NEW ROCHELLE, NY — To evaluate disciplinary records of New Rochelle police officers, we set about building a database that was as comprehensive as we could make it by gathering Internal Affairs records and adding in pension records and payroll records which include start dates, retirement dates and more. This came about because of a change in New York State law last year and the belated release of data by the New Rochelle Police Department with more promised in the coming weeks.
On June 12, 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an order repealing Section 50-a of the state Civil Rights Law — a provision that treated police disciplinary records as confidential for decades. The repeal of 50-a came less than three weeks after the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, in Minneapolis and one week to the day after the death of Kamal Flowers, a 24-year-old Black man in New Rochelle.
Within an hour, of the bill becoming law, Talk of the Sound filed a Freedom of Information Law request seeking the disciplinary records for Alec Kenna, a New Rochelle Police officer. McKenna, who is White, shot and killed Kamal Flowers, a 24-year-old Black man on June 5, 2020. The City of New Rochelle informed Talk of the Sound on Thursday, July 9th, 2020 they had the McKenna records and were prepared to turn them over the following week at a meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, July 14th, 2020 at 10:30 a.m. That meeting never took place and for 8 months we were denied those records.
New Rochelle Stonewalls on Release of Disciplinary Records for Cop Who Killed Kamal Flowers
When the City of New Rochelle decided to illegally withhold McKenna’s records in July 2020, Talk of the Sound responded over the ensuing months by filing FOIL requests for the disciplinary records for 835 officers going back 100 years based on a myriad of public sources including rosters and payroll information previously obtained by Talk of the Sound as well as pension records from the Office of the New York State Comptroller, newspaper articles, departmental award ceremonies, Westchester County Police Academy records, press releases, the New Rochelle PBA Facebook page and more. The Records Access Officer later determined that due to duplication resulting from our merging records, there were between 550 and 600 separate requests.
The Internal Affairs disciplinary records for Alec Kenna were released by the City of New Rochelle on March 4, 2021, making them the first internal police disciplinary records ever made public in New Rochelle. The records were accompanied by a statement by the City of New Rochelle and New Rochelle Police Department.
Talk of the Sound published statements by City Manager Charles B. Strome and Police Commissioner Joe Schaller along with the Internal Affairs Department “top line” summary of Alec McKenna’s Individual Delinquency Record and the IA records supporting the determinations in McKenna’s Individual Delinquency Record. At the time, we decided not to report further on the McKenna records without knowing more about the Individual Delinquency Records and supporting documents for all officers in the belief that reporting on the McKenna records alone lacked necessary context.
Likewise, we withheld reporting further on the criminal record of Kamal Flowers. Over the course of the 10 months since Flowers’ death, Talk of the Sound has filed numerous Freedom on Information requests with the Westchester County District Attorney, the New Rochelle Police Department, the Mount Vernon Law Department and the Niagara Falls Police Department. We believe we have the most comprehensive account of his criminal history.
There were numerous roadblocks in obtaining the Flowers’ records, in particular those put up by the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office under Anthony Scarpino, in what we believe amounted to a deliberate effort to block the timely release of the Flowers records. Without the McKenna records, presented in context, we decided not to report on the Flowers’ records either. We chose to wait until we could present both sets of records simultaneously. We are now at the point.
But before we publish those stories, we want to explain what we have and do not have regarding the New Rochelle Police Department records.
Talk of the Sound has yet to receive the full set of Internal Affairs records for those among the 550 – 600 officers where IA records exist like those released for McKenna. We have been told to expect the full records. While we were unhappy with the stonewalling from City Hall between July 9, 2020 and March 4, 2021, we believe that there is now a good-faith effort by the New Rochelle Police Department and the Law Department of the City of New Rochelle to review the records and, where appropriate, redact information, then providing them to us. We plan on making additional requests as new names are identified but from a data analysis perspective 550 to 600 is a good sample size for our purpose.
After a good deal of back and forth with City and Police Department Officials, the City agreed in mid-March to an “early” release of the available “top line” Individual Delinquency Records (“IDR”) for 146 officers — some active duty, some retired, and some recently retired but indicated as active duty officers. We have been working our way through this data, line by line, ever since.
With records for 146 out of what we will call for now 550 officers that indicates 26.5% of officers in our data set have at least one Internal Affairs case opened with a typical resolution ranging from “Letter of Reprimand” to “Loss of a Day” or “Loss of a Leave Day”, “Suspensions” up to 60 days (the current limit is 30 days) and various other outcomes like Retraining, Banned from Getting Overtime or Special Duty Details. In a separate letter, the NRPD Records Access Officers stated that 9 records were not housed within the Internal Affairs Office, records for officers who were terminated or forced to resign. He believes those records may be with the Law Department or Human Resources Department.
This raises a question — which we have asked — as to why all Internal Affairs records would not be housed in the Internal Affairs Office with copies provided as needed to other departments within the City government. We do not have an answer as yet.
According to 2020 payroll data, there were 173 officers on Active Duty in 2020 — not all for the full year due to New Hires, Retirements, and Suspensions.
Of the 173 officers, 66 had no Individual Delinquency Record in their entire career, or 38%.
To place Alec McKenna and all other officers in as fair a context as possible, we created a Logarithmic scale to group officers according to a coded/weighted measure of their disciplinary record — or lack-thereof. There is no “right” way to do this because the severity of a violation can be highly subjective. Further, the records we obtained go back 50 years in some cases. There have been many changes over that time; how discipline has been meted out and documented is not consistent over time. The goal was not to come up with some perfect formula but rather to use a scoring system to spread the officers’ records across a scale and group them in some logical manner.
We chose a scale of 0-100.
Officers with no IDR records were given a zero. No matter how bad a record, the maximum score was 100.
To place officers’ records on that scale we looked at the various types of dispositions and their severity. The most common Disposition of an investigation is “Letter of Reprimand”. Next is ‘Loss of Days’ and ‘Loss of Leave Days’. Then ‘Suspensions’ ranging from a few days up to 30 days (and in one older case 60 days). Individual cases can contain multiple violations. Suspension Days are far rarer and for far more severe incidents than those resulting in a Letter of Reprimand or Loss of Days or Leave Days.
To give some context on that point, of the 772 violations identified in the IDRs we obtained (not cases with multiple violations, but the violations counted individually regardless of case file) close to 60% of the violations resulted in a Letter of Reprimand and about 16% resulted in the Loss of 1 Leave Day. Less than 1% of cases resulted in a Suspension and of those only 6 officers have ever received a maximum suspension (30 days in 5 cases, 60 days in 1 older case). It is worth noting there, these numbers highlight the horrific nature of Michael Vaccaro’s IDR which we reported on separately. Although his Suspension has not been stipulated (formally accepted by him), he is only the 7th officer in the history of the department, based on the records provided to us so far, that has received a 30+ day suspension.
Our goal was a scoring system that separated officers with “good” disciplinary records from “bad” disciplinary records along our 0-100 scale. To accomplish that, we coded each violation based on the disposition of the investigation then weighted the coded violation.
Letter of Reprimand = 1 point per violation per case.
Loss of Leave Day = 1 point plus 1 point per day lost per violation per case.
Loss of Day = 1 point plus 2 points per day lost per violation per case.
Suspension = number of suspensions days x 2 per violation per case.
Termination/Forced Resignation = 100 points.
For example, an IA investigation for a Motor Vehicle Accident (R&R 8.2) with a disposition of Letter of Reprimand would be 1 point for 1 violation for a total of 1 point. If that same IA case had a violation for the MBA plus a violation for Failing to Follow Procedure (R&R 1.1) that would be 1 point for 2 violations for a total of 2 points for that IA case file. An IA investigation with a disposition of a Loss of a Day would be 1 + 2 for a total of 3 points for that violation. An IA investigation for an incident with a weapon with a 10-Day suspension would be 10 × 2 or 20 points.
So, our statistical approach is to code each violation, weight the violation, total the points per officer then group officers within a certain range and give that range a group designation, a letter grade.
A = 0 points
B = 1 to 5 points
C = 6 to 20 points
D = 21 to 50 points
F = 51 to 100 points.
Applying this scoring method to each of the 173 officers for whom we received IDR documents plus 9 officers identified as terminated/resigned, but no files held within the New Rochelle Police Department (note: the NRPD records department believes these records are held by the Law Department or Human Resources Department and are seeking to locate these records) out of the “550” overall (our count is 597) and on the assumption that the 368 officers which were checked and had no records on file had no violations (note: this could be because they had no violations or their records are old and either lost or destroyed but for our purposes we are giving them a score of 0 unless other data is produced by NRPD), we see the following:
All-Time (597)
A = 445 (74.5%)
B = 83 (13.9%)
C = 36 (6.0%)
D = 10 (1.7%)
F = 23 (3.9%)
Activity Duty (177)
A = 66 (38.4%)
B = 64 (36.2%)
C = 29 (16.4%)
D = 5 (2.8%)
F = 11 (6.2%)
Our analysis shows the vast majority of police officers both in the history of the department and among Active Duty officers, have either no disciplinary records of a few minor violations (A’s and B’s). Just a handful have “failing” or “near failing” grades.
It is worth noting that only one IA Case File indicates it was converted from a Civilian Complaint. Almost every violation appears to be based on an investigation instigated by a Supervisor or someone higher up in Departmental Command. That said, we only have the top line IDR documents and much more may be revealed once we obtain the full set of records behind each top line IDR document.
It is our intention to continue to update and refine the database including the nine IA files that are not accounted for, uploading to our server all the full IA records for each officer with an IDR, continuing to identify officers we did not request for various reasons, monitoring new hires coming out of the police academy, retirements and any new IA cases that result in dispositions including terminations and resignations.
We ultimately intend to place the entire database online including a mobile-first interface so anyone interacting with a New Rochelle police officer can pull out their phone, type in the officers name or badge number and view a detailed set of information of their disciplinary history, if any, with the New Rochelle Police Department.
Next up, twin articles on McKenna and Flowers — hopefully before the end of the week.
2 thoughts on “How We Created the Talk of the Sound New Rochelle Police Department Disciplinary Records Database”
Comments are closed.