New York Police Commissioner Edward Caban on Tuesday evening issued a five-page statement defending how he has handled officer discipline in the year since he was appointed to lead the department.
The statement, posted on the social media platform X, came in response to a story published last week by ProPublica and The New York Times that detailed how Caban has buried dozens of cases of alleged police misconduct involving officers accused of, among other things, wrongly using chokeholds, deploying Tasers and beating protesters with batons. Some episodes were so serious that a police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes.
Caban, ProPublica found, has prevented 54 officers from facing a public disciplinary trial in his roughly one year in office — a tactic known as retention. His predecessor, Keechant Sewell, did it eight times in her first year.
Well before our story was published, we asked for an interview with Caban and sent the New York Police Department detailed questions about our reporting. In response, the department offered a one-sentence statement: “The NYPD continues to work closely with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in accordance with the terms of the memorandum of understanding.” That memorandum gives the commissioner the authority to preemptively end cases without a trial.
On Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams was asked at a press briefing about our story. “I have committed my life to police reform and proper policing,” he said. “I monitor these cases, I don’t interfere. But I’m very clear on what I expect. We are going to have a police department that’s professional.” Adams offered his full support to Caban, saying the commissioner has “been extremely clear in doing that.”
Caban followed with the five-page statement taking issue with the story.
He identified no inaccuracies but instead argued that the story was unfair. “No one is more invested in a fair, effective, and efficient NYPD discipline process than I am,” Caban wrote. “Any suggestion that my handling of an incredibly complex, collaborative process undermines these standards simply does not survive honest scrutiny.”
Caban also argued that he was more efficient and effective at administering justice than the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Here are a few of Caban’s assertions and what our reporting found:
“This was and remains an open process.”
When the CCRB adjudicates misconduct accusations, its lawyers serve as prosecutors at an NYPD trial that is open to the public, where evidence is presented and officers are questioned about what happened.
When the commissioner retains a case, he decides in private whether the officer’s behavior was justified, and he alone determines whether they should be punished. He sends a letter to the CCRB laying out his reasons, but the department does not publish the letter, and the CCRB only does so months after the fact.
The process is so opaque that civilians we interviewed about their pending misconduct cases did not know that the cases had been swept away.
When we told Brianna Villafane that the commander who grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to the ground during a Black Lives Matter march had been cleared by the commissioner, she gasped and shook her head. “Who am I supposed to call to feel safe now?” Villafane asked. “Not him.”
“Each and every time I have retained a case, it is in compliance with” the memorandum of understanding’s “mutually understood guidelines and agreed upon guidelines.”
ProPublica’s reporting shows this is not the case. One of the few limitations on a commissioner’s ability to end cases is that he may only do so for officers with clean records.
We found multiple instances where the commissioner ended the cases of officers whose records included previous substantiated cases of misconduct.
The department’s public information office did not respond to questions about these cases for our original story and the mayor’s chief counsel did not respond to a similar question at Tuesday’s news conference. On Wednesday, ProPublica asked the police department about these cases again, and the department did not immediately respond.
“Police officers face unparalleled penalties.”
We tracked the punishment that Caban has given in the cases he short-circuited. Forty percent of the time, he gave officers no punishment at all.
In the cases in which he has ordered discipline, it has mostly been light, such as the loss of a few vacation days. The most severe punishment, we found, was a case in which he docked an officer 10 vacation days.
In more than 30 other instances, Caban upended cases in which officers themselves had already agreed to punishment, doing so more times than any other commissioner in at least a decade.
“In the past year, the sheer number of cases that I have adjudicated has greatly increased, so it is only logical that the number of cases I retain would increase as well.”
ProPublica looked at this very issue. According to CCRB data, Caban had faced 409 cases from the agency in his first 11 months, compared to 521 cases for his predecessor, Sewell, in her first year.
One thing we found that the commissioner didn’t address:
Retention is not the only way the NYPD has been blocking cases.
As we reported, there are seven cases in which the NYPD has, since last summer, declined to formally notify officers of charges brought against them. Without such notification, there can be no disciplinary trial.
These cases include chokeholds, Tasings and beating a teenager with a baton. Each one was so serious that the CCRB concluded that the officers’ conduct was likely criminal. And there is no public disclosure when the department simply doesn’t inform an officer, effectively stalling the case indefinitely.
We asked the NYPD and the commissioner about these cases for our earlier story. They did not respond.
Do you have information about the police we should know? You can email Eric Umansky at [email protected] or contact him securely on Signal or WhatsApp at 917-687-8406.
