Council Okays Bill for Data On All Police Shootings

PATRICK J. LYNCH: A solution for a non-problem.

The City Council Jan. 7 passed a bill that would require greater oversight of the NYPD through detailed, written records of every time a police officer fires a gun, despite protests from the department and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association that it would divert resources at a time when there are 5,000 fewer officers on the force than a decade ago.

The bill moved out of the Public Safety Committee on Jan. 6, and was approved unanimously by the full Council the next day. It requires the NYPD to submit an annual report to the Council detailing the circumstances surrounding incidents where officers fire their weapons, a precinctby precinct and borough-by-borough breakdown of incidents, the reason for the firearm discharge and the race, gender and age of any individual engaged in the incident.

'Most-Restrained in Nation'

PBA President Patrick J. Lynch said the law was a waste of resources. "The NYPD is the country's most-restrained police department in the use of deadly physical force," he said in a statement last week. "Requiring a report for every firearms discharge is unjustified and will not benefit anyone but the paper suppliers. It's a solution in search of a problem."

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow FILLING IN A VITAL GAP: With City Council Speaker Christine Quinn looking on, Council Public Safety Committee Chairman Peter F. Vallone Jr. explains the need for a bill requiring police to provide racial data on all shootings, noting that this has been unavailable even though the NYPD provided details on the breeds of dogs its officers shot.

NYPD Deputy Chief John P. Gerrish, who testified at a May 5, 2008 hearing on the bill, said, "We respond to requests for information from the Council both at an executive level and at the local precinct level, on a routine basis. However, every piece of information which is requested and every data item which is collected, not for law-enforcement purposes but for the purpose of responding to an external request, represents a cost. Therefore, at a time when we are asked to fulfill our public safety and counterterrorism responsibilities with 5,000 fewer police officers, we must look carefully at the purpose to be served by enacting into law a new set of mandates requiring the expenditure of police resources."

Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn responded by saying that the amount of extra work required by the Police Department to provide records it is already keeping is minimal. "If you're talking about a range of 100 to 200 shootings, and you're already keeping internal documentation what we're adding to that is the race of the person who was shot, the age, the gender. That's not really a lot of additional work, if you think about it," she said at a Jan. 7 City Hall press conference. "That is at best a minimal amount of work that could lead to much heightened oversight."

The New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit in August to force the NYPD to reveal the race of suspects shot by police, supported the legislation. "This new reporting requirement will shed much-needed light on the NYPD's shooting practices, which should build trust between the police and community," said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. "The role of race in police shootings is a source of serious concern— and outrage—for many New Yorkers. It's a shame the Police Department didn't recognize that. Hiding this information didn't address this concern—it just deepened distrust of the NYPD."

A Surprising Lack of Data

On the heels of the Council's successful push for "stop-and-frisk" data, crime in parks data and others, the Public Safety Committee, chaired by Peter F. Vallone Jr., sought to learn more detailed information about each time a police officer pulls the trigger, or at least as much as is available about the shooting of animals. Mr. Vallone said at the press conference that he first learned of the problem after he researched data on Pit Bull shootings and found there was more information about them than policeinvolved shootings of people.

"You could get the breed of the dog shot, but you couldn't get the race of a person shot," he said in the City Council Chambers after the bill was voted out of committee.

Mr. Vallone noted the last time the Council requested this data, it received 10 years of police shooting data on the day of the scheduled hearing on the topic. Mr. Vallone, though, was quick to say that there was not a particular incident that had raised his concern on the need for more data. He said it was "remarkable" there were just 80 police-involved shootings in 2007 in a city of 8.5 million people.

May Post on Web Site

Speaker Quinn said the Council plans to put the data on its Web site, if it can resolve a possible problem with formatting the data. She also hoped that beyond any Council oversight, the NYPD would take an internal look at any data it was forced to create.

Mr. Gerrish testified before the Council last May that the NYPD would not learn anything from the data because there was nothing to learn. "No meaningful conclusions may be drawn from such information, since every firearms discharge must be judged in light of the unique circumstances in which it occurs, and any conclusion drawn from the purely demographic data involved is fatally flawed," he stated. "Evaluating the circumstances of a shooting and determining whether it is within the law and Police Department guidelines is the job of the executive staff of the Police Department, and potentially the District Attorney."