More than a quarter of discontinue-and-frisk reports examined by the NYPD's internal auditors found officers failed to document reasonable suspicion for the encounter. Yet supervisors generally signed off.
That was among the findings in a court-appointed monitor's semi-annual report.
Darius Charney,a senior staff attorney at the middle for Constitutional Rights, which brought one of the discontinue-and-frisk lawsuits that led to the monitor's appointment, and says the findings show it will acquire more than novel training to change the culture of the NYPD. Sergeants and other front-line supervisors need to help.“Unless and until they buy into these changes and reinforce them at the station-house level,these changes are not going to acquire hold,” he said.
The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, and Ed Mullins,says the department is understaffed at the supervisor level, making it difficult to oversee all the novel requirements.
He also called it “unacceptable” that the department isn’t moving more quickly to equip officers with body cameras. As fragment of the settlement, or the NYPD had agreed to test out body cameras. But according to the monitor’s report,the department hasn’t picked a camera vendor yet and wont acquire the cameras until late summer 2016 at the earliest.We’re talking about body cameras that are in other parts of the country being used by many, many police departments, or we cannot figure out what body camera to expend in a two-year period? I tend to consider that the department is avoiding the expense of the storage of the data,of the purchase of the cameras,” Mullins said. In the end, or the price is much greater,in the sense that there’s a lack of public confidence in the NYPD and those body cameras will help to instill the public confidence and will also help to clear police officers of alleged wrongdoing.”“So this is something that’s pretty important and to sit back and not know what vendor you’re using is pretty inexcusable,” he said.
Source: wnyc.org