Uptown Active NYPD Officers Have Over 50 Confirmed Misconducts: Data

UPPER MANHATTAN, NY — Officers within Washington Heights and Inwood's four police precincts have a collection of 52 substantiated complaints again them, a new database compiled and released by Legal Aid Society on Monday shows.

The advocacy and legal organization call its new "Law Enforcement Lookup" database the most comprehensive collection of city police misconduct files released to date.

The database allows you to look at complaints made against NYPD officers by precinct, including those in Upper Manhattan.

Washington Heights and Inwood are policed by two precincts: the 33rd Precinct, which oversees Washington Heights south of West 179th Street, and the 34th Precinct, which patrols the neighborhood north of West 179th Street, including Inwood.

When looking at the active members of those four units (a Detective Unit for each Precinct also included), current officers have wracked up 52 substantiated Civil Complaints made against them, which include issues surrounding threats of arrest, frisks, and physical force, according to the Legal Aid database.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board, which oversees all submitted complaints against NYPD members, defines "substantiated" as the following: "The alleged conduct occurred and it violated the rules."

The number of 52 substantiated complaints compares to 1,156 total complaints made against active officers in Upper Manhattan since 2000.

You can look through the full list of substantiated complaints against active members of Upper Manhattan's police force — HERE.

The complaint dates in the current database are collected between November 1994 and August 2015.

Pat Lynch, the president of the powerful Police Benevolent Association union, blasted the database as nothing new, given most of it has already been publicly available.

“This isn’t really about ‘transparency’ – it’s about advancing the anti-police narrative and making it easier for cop-haters to target individual police officers,” he said in a statement. “It’s yet another reason that New York City police officers are quitting at record rates.”

Here is what else the new database includes.

• more than 18,000 lawsuits filed against more than 14,000 NYPD officers between 2013 and June 30, 2022;
• more than 190,000 Civilian Complaint Review Board records of allegations made against NYPD officers, including more than 1,000 full investigation closing reports obtained through FOIL requests and from partner organizations;
• about 9,000 NYPD internal misconduct records, including NYPD trial decisions and NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau records;
• nearly 15,000 District Attorney and judicial records, including Brady and Giglio disclosures from prosecutors, and DA “adverse credibility” records from four New York City counties;
• NYPD and DOC payroll and roster data for all currently employed members of service;
• more than 1,000 archived media articles concerning NYPD officer misconduct; and
• hundreds of DOC staff discipline records.

Police officials, with strong union backing, fought to keep officers’ disciplinary files hidden from the public by using 50-a, a transparency law to deny requests for access.

But the murder of George Floyd and the protests against police violence poured fuel on the fire for transparency.

Lawmakers repealed 50-a repeal in 2020 — which was upheld by a judge in 2021, prompting Mayor Bill de Blasio to declare “good riddance” — and opened up NYPD disciplinary records to the public for the first time.

You can check out complaints made against members of the 33rd and 34th Precincts on the database's website.

Patch reporter Matt Troutman contributed to this report.