the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) provided additional data and clarified information they provided to the NYCLU in July 2020. The updated database now includes information on the race or ethnicity of the impacted person and officer, incident location, current employment status of the officer, and other data. The CCRB’s original data set also contained duplicate entries and a number of entries with many missing values. The NYCLU published the data set in full in 2020 and noted where there appeared to be incomplete information. The current version of the database does not include 14,000 confirmed duplicates and 33,000 entries without complaint data. To access the old version, please visit our GitHub page.
The NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database, which the NYCLU obtained through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests, is a repository of complaints made by the public on record at the CCRB. These complaints span two distinct periods: the time since the CCRB started operating as an independent city agency outside the NYPD in 1994 and the prior period when the CCRB operated within the NYPD. The database includes 279,644 unique complaint records involving 102,121 incidents and 48,757 active or former NYPD officers. The database does not include pending complaints for which the CCRB has not completed an investigation as of April 2021.
Using the CCRB complaint history data, which the NYCLU obtained through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, the NYCLU built a search tool to make the information more accessible. Each row of the database represents a unique complaint made against an NYPD officer, including the officer’s name, race or ethnicity, rank, and current command (the NYPD unit where the officer was most recently assigned at the time that the complaint was filed at the time of the incident). It is not uncommon for a single police-civilian encounter to result in multiple complaints against the same officer or against multiple officers. Of the complaints that include the self-reported race of the impacted person since 2000, 14% of are white, and about 81% are Black or Latinx. Of all complaints naming a NYPD officer since the 1980s, 61% are about white officers and 36% are about Black or Latinx officers.
Details about the CCRB investigation process can be found on their website. The CCRB also has a tool with up-to-date data on their website but includes less information for each complaint.