New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases.
New York City’s Police Commissioner Edward Caban has repeatedly used a little-known authority called “retention” to prevent officers accused of misconduct from facing public disciplinary trials. Victims are never told their cases have been buried.
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Criminal Justice
New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases.
by Eric UmanskyJune 27, 5 a.m. EDTNew York City’s Police Commissioner Edward Caban has repeatedly used a little-known authority called “retention” to prevent officers accused of misconduct from facing public disciplinary trials. Victims are never told their cases have been buried.
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Appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, bottom center, Police Commissioner Edward Caban, center, has used the powers of his office to bury police misconduct cases. Credit:Photo illustration by Andrea Wise/ProPublica. Source photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.
New York City’s Police Commissioner Edward Caban has repeatedly used a little-known authority called “retention” to prevent officers accused of misconduct from facing public disciplinary trials. Victims are never told their cases have been buried.
Co-published with The New York TimesProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.
Brianna Villafane was in Lower Manhattan protesting police violence in the summer of 2020, when officers charged into the crowd. One of them gripped her hair and yanked her to the ground.
“I felt someone on top of me and it was hard to breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was being crushed.”
The New York City civilian oversight agency that examines allegations of police abuse investigated and concluded that the officer had engaged in such serious misconduct that it could constitute a crime.
Series:The NYPD Files: Investigating America’s Largest Police Force
ProPublica reporters uncover abuse and impunity inside the NYPD, using confidential documents and insider interviews, giving the public unprecedented access to civilian complaints against officers.
Villafane received a letter from the agency about its conclusions. “I was happy and I was relieved,” she recalled. The next step would be a disciplinary trial overseen by the New York Police Department, during which prosecutors from the oversight agency would present evidence and question the officer in a public forum.
New York’s civilian oversight agency found that an NYPD officer engaged in misconduct when he grabbed Brianna Villafane by the hair during a protest. Credit:Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica
Then last fall, the police commissioner intervened.
Exercising a little-known authority called “retention,” the commissioner, Edward Caban, ensured the case would never go to trial.
Instead, Caban reached his own conclusion in private.
He decided that it “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” to pursue administrative charges against the officer, Gerard Dowling, according to a letter the department sent to the oversight agency. The force that the officer used against Villafane was “reasonable and necessary.” The commissioner ordered no discipline.
Today, Dowling is a deputy chief of the unit that handles protests throughout the city.
Video Taken by a Civilian Shows NYPD Officer Gerard Dowling Grabbing Brianna Villafane’s Hair During a Protest
Credit:Courtesy of Brandon Remmert
His case is one of dozens in which Caban has used the powers of his office to intervene in disciplinary cases against officers who were found by the oversight agency to have committed misconduct.
Since becoming commissioner last July, he has short-circuited cases involving officers accused of wantonly using chokeholds, deploying Tasers and beating protesters with batons. A number of episodes were so serious that the police oversight agency, known as the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes.
As is typical across the United States, New York’s police commissioner has the final say over officer discipline. Commissioners can and often do overrule civilian oversight boards. But Caban’s actions stand out for ending cases before the public disciplinary process plays out.
“What the Police Department is doing here is shutting down cases under the cloak of darkness,” said Florence L. Finkle, a former head of the CCRB and current vice president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Avoiding disciplinary trials “means there’s no opportunity for transparency, no opportunity for the public to weigh in, because nobody knows what’s happening.”
Indeed, the department does not publish the commissioner’s decisions to retain cases, and the civilian oversight agency makes those details public only months after the fact. Civilians are not told that the Police Department ended their cases.
To piece together Caban’s actions, ProPublica obtained internal records of some cases and learned details of others using public records, lawsuits, social media accounts and other sources.
Retention has been the commissioner’s chief method of intervention. He has prevented the cases of 54 officers from going to trial in his roughly one year in office — far more than any other commissioner, according to an analysis of CCRB data. His predecessor, Keechant Sewell, did it eight times in her first year, even as she faced more disciplinary cases.
In addition, under Caban, the Police Department has failed to notify officers that the oversight agency has filed charges against them — a seemingly minor administrative matter that can actually hold up the disciplinary process. The rules say that without this formal step, a departmental trial cannot begin. Seven cases have been sitting with the department since last summer because it has never formally notified the officers involved, according to the CCRB.
These cases are particularly opaque, as there is no publicly available list of them.
In one episode, the CCRB found that an officer had shocked an unarmed man with a Taser four times while he was trying to back away.
