Queens DA’s cop credibility database includes 406 officers named in lawsuits
/
AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
By David Brand
The Queens District Attorney’s office on Thursday released a list of hundreds of police officers named in civil lawsuits included in its internal database of cops with credibility issues. The disclosure comes eight days after the DA’s Office released a roster of cops whose honesty was challenged by judges in court.
The 13-page list includes 406 officers who have civil lawsuits against them. A previous list of 65 officers contained the names of cops with adverse credibility findings — information that is harder to access than civil complaints.
The DA’s Office shared the two lists with the Eagle and various other reporters and attorneys in response to Freedom of Information Law requests. Gothamist/WNYC was the first publication to learn that the list existed in April. Prosecutors in the Bronx and Brooklyn shared their partial lists of officers with adverse credibility findings earlier this year.
Anastasia Spanakos, an assistant district attorney and records access officer, said the Queens DA’s list “contains information regarding civil suits known to this Office, but not every civil suit against a New York City Police Officer.”
“This Office adds information to the database as it becomes relevant to an officer who may testify in a Queens County criminal matter,” Spanakos added in her response to a FOIL request.
The DA’s Office said it began maintaining the database — which also includes undisclosed officers who have been the subject of substantiated misconduct allegations — in March 2018 so that prosecutors could more efficiently turn over information on potential police witnesses to defense counsel under discovery law.
Witness credibility issues could also upend a prosecutor’s case against a defendant, giving DAs incentive to keep track of cops who have been known to lie on the stand or in their police reports.
Meanwhile, hiding that information from a defense attorney could amount to prosecutorial misconduct, said Legal Aid Society Cop Accountability Project fellow Molly Griffard.
“Failure to disclose an officers’ prior misconduct when an officer knows about it is a Brady violation. And there are absolutely times when that information is incredibly relevant,” said Griffard, referring to the Brady doctrine that compels prosecutors to turn over evidence and other material to defendants before trial.
Griffard said the disclosure of the list of sued cops is not a major step toward transparency, however. Civil complaints are already public records, and the city law department maintains and updates a spreadsheet of lawsuits naming cops.
The Legal Aid Society has created its own database, called CAPstat, that aggregates lawsuits naming NYPD officers that were filed since 2015. There were more than 130 lawsuits naming Queens cops in the database when it went live in March.
“Just turning over a list of officers that have civil rights lawsuits against them is not sharing anything that isn’t publicly available,” Griffard said. She called on the DA’s Office to release its “own internal credibility findings” — cops who prosecutors have found not credible, even if the cops have not been named in a lawsuit or challenged by a judge in court.
