New York City police on Thursday announced a new policy requiring officers to report nearly every time they use force, shortly after a watchdog condemned the department’s inability to track such instances and its failure to discipline officers who used excessive force.  “NYPD was living a little bit in the dark ages,” said Philip Eure, the New York police inspector general, as he released an investigative report about the department.  The report stated that the NYPD had no standardized method of reporting or tracking the use of force throughout the department. The findings detailed a litany of New York City’s bad policing practices with regard to use of force, citing problems with officer training and policies intended to de-escalate situations.  Investigators reviewed 104 substantiated allegations of unwarranted force from the past five years and found that the commissioner had failed to discipline officers in 36% of those cases.  The department has no definition for what constitutes “force”, “excessive force”, or “deadly physical force”, investigators said, calling on the NYPD to clarify its policies. The report also faulted the agency’s training for officers. Of the nearly 500 hours of coursework in the police academy, investigators said they could only identify one nine-hour course specifically on the use of force.  The NYPD, which received an embargoed draft of the report last Friday, responded promptly to the report’s criticisms, citing new use-of-force procedures announced on Thursday.  Under the new policy, which will probably launch in early 2016, officers will use standardized forms to report every incident during which they use force or force is used against them, according to a letter from the department’s deputy commissioner, Lawrence Byrne.  Commissioner William Bratton formally announced the new policies and addressed the inspector general’s report at a press conference on Thursday afternoon.  “We are now applying the same policy, oversight and training principles to all uses of force, not just firearms,” he said.  The new reporting practices are accompanied by new definitions of and guidelines for use of force, addressing some of the inspector general’s concerns.  The NYPD must submit a full response to the inspector general’s report within 90 days.  Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the changes were “welcome recognition” of longstanding criticisms of police transparency with regard to use of force.  “There are definite concerns about relying on self-reporting, but we have yet to come up with a more objective way to find out what’s going on,” she told the Guardian.  She called on the department to release in full the new policy and the form that officers will use to report incidents.  NYPD’s new data collection comes as Texas moves forward with a new law tracking and publicizing police shootings in the state.  The attorney general of Texas will release information on all police shootings that result in civilian injury or death as part of a new law that went into effect on 1 September. The attorney general has begun publishing incident reports of police shootings in full online.  The initiatives from the nation’s largest police department and second-largest state join other local attempts to more closely track police killings absent national data on the topic.  The federal government does not collect or publish information on people killed by law enforcement. Local police may voluntarily report “justifiable homicides” to the FBI. Director James Comey maintained the voluntary self-reporting model on Monday, saying that the bureau would try to collect more data. The FBI declined to state specifically how they would collect more data. In 2014, the FBI counted 444 “justifiable homicides”, a number that has been widely questioned.  The Guardian is tracking all police killings in the US in 2015 and has counted 875 deaths by law enforcement as of Thursday afternoon.
Investigative report condemned police department as being stuck in ‘the dark ages’ for absence of method to track use of force and failure to discipline officers