He Excelled as a Detective, Until Prosecutors Stopped Believing Him (The New York Times)
The New York Times, October 10, 2017
He Excelled as a Detective, Until Prosecutors Stopped Believing Him
“There is a long string of gun arrests over the years in which judges have cast doubt on the officers’ accounts. And troubling instances keep emerging. In recent years, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a city agency that investigates police misconduct, has documented an increase in cases in which police officers give false statements. ‘There is lying going on on a regular basis,’ said Richard Emery, who until last year was the chairman of the review board. While he credits the department with effective reforms regarding use-of-force and unconstitutional search and seizures, he said, ‘the one major lapse in the fantastic work of the N.Y.P.D. is not addressing police lying.’ Lawrence Byrne, the department’s top legal official, disclosed in a recent panel discussion at the City Bar Association that 73 officers have ‘been fired or forced out of the department in the last five years for either perjury or making a false statement,’ and that about twice that many officers had faced lesser penalties for false statements ‘in the last few years.'”
