New York City Cops Have a Choke Hold Problem, Says New Report

Philip Eure has one of the most challenging positions in the country, if not the world.

As the first inspector general (IG) for the New York City Police Department, his job is to reform America's largest municipal law enforcement agency at a time when the cops and mayor are publicly beefing and the Black Lives Matter movement is still simmering.

Since taking office this spring after the City Council created the position in 2013, Eure, the former oversight chief of the Washington DC police, has stayed on the sidelines of the debate over policing that has consumed much of the country. While slowly amassing a 50-person team, Eure reportedly (yet quietly) met with the mayor's office, NYPD brass, and the mothers of police brutality victims in an effort to find out what could be done about New York's finest.

Now, as we seem to be nearing the end of a citywide policing slowdown, the man in charge of independently monitoring and reforming New York cops is making his move.

In its first ever report, the Office of the Inspector General dedicated 45 pages to an initial target: choke holds. The aggressive use of force was infamously implemented by Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the takedown of Eric Garner on Staten Island this July. (According to the medical examiner, the tactic is what led to his death.) The practice—which is prohibited in the NYPD handbook—has since led the City Council to draft a bill banning the move altogether, but the problem, according to the IG, is what we tend to see happen (or not happen) after a choke hold is used.

Analyzing ten cases between 2009 and 2014, all of which involved the banned procedure, the IG found that choke hold complaints are routinely lost in the abyss of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) and Internal Affairs Bureau, both of which are institutions within the NYPD that are supposed to be watching the cops. (It's worth noting that the official penalties for using a choke hold range from undergoing retraining to losing vacation days to termination. Officer Pantaleo is currently facing departmental charges, but given the NYPD's track record, it's unlikely he'll lose his job.)

"After the tragic death of Eric Garner, and intense scrutiny of choke holds, OIG-NYPD conducted a deep dive into cases involving this prohibited tactic to explore and demystify how these complaints are addressed internally," Eure says in the report. "Our targeted analysis revealed troubling deficiencies from the top-down that must be rectified."

Those deficiencies strike at the core conflict of interest in the idea of self-enforcement—basically, cops watching over other cops. For instance, the IG found that, for reasons unknown, six cases under the jurisdiction of former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly saw him intervene to either lessen the CCRB's recommendations of penalties against the particular officer or toss them out altogether.

"We really don't know why the police commissioner came out with a different result, a lesser result than the CCRB recommended," Eure told WNYC on Monday morning. "That sort of thing undermines confidence."

(It's worth noting that current NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton recently told CNN that what we saw in the Garner video was not a choke hold, after initially conceding it looked like one. "It appears to be a choke hold—as we understand it, [it] wasn't," he said.)

The IG also argues that the definition of what constitutes a choke hold, the evidence needed to prove one took place, and communication about the tactic—at the precinct, borough, and higher levels of the Department—varies among the NYPD's internal agencies. The CCRB has consistently failed to tell internal affairs about choke hold complaints, even though it is required to do so by law.

In the end, the picture painted by the report is one of bureaucrats falling over each other—confusion at every tier of power. Whether on purpose or not, accountability measures and the complaints themselves are left by the wayside.

Of course, the internal agencies' incompetence has become an unspoken rule of New York City politics—a reality of internal bureaucracy that city residents, especially those involved in serious police brutality cases, have been used to for some time. Many relatives of victims I've spoken with say "internal investigation" with an exhausted tone of voice that implies guaranteed failure. If something "goes to the CCRB" or cops say they're "doing an internal investigation," that usually means essentially nothing will happen to the officers involved. That's another reason Eure's office, which was given subpoena power among other legal enforcement tools, exists in the first place.

Finally, the IG touches upon officers' communication skills training, which indirectly gets at a central question of the Black Lives Matter protests: What did Eric Garner do to instigate a choke hold? "In several of the cases, officers escalated to force too quickly—in many instances as a first act of physical force in response to verbal resistance," Eure writes, calling officers' tendency to use a choke hold "alarming." On this note, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a total retraining of the boys in blue, which will heavily focus on de-escalation.

To fix this mess, the IG office's recommendations are basically an amalgam of "Stop doing that!" gestures: improved communications and information-sharing among agencies; transparency in decisions made by the commissioner, especially when they run contrary to the CCRB; and general reform of how the NYPD disciplines its officers when they defy the handbook.

In addition to looking into post-9/11 surveillance, handling mentally ill suspects, and " broken windows" policing theory in its entirety, Eure's office will also work on releasing a full, comprehensive review of excessive use of force in the coming months. The idea is to consider more systemic issues rather than individual instances of police brutality. After all, that's his main responsibility here: finding out not only why these things happen, but why they continue to happen.

According to the inspector general, the NYPD must submit a formal response to its proposals within 90 days—a detailed blueprint to show exactly how the Department plans on fixing its own problems. But Newsday reported on Monday that NYPD officials have yet to read the report, nor are they willing to comment on it. (The NYPD did not respond to VICE's request for comment.)

However, given the news of cops turning their backs on the mayor and drastically reducing the number of arrests they make, what will be most important is how Eure is received by the department he's charged with overseeing. The release of this report itself was delayed due to the deaths of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in Bed-Stuy—a tragic event that paused the policing debate in New York City, at least momentarily.

Still, it seems as if Eure is determined to push ahead, and that he might even have the clout to nudge the cops into changing their ways.

In a letter to the mayor, the City Council, and Police Commissioner Bratton, Mark Peters—the former civil rights lawyer who picked Eure for the inspector general gig—struck a balance between praising cops and promising change to reformers.

"The NYPD is among the most professional and best trained police forces in the world," he wrote. "To suggest otherwise is to forfeit participation in the reasoned debate about the future of policing. However, neither the NYPD's virtues and successes, nor its acknowledged importance to our civic life, should be used to prevent a discussion of genuine problems. One can respect the NYPD and still seek to address the legitimate concerns of the communities it serves."

Follow John Surico on Twitter.