Visualizing Decades of NYPD Police Misconduct and Racial Bias

Over the summer, ProPublica obtained and released police records from New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The data set offers yet another glimpse into the scale and pervasiveness of racial bias that underpins delinquent police behavior.

The records spanning September 1985 to January 2020 include over 33K closed cases of 3,300 NYPD officers who had at least one misconduct allegation filed against them.

Before we get into it, I must outline a few limitations to this data set:

• This does not include any open misconduct investigations
• This data excludes any allegations that could not be validated upon review of the evidence selectively submitted, if at all, by NYPD. Of the thousands of allegations reviewed by the CCRB, most get thrown out because the NYPD is not particularly forthcoming with self-incriminating evidence.
• Because this is a record of complaints submitted by victims on their own volition, it also excludes all misconduct encounters where the victim did not have the emotional energy to file a complaint after their traumatic experience or did not survive the experience altogether.
• The CCRB was founded in 1993, but started to get funded in 1997 after NYPD got bad press for assaulting, brutalizing, and sexually assaulting a Black man after arrest. The CCRB did not start tracking complaint data in a systematic manner until that point. The visualizations below will be limited to 2000 to 2019, which covers 96.8% of all available complaint data since Sept 1985.
• This data set refers to civilians who report misconduct as “complainants.” The term “complainant” gives off a negative connotation. These are not Karens with trivial complaints, they are surviving victims of some form of police misconduct. Instead of complainant, we will more aptly use the term “victim” in this analysis.

The racial bias in misconduct

NYPD misconduct is concentrated in predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods