This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.

An Orchard Park police officer found the man in the shoulder of a six-lane road, standing near his crumpled black BMW, arguing with his girlfriend.

It was 11 p.m. on a Saturday in 2021, in the suburbs of Buffalo. The BMW had slammed into a Jeep, smashing its left taillight. White high heels were toppled on their sides on the pavement, outside the BMW’s passenger door.

The man’s speech was slurred and his gait was unsteady, the officer, Andrew J. Kowalski, would later note in a report. His eyes were glassy, and he smelled strongly of alcohol.

The officer asked who had been driving. The couple looked at each other.

“We’re State Police,” the woman said. Her boyfriend, Ronald W. Wilson, was an off-duty investigator and had the identification to prove it.

Kowalski did not give Wilson a sobriety test. One of his supervisors called the State Police, per procedure, and a sergeant with the agency drove the couple home.

Days later, Wilson admitted in an affidavit that he had been behind the wheel. But he was not charged with driving while intoxicated — he received a traffic ticket for following behind another car too closely, court records show. When the State Police investigated him months later for violating department policy, he admitted to drinking six cocktails and a shot that night, according to disciplinary records. He was suspended without pay for 35 days. Wilson, 49, is still with the State Police.

In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020, New York State repealed a law that for decades kept the disciplinary records of its police officers secret.

New York Focus and The New York Times have since gathered over 10,000 such files from around half of New York State’s nearly 500 law enforcement agencies. The documents, most of which are from the past 10 years, provide a window into how some officers at the state, county and local levels have avoided accountability in court despite relatively clear evidence that they broke the law.

When Republicans dragged Democratic governors before Congress in June to testify about sanctuary policies, Governor Kathy Hochul was pressed on one case in particular: a central New York sheriff who had refused Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s request to hold a man in county jail past his release date.

The case had drawn national attention in January, when the Trump administration announced it was investigating Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne for allegedly obstructing ICE in its efforts to arrest the man.

A letter released this morning gives new ammunition to critics who allege New York state officials rigged the process for awarding an $11 billion home health care contract.

Last year, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration announced that it had chosen the company Public Partnerships, LLC (PPL) to take over New York’s state-funded home health care program, which serves hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled New Yorkers. The move followed a last-minute addition to the state budget that required the state to select one company to run the program, replacing the hundreds of independent companies that had been administering it for years.