How We Tracked Down Thousands of Police Misconduct Files

U.S.|How We Tracked Down Thousands of Police Misconduct Files

I’ve spent the past two and a half years requesting and reviewing more than 10,000 misconduct files from New York State’s roughly 500 police agencies.

The work has been as tedious as it probably sounds. But it has also contributed to a new era of transparency around policing. These files, many of which had never been reviewed, reveal the systems through which police departments have addressed negligence and misconduct committed by their own.

My work started in 2023, when I filed a request with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office for its “Brady files,” or records about police officers’ potential credibility issues. I assumed I would receive a few files about a handful of officers with known disciplinary histories.

Instead, the office sent me more than 1,600 pages of files pertaining to misconduct by hundreds of officers in the county and the surrounding area.

The ability to get most of these records is relatively new. Starting in 1976, New York State, by law, kept most police personnel records secret. But when the law was repealed in 2020, many departments began making their records available. Others resisted the change, demanding large payments to do the work of pulling the files, providing lengthy timelines or ignoring requests altogether.

In the immediate aftermath of the law’s repeal, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester filed records requests with every police department in the state. The news organization received huge troves of records, but it also received a number of denials from police departments, a few of which it took to court. From the files it obtained, the organization published an investigation, “Driving Force,” that documented the toll of hundreds of car crashes by on-duty police officers around the state.