Criminal Justice New York State

Can Police Departments Be Trusted to Release Their Own Misconduct Records? Apparently Not.

The police chief in Orange County’s Village of Chester claimed his department had no misconduct records. He was hiding an investigation into his own alleged malfeasance.

Sammy Sussman · October 30, 2024

“There are no records,” Village of Chester Police Chief Timothy McGuire wrote. | Photo: Sammy Sussman / Illustration: Chris Gelardi

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This story was co-published with MuckRock and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

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This story was co-published with MuckRock and supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

In January 2023, the mayor of the Village of Chester, in Orange County, received an anonymous letter from a village police officer about the police chief.

The letter said that, starting in 2020, Chief Timothy McGuire, then a sergeant in the department, repeatedly met a woman he was in a sexual relationship with at the police station. McGuire would brag about his affair, the letter alleged — and he would recruit his police underlings to help him hide it. When the woman was at the station, McGuire would instruct the officers to leave; he would tell them when they could return.

McGuire also met the woman at remote locations throughout Chester after telling officers not to patrol in those areas, the letter stated. At least once, McGuire allegedly met the woman in his police vehicle.

The officer described McGuire’s behavior as “immoral, unethical, and illegal.” The mayor acted quickly, tapping a village lawyer to launch a formal investigation.

But 10 months later, after the lawyer drafted his initial investigation report, the Village of Chester Police Department claimed that it didn’t exist.

In November 2023, New York Focus and MuckRock filed a public records request with the village for all disciplinary records and misconduct complaints against police department staff, as well as misconduct records shared with prosecutors since 2018. McGuire personally responded to the request. “There are no records,” he wrote in an email.

Recent years have seen a significant push for police accountability and transparency in New York state. In 2020, the legislature repealed Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law, which had shielded police misconduct records from the public. For the first time in decades, reporters, researchers, and members of the public had broad access to these records under the state’s records laws — at least in theory.

Even with the repeal, watchdogs still depend on police departments to keep accurate records and respond to their requests honestly. An investigation by New York Focus and MuckRock illustrates the limits of that system. McGuire claimed that the Village of Chester Police Department had no misconduct records at all — but a similar request to the county district attorney’s office yielded 18 pages about allegations against McGuire himself. They point to a bare bones investigation that quickly exonerated the chief and led to the resignation of the anonymous letter writer.

Further prodding lodged free even more records. Among them were nearly 40 pages of misconduct investigations and disciplinary proceedings against the officer who wrote the anonymous letter.

McGuire, who remains police chief, and the village mayor, Christopher Battiato, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“There are no records.”

—Village of Chester Police Chief Timothy McGuire

The lack of transparency likely extends far beyond Chester. Of 228 municipal and county law enforcement agencies that responded to requests from New York Focus and MuckRock, 72 — almost a third — claimed that they had no records of recent misconduct investigations or complaints.

These departments vary in size, but skew small, from employing a few part-time officers to over 30 cops and civilian employees. Some had simply lost records. The Spencer Police Department, in the Southern Tier, claimed to have no disciplinary records, though it noted that “there was a case against a former Chief of Police, Carl Alve, back in the late 80s to early 90s” that resulted in criminal charges. “Due to the remoteness in time, we no longer have those records,” the department explained.

Other police departments, like the Village of Chester’s, claim to be free from documented misconduct in recent years.

The 72 departments who claimed to have no discipline records collectively employ over 1,100 cops. While research on the proportion of cops with documented misconduct is scant, one federally funded study from 2016 focused on the most severe misconduct, finding that nearly 1 percent of cops over the years the study examined faced criminal charges.

In New York, the public has few ways of ensuring that departments are telling the truth when they claim to have no misconduct records. One of the only ways to unearth improperly withheld documents is to file lawsuits, which can be costly and complicated.

In September, this reporter filed such a lawsuit against the Village of Chester. The village has not responded, and a tentative hearing has been set for November.

Unlike a few other states, New York doesn’t maintain a statewide police misconduct database, making a department’s claim that they have a perfect disciplinary history hard to verify.

The state does keep a list of “decertified” officers who have been fired or resigned for committing serious misconduct, but it relies on individual departments taking the step to investigate and fire officers, and departments are generally responsible for reporting officers to add to the list. No officer from the Village of Chester has ever been added.

The state also lacks mandatory standards for how police departments must handle misconduct investigations. Though New York facilitates a law enforcement agency accreditation program that contains limited disciplinary process requirements, accreditation is voluntary, and not every department participates. The Village of Chester department is not accredited.

The outline of New York state, inside a badge, with a cracked effect on top and a blue and red gradient background.

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Rather than expanding transparency after the repeal of 50-a, police departments and unions have lobbied the legislature and initiated lawsuits attempting to once again shield their members’ records from disclosure. In September, they succeeded in re-erecting a limited bureaucratic wall: A new law will force reporters and researchers seeking police misconduct records to wait for departments to notify each current or former officer before receiving their files.

Good government, civil liberties, and press freedom organizations have decried the revision as a further hurdle to mass disclosure of police misconduct records. They note that the new law makes large requests impractical and potentially adds weeks of response time to even narrow requests.

The state senator representing the Village of Chester, James Skoufis, was the law’s lead Senate sponsor. Skoufis said that the law would provide “new, fair standards” for records disclosure. “When a public employee has their personnel record requested under the Freedom of Information Law, they are now entitled to the decency of simple, straightforward notice,” Skoufis’s office wrote in a statement. The office described concerns over the law fueling records delays, which stem from “fundamental problems” with New York’s public records laws, as “deceitful.”

The Village of Chester police headquarters. | Sammy Sussman

In the absence of state and police department transparency, district attorneys’ offices can serve as countywide repositories of local police misconduct. The offices must disclose to defendants any evidence that could be used to argue for their innocence. As a result, federal courts and state law have bestowed upon them the difficult task of tracking, and then disclosing, allegations of misconduct against officers involved in cases that move to prosecution.

New York does not have a statewide policy for how county district attorneys should maintain the records; instead, each district attorney must reach an information-sharing agreement with each local law enforcement agency.

Some district attorneys’ offices have done the bare minimum, even decrying their obligation to disclose police misconduct. In a 2020 letter, the St. Lawrence County District Attorney’s Office described its obligation as uncovering “potential land mines” and “too often unfair” to the police department.

Other offices have embraced police misconduct disclosure and maintain internal databases of records on their local departments and State Police troop.

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office took the latter approach.

In 2023, the Orange County DA’s office obtained a draft report on the Village of Chester’s investigation into the allegations against McGuire and provided it to New York Focus in response to a public records request. If it hadn’t, McGuire’s claim that “there are no records” might have prevented his own alleged misconduct from ever becoming public.

In the draft report, the village’s lawyer summarized interviews with McGuire, the village cop who wrote the anonymous letter, and other police department employees.

In an initial interview, McGuire admitted to having an affair, but denied any wrongdoing while on duty. He offered various explanations for the woman’s presence in the police station — that she visited to discuss an accident and to deliver Christmas cookies and ornaments — and denied boasting about any sexual encounters to his colleagues. McGuire said that the relationship with the woman ended shortly after he was named chief.

The officer who wrote the anonymous letter doubled down on his allegations in his interview. He later provided the lawyer with text messages in which McGuire told him not to drive down a specific street. In one set of messages from August 2020, McGuire told the officer that he was visiting the woman at her home when her daughter was there.

“No way u can pull that off,” the officer texted.

“Hahahahahahahaha we’ll see!” McGuire responded.

The village’s lawyer, Brian Nugent — a former police officer whose son is an officer in the department — interviewed other police employees about the allegations. They knew about the relationship, but none could verify the allegations from the letter.

By that time, other officers had been circulating their own letter backing the chief amid the allegations, the department’s current second-ranking officer, Gene Iannuzzi, told New York Focus and MuckRock. It is unclear if the village lawyer’s son was one of them.

Nugent, who did not respond to requests for comment, concluded his investigation in 30 days. There’s no indication in the report that he searched McGuire’s cell phone or interviewed the woman with whom he admitted to having an affair.

“The Chief advised that he had not engaged in any improper conduct,” Nugent wrote at the end of the report.

McGuire remains the chief of the Chester Police Department.

Public records from this article and more information about this reporting project can be found at policefilesny.com.