The office wasn’t able to fill the positions fast enough to keep up with the exits, and today, with a head count of 20 staffers, is almost half of the size it was at its peak in 2017, when it had 38. Some employees became disenchanted with their inability to dig into issues others found better paying jobs and left after less than a year. This is, in large part, due to diminished staffing, an attrition connected to the challenges of obtaining timely and complete records from NYPD, according to current and former Inspector General’s office staffers. Since the beginning of 2019, it has only generated two investigative reports. There was a time, in its first few years of existence, when the Inspector General’s office could pump out four robust investigative reports in a year. The Inspector General hopes to publish some of the reports this year. Two records requests from 2019 remain unfulfilled. Investigations that were opened in 20 remain open to this day, largely due to NYPD’s failure to provide documents in a timely fashion, according to multiple sources. You heavily redact and then there has to be three rounds of negotiations about what’s under the redactions.”
#INSIDE THE OFFICE OF THE NYPD POLICE COMMISSIONER HOW TO#
“When the police department wants to slow-walk things, when they want to find problems,” she continued, “every lawyer knows how to do these things. “There’s a reason people call 1 Police Plaza the puzzle palace,” Garnett said. Still, they said, the police department has interpreted the IG to have more limited legal authority than they believe it does, which has led to lengthy disputes. Eure and his boss, Margaret Garnett, commissioner of the Department of Investigation, said there has been some improvement in recent years, namely the tenor and tone of how the IG and NYPD communicate.
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The Office of the Inspector General is a branch of the city’s Department of Investigation, which looks into corruption complaints against city employees and reports to the mayor and City Council. “It’s had a tremendously negative impact on our work and has slowed production,” he said. There will be disagreements from time to time on process and there are systems in place to resolve those.”īut the Inspector General, Phil Eure, says problems persist. “To the contrary, we value their important work and embrace our continuing cooperation in the mission of further reimagining and reforming policing for our great city.
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Jessica McRorie, an NYPD spokesperson, in a statement.
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“It is categorically untrue that NYPD impedes the OIG’s efforts or does not accept its oversight role,” said Sgt. While the NYPD didn’t comment on Osgood’s allegations, a spokesperson attributed the disagreements three years ago to the fact that the Office of the Inspector General was still relatively new and said that the department has since worked out protocols to cooperate with it. More than a dozen former and current employees of both the office and the NYPD told ProPublica that for years, the police department has restricted the Inspector General’s access to records and witnesses, withholding information the office was legally entitled to, excessively redacting material or providing it in formats difficult to review, instructing witnesses to cancel interviews and delaying requests for as long as two years. Osgood isn’t the only person to say that the NYPD has delayed and impeded the investigative efforts of the Inspector General. Dermot Shea, then the department’s chief of detectives, said at the time that moving Osgood was not a punishment. In response, the NYPD nearly doubled its number of investigators for adult sex crimes, raised their experience requirements and took steps to improve the division’s facilities.īut, in a move some saw as retaliation for his cooperation, the NYPD transferred Osgood from his position as commander of special victims investigations for all of New York City to the head of patrol for Staten Island, a lesser post. In March 2018, the Inspector General released a scathing report on problems inside the Special Victims Division, relying substantially on Osgood’s cooperation. “My career was threatened and I incurred acts of intimidation, retaliation and vilification.” He said that he witnessed and fought off “prolonged and protracted criminal obstruction by NYPD senior executives.” “The NYPD withheld documents from the IG, delayed handing pending documents over to the IG, lied to the IG, restricted the IG’s access to information, had NYPD attorneys present in IG interviews to chill testimony,” Osgood told ProPublica in a statement.