Cop Out: Analyzing 20 Years of Records Proving Impunity

In the summer of 2020, the New York Civil Liberties Union obtained a comprehensive database of complaints made by the public to the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the independent agency charged with investigating complaints about NYPD misconduct. Then in May of 2021, the NYCLU added updated and more detailed information to the database, which now includes 180,700 unique misconduct complaints since 2000 involving 59,244 separate incidents and 35,435 active or former NYPD officers.

The analysis of the database in this report focuses on the time period beginning in 2000 – when the CCRB started recording several key pieces of information, including the race of the injured party identified in the complaints.