False Alarm: Investigating Police Car Crashes and Disciplinary Records After the 50-A Repeal Finds Little Need for Police Reform

Anti-police activists are disappointed as police disciplinary records released due to the 50-a repeal fail to prove widespread police misconduct.

Photo by Michael Jin on Unsplash

I’ve had two friends die behind the wheels of patrol cars, each in single vehicle crashes with stationary objects. In one of the cases, the officer was speeding to an emergency backup call to help another officer in a physical struggle with a suspect resisting arrest. Policing, as with all emergency services, is not and never will be tragedy free.

A recent traffic study highlights the danger of police cruisers colliding with civilian vehicles causing injuries and deaths. This report was published in USA Today with a double dose of bias. The premise was that over 700 police crashes that included injuries resulted in little or no discipline couldn’t be correct. (They did also find that 237 officers did face discipline.)

The online Syracuse University news site, The News House explains the research process. ‘As records came in, students read hundreds of pages of documents, pulling out details like the type of conduct, the date, the officer involved and the discipline rendered in a process called “data tagging.”’ Their research project was made possible by grant funding from the Google News Initiative working with Northwestern University/Medill.

Driving Force

Instead, the USA Today story swung on two separate  traffic crashes, both involving serious lasting injuries to the drivers of the civilian vehicles involved. Both were from more than ten years prior. Each were problematic and curious choices given the ‘hundreds of crashes’ over the period.

In the first case, a video is also added to assist the reader. This video, shot from the inside of the vehicle, takes place during daytime, and approaches a four-way stop in the middle of the day. The actual crash took place in the middle of the night and the intersection, a decade earlier, was regulated by a traffic signal. The civilian driver, Deshane Lavere’s medical information is shown from a brief excerpt from a medical visit after the crash. The medical visit took place on August 7, 2013 following the crash on June 22, 2013 and it’s unclear if this is her initial diagnosis. There’s no mention of injury to the officer involved or her other passengers.

Their second case is a worse failure to make their point. The civilian driver is making a left turn and is struck on the passenger side by the law enforcement vehicle. The cop car is traveling in the right lane next to stopped traffic in the left lane. The officer is accused of speeding without their emergency lights on. The police vehicle driver maintains emergency lights were activated. This crash also took place in 2013.

But this a clear-cut case of the civilian driver, Charles McLoughlin,  failing to yield right of way to the approaching vehicle while making a left turn. On one day in the late 1990s, I responded to four of these crashes, in a row, in a single shift. (This case also presented video that failed to add any relevance.) But the focus was not the details of the crash but the lasting physical and economic injury of the McLoughlin. There is no mention of the injury status of the officer. Eventually the USA Today story reveals:

“In the end, what McLoughlin described as pre-trial legal tricks – including the city hiring a high-powered outside legal firm that uncovered new event data recorder, or black-box, evidence – led him to take just a $49,500 settlement.” 

Why would this longstanding news organization publish (and promote nationwide) such poor and deceptive reporting? Their aim clearly was to persuade readers that their examples were people who were victimized by the police but the bigger picture was to highlight the value of the research product from records obtained since the repeal of 50-a in New York State.

Photo by Mike C. Valdivia on Unsplash

What are the 50-a repeal and the Clean Slate Act?

The 50-a statute was a 1976 amendment to the state civil rights law that excluded police officer personnel records from being discoverable and subpoenaed by defense attorneys to attack the arresting officer’s credibility while defending their clients in criminal cases.

The 2020 repeal of 50-a was a knee-jerk reaction to the death of George Floyd that was supposed to increase transparency. Like so many agenda priorities which police reform activists cling to with the expectation of finding widespread corruption, the results of the repeal been disappointing. This has been on the priority list of the Communities United for Police Reform, a network of dozens of social activist organizations ranging from moderate to unindicted co-conspirators.

The repeal has another ripple effect: officer and family safety. In 2020, Vox reported:

In response to the repeal of 50-a by the state legislature, Patrick Lynch, president of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement, “The unfettered release of police personnel records will allow unstable people to target police officers and our families for harassment or worse.”

The New York State Clean Slate Act is a new law that seals certain misdemeanor and felony criminal records to increase job opportunities for individuals with past convictions. Convicted New Yorkers will be eligible to have conviction records automatically sealed 3 years from sentencing for misdemeanors and 8 years from sentencing for felonies, not including time incarcerated. This law goes into effect in November 2024.

In order to obtain a better understanding of the impact for officers in New York State, I consulted with NYPD Lt. John D. Macari (ret.) who provided the following statement:

“New York progressive politicians pushing for and celebrating the repeal of 50-a which allows NYPD police officers disciplinary records to be open sourced public information even in retirement or death, while at the same time pushing for and celebrating the Clean Slate Act which (automatically) removes individual criminal records from public record after a particular amount of time has passed, shows where their priorities lie. NY politicians have created a pro-criminal, anti-police society through legislation. This hypocrisy highlights the serious failures of the Public Safety Platform presented by progressives as well as exposes their inability to draft common sense legislation”

Macari and NYPD Lt. Eric Dym (ret.) continue to courageously advocate for the officers of the New York City Police Department in many mediums including The Finest Unfiltered podcast. The challenges of the NYPD are relevant to everyone with a mindset preserving local professional policing across the nation. I hope you get a chance to check them out. All their links are in the references below.

Deliberately Misleading

There are several reasons why officers are less likely to be at fault or cause a crash. Most police officers receive driving training at least every two years. Vehicle operations is considered a high liability topic requiring specialized instructors. Their fleet vehicles receive both regular preventative maintenance and safety checks. In my experience, police cars with a tire puncture that can be safely repaired receive a replacement tire. Generally, the policies on use of police vehicles are incredibly specific and include conditions as detailed as who can ride in the vehicle, whether you can jump start or push other vehicles, as well as operation in emergency mode.

The research students and the article author demonstrated no understanding of police discipline and how police bargaining units demand uniform consequences while protecting officers from their own administrations. I’m confident that nearly all officers would prefer a traffic ticket than a written reprimand in their personnel file. Regardless of their use of inflammatory terms, police agencies do not maintain ‘misconduct files’, instead they preserve discipline records for the purpose of maintaining accountable professional agencies with professional officers.

In the end, these police reformers look like Geraldo Rivera in Capone’s vault.

Please keep all law enforcement employees in your prayers.

---

References

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/18/police-car-crashes-devastating-injuries-few-consequences/72630786007/

https://www.thenewshouse.com/off-campus/driving-force/driving-force-investigating-police-crashes/

https://www.thenewshouse.com/off-campus/driving-force/driving-force-investigating-police-crashes/

https://news.syr.edu/blog/2024/02/21/data-journalism-project-launches-focuses-on-impact-of-police-vehicle-accidents-in-new-york/

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/emergency-vehicles/

https://datadrivenreporting.medill.northwestern.edu

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/16/21291595/new-york-section-50-a-police-misconduct

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/on-this-day-36-years-ago-al-capones-vault-is-blasted-open-nothing-of-interest-is-found/

https://twitter.com/RetiredNYFinest/

https://www.facebook.com/NewYorksFinestUnfiltered

https://www.instagram.com/TheFinestUnfiltered/

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/16/21291595/new-york-section-50-a-police-misconduct

https://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-local/article/Court-rulings-shroud-records-10788517.php

http://www.youtube.com/@TheFinestUnfiltered