The New York Police Department has failed at every level to punish officers who engage in illegal stop and frisks, said a retired New York judge in a disciplinary report released Monday. Former Justice James Yates found in the 503-page report filed in Manhattan federal court that NYPD displayed a willful disregard to punishing officers engaging in stop-and-frisk related misconduct, Courthouse News reports. In particular, Yates says various police commissioners “have demonstrated an inordinate willingness to excuse illegal stops, frisks and searches in the name of ‘good faith’ or ‘lack of mal-intention.’” The report focuses on the years since a 2013 federal court ruling that found stop and frisks constitutionally violated the rights of communities of color. Yates emphasizes that the department’s systematic failure to punish officers for stop-and-frisk misconduct has persisted under the leadership of multiple police commissioners. Since the ruling, there have been six commissioners. According to Yates, police commissioners regularly reduced or dismissed penalties for officers whose misconduct had been substantiated by review boards.
While commissioners are required to submit their reasoning behind a dismissal of an officer’s misconduct, the need for justification is not heavily enforced and is often chalked up to “good faith” or “good intent” on the part of the police officers. Yates argues that officers should not be able to evade disciplinary action simply because they had good intentions. He says the Supreme Court "has never engrafted the doctrine of good faith mistakes of law onto departmental disciplinary proceedings ... That line of thinking would erase years of careful demarcation of the boundaries of lawful search and seizure," Yates said. In times when police commissioners acknowledge the need to discipline substantiated misconduct, Yates says, they have often delegated the cases to precinct commanders. “In those cases, imposition of penalty days at the precinct is even more rare,” Yates says.
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