Police Discipline Comes Before the Court of Appeals

Update 10/24: Shortly before oral argument, the city of Syracuse reached an agreement with its police and fire unions and withdrew its appeal. The Court of Appeals heard the Rochester and New York City cases as scheduled.

Donovan Richards was 13 years old when, he said, New York Police Department officers drew their guns on him and his cousin, subjected them to an illegal search, and told the two Black boys they looked like armed robbers. In 2006, NYPD officers gunned down Richards’s neighbor, Sean Bell. Richards says he emceed Bell’s funeral and later threw a birthday party for his newly fatherless daughter.

“Those are things that always stuck with me,” Richards, now the Queens borough president, told New York Focus. In 2020, as racial justice protests swept the nation, Richards — then the chair of the New York City Council’s public safety committee — spearheaded a sweeping package of police reform bills, including chokehold and diaphragm-compression bans aimed at eliminating the restraint techniques that killed George Floyd and Eric Garner.

Next week, those bans will go before the state’s highest court, along with two other cases related to police discipline and civilian oversight of law enforcement agencies. Over two days, the Court of Appeals will hear not only from New York City and its police unions, but also Syracuse, Rochester, and their respective police unions. Together, the cases could significantly reshape police discipline — dictating what kind of police misconduct laws municipalities can enact, how municipalities can discipline abusive officers, and who can do the disciplining.

“New York is behind,” said Josh Parker, senior counsel at the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, which partners with communities to promote police accountability. The state lags even conservative jurisdictions like Florida and Texas in providing basic civilian protections, he said, such as a robust statewide police discipline and decertification system. “An officer could punch someone in the face … and not required to be reported unless the person is hospitalized and suffers serious injury.”

Reformers have fared a little better at the municipal level, though progress has been slow. A majority of New York City legislators supported a chokehold ban following Garner’s death in 2014, but then-Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated he would veto the bill if it reached his desk, and the council never brought it to a vote.

In 2020, spurred by Floyd’s murder, the council revived the chokehold ban. This time, they included an additional provision prohibiting all restraints compressing the windpipe, diaphragm, or carotid arteries on each side of the neck. After making amendments to address concerns raised by the NYPD, city legislators passed the bill by a vote of 47–3, and De Blasio signed it into law.

The city’s police unions filed a lawsuit challenging the bans, arguing that its language was too vague for officers to understand. Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, agreed that the bill was “ridiculously broad.”

The New York City dispute is just one of three police oversight cases on the Court of Appeals’ October docket. First, the court will hear separate disputes between the cities of Syracuse and Rochester and their respective police unions.

The court will start with Syracuse. Elected in 2017, Mayor Ben Walsh talked a big game about reforming the city’s police department, which had lost a string of brutality lawsuits. Walsh and his appointees began rooting out abusive officers over stiff opposition from union leadership.

Between 2018 and 2019, the city suspended four police officers — Joseph Moran, Mark Shea, Patrick Moore, and David Craw — for various conduct infractions. The police union challenged the suspensions. Under the union’s collective bargaining agreement, disputes over officer discipline required third party arbitration. Walsh found the arbitration process too secretive and wanted to conduct public disciplinary hearings, overseen by mayoral appointees.

The city filed a state court motion to stay arbitration, beginning a half-decade of litigation. A parallel case between Syracuse and its firefighters union quickly followed. The city claims, and the unions deny, that state law prohibits the collective bargaining of police and firefighter discipline.

After Syracuse, the court will turn to Rochester to settle that city’s dispute over the disciplinary authority of its Police Accountability Board. Like Syracuse, Rochester has a long history of abusive policing. In 2019, the city held a public referendum on whether to establish an all-civilian PAB — charged, among other responsibilities, with holding public hearings and disciplining offending officers.

“The voters overwhelmingly voted … to have a police accountability board, so there could be greater transparency and more importantly, greater accountability,” Sherry Walker-Cowart, the board’s interim executive director, told New York Focus. “When people call police officers to their neighborhoods, they want to feel safe.”

While over 75 percent of Rochester voters approved the board’s creation, the city’s police union did not.