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Councillors and advocates denounced New York City Mayor Eric Adams and called for the change in the wake of a producer’s investigation into a secret, problematic police force led by the mayor’s allies.
Propublica found that the mayor defended the New York Police Department’s community response team despite the aggressive and often abusive pattern of policing that was flagged by city officials. The squad officers killed the motorcyclist after turning his police car back to him. The team commander punched him and kicked the driver to the head. Then another commander shoves the man into the car window after the man complained that he was stopped for no apparent reason.
The founders of two units near the mayor have their own problematic records.
One, department head John Chell, once shot a man in the back and killed him. Chel claimed he was fired by chance, but the ju-degree judge in the civil suit found the shooting to be intentional. The ju judge awarded the man’s family $2.5 million. Chell did not respond to requests for comment.
Another CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, has repeatedly discovered that he is engaged in fraudulent activities by the city’s police supervisory board of private complaints reviews, including pointing guns at motorcyclists and threatening to kill him. Daughtry was docked for that on a 10-day holiday. Daughtry did not respond to requests for comment. Adams recently made him the vice mayor for public safety.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos told Propoblica that Adams’ reliance on chronism would reduce safety in New York City. She said, “People like Chel and Daughtry should never have been trusted by the authority they were given, and not by serious mayors. If you have a professional police department and a real community police force, you need to cut out corruption.”
Meanwhile, local civil rights groups have called for the community response team to be shut down. “It’s time to demolish this unit,” the New York Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
“CRT is a dangerous unit, and Propublica’s report shows it operates without accountability under the protection of a corrupt and compromised mayor,” said the Civil Rights Group’s Latinx review. Police Commissioner Jessica Tish said, “We should be disbanding this unit.”
The Community Response Team was launched early in the Adams administration. It focuses on so-called quality of life issues, such as uncertified motorcyclists who shake up the groups Adams has identified as a priority. “Our mayor has given us the mission to launch the attack here,” Chell told a local TV station in 2023.
However, tissues may be reducing the role of CRT. At a recent city council hearing held on the day Propublica’s story was announced, the commissioner explained how it is changing the NYPD’s approach to quality of life issues that was the focus of CRT.
Tish said the department is away from using centralized units such as CRT for these issues and moving instead to rely on local district officials.
“Over the past few years, quality of life enforcement in the NYPD has been led by a unit called CRT,” says Tisch. “We are proposing to create a Life-of Life division in the NYPD, allowing us to create a precinct commander and resources to be responsible for quality of life complaints.”
When asked about the comments of the unit and the commissioner at a recent mayoral press conference, Adams provided support for the team.
“The CRT is here,” the mayor said. “I support all the units, and if they don’t get up and do the job they are supposed to do, then they’re going to be responsible.”
Over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints alleging inappropriate use of force by CRT members, according to private complaint review committee records obtained by ProPublica. Another NYPD team with similar sizes and mandates received about half of the complaints.
CRT scrutiny will almost certainly continue. The NYPD inspector’s office, one of the police department’s watchdogs, is digging into the unit. Watchdog released a report last fall criticizing CRT’s “lack of public transparency” and “lack of clear rules.” A spokesperson said the unit is still under investigation.
“Completely inaccurate photo”: Real-life police officer shows a man wrongly convicted as “The First 48.”
The role of CRT was not the only reforms associated with the Propublica report that Tisch discussed in his recent testimony. The commissioner also said the NYPD has suspended its policy of abandoning fraud cases without seeing evidence. Propublica investigated its practice last fall and found that the department had ended hundreds of alleged fraud cases simply because it received a referral from a private investigator within three months of the discipline deadline.
The lawsuit has already been investigated and demonstrated by the private complaint review board and has been sent to the NYPD for disciplinary action. In one case, officers punched a man into the gro diameter, the watchdog discovered. In another, the officer tackles the young man and accidentally stops and searches him.
A NYPD spokesperson said the department has already begun handling such cases again.
