NYPD Restores Thousands of Missing Records From Officer Discipline Database — ProPublica

The New York Police Department restored more than 2,000 previously missing disciplinary records from its public database of uniformed officers last month, weeks after a ProPublica report revealed data reliability issues that plagued the site for nearly two years.

The department also overhauled the site, including removing case numbers, which will make it harder for the public to identify or track missing cases. When the revamped site went live two weeks ago, the case counts dropped again.

The system, known as the Officer Profile Database, was launched in 2021 after the New York state legislature repealed a law that for decades had excluded officers’ disciplinary records from public disclosure. But a ProPublica analysis of more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database found that for nearly two years, officers’ disciplinary records frequently disappeared from the NYPD’s website for days, sometimes weeks, obscuring the misconduct histories of officers of all ranks, including its highest-ranking uniformed officer. At that time, about half of the records that had been in the system at any given time were missing.

Since late April, the number of cases in the database has steadily increased, suggesting that the department may have fixed the glitch that had previously caused cases to disappear from the system. An updated analysis shows that the restoration of cases began around May 5, more than a week after ProPublica reached out to the department for comment and four days before the news organization published its initial story.

Police officials did not respond to ProPublica’s repeated requests to confirm why cases were removed or reinstated. But the recent streak of flat or rising case numbers appears to be the longest in more than a year. That streak ended with the site’s June 18 update; since then, the number of cases has again fallen by about 200 from its all-time high.

Representatives for RockDaisy, the software company that developed the original system, also did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Last month’s software update appears to have removed all references to the company from the site’s source code, and the company’s involvement in the latest version of the site is unclear.

Lupe Aguirre, senior attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she remains concerned that the database is so inconsistent and, more broadly, that the department's website discloses only a subset of all misconduct and discipline cases.

“The fluctuation in data remains concerning and reflects a continuing trend toward secrecy in how the department handles disciplinary matters,” Aguirre wrote in an email. “New Yorkers deserve full transparency about the NYPD’s internal accountability systems, especially given the department’s culture of impunity.”

Because the department’s database is designed to track only disciplinary actions against active officers, some cases involving former officers may have been removed from the data over time. Yet that would have accounted for only a fraction of the missing cases. For most of the past year, at least a third of the cases previously in the database were missing.

The cases involved officers at all levels, including Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the police department's highest-ranking uniformed officer, and at least six deputy chiefs with high-profile assignments whose violations ranged from rude behavior to drinking while on duty to unjustified searches, pat-downs and use of force.

Police reform advocates, including Aguirre, have previously argued that the database problems uncovered by ProPublica underscore the need for agencies to release data through the city’s open data program, as required by a 2012 law. A recent timeline of upcoming releases shows that data on NYPD officer profiles was supposed to be added by the end of 2023, but that has yet to happen.

The NYPD’s website and its broader disciplinary process have come under scrutiny in recent days. City & State reported Friday that an administrative page on the site did not require authentication, potentially allowing malicious actors to tamper with records in the database. And the same day, a ProPublica investigation, co-published with The New York Times, revealed how top police brass secretly buried dozens of disciplinary cases involving NYPD officers. Their actions ensured that those cases would never appear in the online database.