Rochester Police Accountability Board Loses Investigatory Powers

Rochester’s police union promptly filed a lawsuit in state court, arguing that the board doesn’t have the power to investigate complaints of officer misconduct, let alone publish its findings. Last month, Justice Joseph Waldorf of the Monroe County Supreme Court sided with the union.

“We’re very disappointed in the court ruling,” said Wanda Wilson, who helps lead the PAB Alliance, a coalition of community organizations supporting the board. She called the police union’s lawsuit “a tactic to make the PAB toothless.”

For years, Rochester police and city officials have attempted to conceal information about police violence and misconduct, including in the case of Prude’s death. City residents voted to create the PAB to improve police transparency and accountability. But political winds have shifted in the half-decade since the Rochester board’s formation, the police killings of Prude and George Floyd, and the nationwide push for change that followed. The PAB’s defeat signals that reformers still have a ways to go. Despite mounting public criticism, the RPD itself has done little to rein in and discipline abusive officers since then, advocates say.

“We’re not in a good place,” said Wilson. “This court ruling takes the city backwards.”

Captain Gregory Bello, the RPD’s public information officer, told New York Focus that the PAB’s reports “violated all kinds of law and policy” but declined to comment further. The city’s police union also declined to comment. The City of Rochester did not respond to New York Focus’s requests for comment.

The police union later argued that was off limits, too. On November 1, the police union filed another lawsuit against the city, contending that the PAB does not have the authority to issue public reports on specific incidents of misconduct.

Rochester’s lawyers argued the union’s new lawsuit was “a transparent attempt to gain a second bite at the apple.”

The chief disagreement centered on how to interpret the court’s decision in the 2023 case, which ruled that the board couldn’t discipline officers but did not specify exactly what it could still do.

The union argued that the Court of Appeals had prohibited the PAB from any activities related to officer discipline — including investigating allegations of misconduct, issuing investigatory reports, and recommending disciplinary measures.

On April 28, Waldorf, the state court judge, agreed. The PAB could no longer investigate allegations of police misconduct nor publish investigatory reports.

“The PAB has essentially been stifled from doing their job,” said Jalil Muntaqim, a Rochester-based activist with Citizen Action of New York, a grassroots social justice organization that supported the PAB’s creation. “The courts are protecting the police and their abuse.”

At the time of the decision, the PAB had issued 43 investigative reports. In response to the ruling, the board removed the reports from its website (some were preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine).

Rochester’s lawyers are appealing Waldorf’s decision.

If they wanted to, state lawmakers could intervene and perhaps end the PAB’s legal battles once and for all. Chief Judge Rowan Wilson, who dissented in the Court of Appeals’s 2023 decision, suggested that the state legislature could pass a bill overturning the decision. “If Rochester’s desire to establish an independent disciplinary commission is in fact consistent with state policy, the legislature may easily correct our error,” he wrote.

One such bill, sponsored by Assemblymember William Magnarelli, was introduced in 2021 but never made it out of committee. Diana Abdella, Magnarelli’s chief of staff, told New York Focus in an email that “there are no plans to reintroduce” it.

In another, the board found that two police captains and one investigator engaged in illegal political activity on behalf of Republican politician and former RPD chief La’Ron Singletary during his 2022 congressional campaign. Singletary had resigned from the department two years earlier following accusations that he covered up the circumstances of Daniel Prude’s death.

The reports show that even seemingly minor incidents of police misconduct can have serious “snowballing” effects, Aweis said. She pointed to a report that describes the consequences of the RPD’s failure to document the recovery of a reportedly stolen vehicle. The report says that Maryland State Troopers later pulled the car over and, believing it stolen, allegedly handcuffed the driver at gunpoint, traumatizing children inside the car. An RPD officer later falsified a report to try and cover up the mistake.

Advocates commended the board for bringing police misconduct into the public eye. According to Police Scorecard, a national database evaluating police violence, bias, and accountability, the RPD’s internal investigators only found wrongdoing in 7 percent of the 417 civilian complaints the department received between 2016 and 2021.

The PAB’s reports prove “the community is not delusional” when it raises concerns about police abuse, Muntaqim said. But he doubts the RPD will actually discipline officers based on the board’s findings.

After years of setbacks and black eyes, PAB leadership hailed the reports as a meaningful step forward. Lesli Myers-Small, the board’s executive director, told New York Focus that informing the Rochester community about RPD misconduct is a crucial first step to reforming the department. “Knowledge is absolutely power,” she said.

But for now, the PAB’s power to investigate and report misconduct is gone.

City Councilmember Stanley Martin suggested to New York Focus that Evans — who supported the PAB’s creation during his time on the council — has prioritized protecting the city from lawsuits over police accountability. Police officer violence has been expensive for the city. In December, Rochester settled a $1.75 million lawsuit arising from the police response to the protests following Prude’s death. According to the PAB, the police department has paid $25 million in claims since 2012. The PAB’s reports could bolster future legal claims against the city.

Rochester’s corporation counsel Patrick Beath — an Evans appointee and the administration’s top lawyer — began pressuring the board to hold its reports in January 2024, according to Vanessa Cheeks, the PAB’s spokesperson at the time. She said Beath suggested the PAB could face an ethics inquiry if they did not comply.

The pressure continued into the fall, records show. Just before the PAB issued its first reports, Beath sent a letter to Myers-Small, the board’s executive director, with a similar warning. In the letter, obtained by New York Focus through a public records request, Beath said that Rochester’s charter permits the board to publish only data and statistical reports — the same argument the police union would soon use in its lawsuit (due to a conflict of interest, a hired law firm, not Beath, is representing Rochester in that case). He also said publishing the reports would violate a city code of ethics provision prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of nonpublic information.

The PAB went ahead and published its reports anyway, prompting the city to issue a statement condemning the action and file a complaint with Rochester’s Office of Public Integrity. The city said that the release of misconduct allegations — whether or not they’ve been sustained by the board — “is dangerous” and could have “lasting impacts” on officers’ “personal and professional lives.” Paul Dondorfer, the police union’s executive vice president, told reporters at the time that the reports could place police officers, their neighbors, and children in physical danger.

Cameron McEllhiney, executive director of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement, an organization that studies police accountability boards nationwide, told New York Focus that she’s not aware of any attacks on police officers or others resulting from independent misconduct reports. “That just really has not been something that we have seen.” Brianna Milon, a PAB spokesperson, told New York Focus there has been no violent backlash against RPD officers in the eight months since the board issued its first reports.

The PAB continued issuing reports. Meanwhile, another court ruling undercut the city’s claims. The Court of Appeals ruled this February in a separate case between Rochester and the New York Civil Liberties Union that even unsubstantiated police misconduct records are public.

After that ruling, the PAB voted to begin releasing unredacted reports moving forward, including officer names. But the victory was short-lived. Two months later, Waldorf stripped the board of its authority to investigate and report incidents of officer misconduct.

Now, the PAB once again faces an uncertain future.

City Councilmember Mary Lupien told New York Focus that the city council is focused on appealing Waldorf’s decision and restoring the PAB’s investigatory powers. If the appeal fails, she said the council will explore other options.

“I’m unsure, at least at the city level, if anything will change unless the people in the positions of power change,” said Lupien. To that end, Lupien is challenging Evans in Rochester’s 2025 mayoral election. But she noted that reform-minded local lawmakers now need to contend with a national political climate that has shifted hard against police accountability since city residents first voted to create the PAB.

The same day Waldorf handed down his decision, the Trump administration released an executive order aimed at further shielding police from accountability. Among other measures, the order directed the Attorney General to provide legal resources to law enforcement officers, possibly including pro bono assistance from the elite private firms that have cut deals with the Trump administration. Trump’s order also threatened local officials who “willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law.”

Police reformers have faced backlash at the state level, too, where Governor Kathy Hochul has prioritized cracking down on gun violence and retail theft over police accountability. According to the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit think tank, New York enacted less than 3 percent of police reform legislation proposed between 2020 and 2024 (compared to 38 percent in California and 68 percent in Utah).