those people sitting in jails and prisons are there because a cop lied on the evidence?" said Stanley Fritz of the activist group Citizen Action.

The district attorneys' offices in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx already maintain a list or database of questionable cops, while the Staten Island DA's office is working to build such a system, according to Gothamist, which reported on their existence last month.

The lists can comprise a wide range of records, including lawsuits, "substantiated" allegations of misconduct, criminal records and judges' findings that cops were not credible, Gothamist reported.

Advocates and public defenders say they don't know just how many cops are on the list, indicating it's uncertain how widespread credibility issues are. While the Legal Aid Society has created its own database of police misconduct lawsuits and other information, the DAs likely know about misconduct that has not yet gotten into a lawsuit — information that prosecutors disclose at the "11th hour" if at all, said Elizabeth Felber of Legal Aid's Wrongful Conviction Unit.

"Oftentimes this is the fox guarding the henhouse," Felber said. "... They make excuses for these cops. They come up with all sorts of reasons why it’s really not misconduct."

Cops' lies on the stand can have dire consequences for New Yorkers. The notorious former detective Louis Scarcella allegedly framed eight people for murder. And just last month, Manhattan prosecutors accused NYPD narcotics Det. Joseph Franco of giving false testimony that got three people wrongly arrested and sent two of them to prison.

Advocates say they only want basic information about cops accused of misconduct, such as their names and badge numbers. Instead of protecting the cops, they argue, prosecutors should disclose who they are in the interest of justice.

"They're there to make sure the scales of justice are balanced," said Jon McFarlane, an activist with VOCAL New York. "They shouldn't be there to take one side or the other. They should be there to seek justice."

Only two of the five DA's offices responded to emails from Patch asking whether they would disclose their lists of cops with credibility issues.

A spokeswoman for Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. did not answer that question directly, but pointed to a December 2018 letter Vance sent to state and city lawmakers about the issue. His office has sought to track times when judges find cops' testimony to be not credible and worked to get "better access to police disciplinary information," he wrote.

"It is wrong to think - as some have recently claimed - that our office maintains a secret 'list of lying police officers,'" Vance said in the letter. "The information we gather about police officer conduct covers a number of topics, and does not lend itself to such simplistic treatment."

In a statement, a top attorney under Queens DA Richard Brown said the office keeps a "database" of information which "may or may not be deemed to bear upon a police officer's credibility."

But the office won't release the information because it's protected by a state civil rights law, protective court orders and decisions leading to dismissed cases, said Executive Assistant District Attorney Robert J. Masters.

"While different versions of a tracking system have been utilized for many years, the current database was developed in March of 2018," Masters said in the statement. "This information is centrally maintained and is provided to assistants to meet all disclosure requirements."