With the coming of a new mayor in just a few months, New York City is at a crossroads in public safety. The central question is: who will run the NYPD? Will it be the police commissioner? Or will it be the activists at the Civilian Complaint Review Board, who have zero accountability for our public safety mission?
This week, the Democratic nominee for mayor, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, offered an unacceptable answer, calling for “the recommendations of the CCRB to be understood to be the final voice.”
These comments are a blaring alarm bell to New York City police officers, because CCRB is already waging a scorched earth campaign against every NYPD member’s career and reputation.
Leading that charge is interim CCRB chair Dr. Mohammad Khalid, who last week told members of the City Council Committee on Public Safety that “the whole discipline authority should be given to the CCRB,” adding, “We are a tiger, but we don’t have the teeth.”
That was a far cry from the vision of fairness that Khalid — a Staten Islander appointed to the board by that borough’s elected leaders — had presented just a few months earlier.
“I accepted the position … to make sure that both parties are fairly treated,” Khalid said at a May board meeting.
Khalid is not the first CCRB chair to abandon promises of “fairness.” Rather, he is the latest in a string of anti-police activists trying to usurp the police commissioner’s authority over not only discipline, but policing policy and strategy.
In other words, Khalid and his colleagues are simply advancing the “Defund the Police” project in disguise.
Unfortunately, rather than fighting back, NYPD management has historically tried to appease CCRB at the expense of cops on the streets.
In agreement after agreement over the past decade, the NYPD has carved off large chunks of its own disciplinary authority and handed them over to CCRB, even while it pushes cops to engage in the kind of proactive policing that CCRB board members explicitly oppose.
This dynamic places police officers between a rock and a hard place. It is also completely at odds with the separation of powers and responsibilities envisioned in the City Charter.
When New Yorkers voted by referendum to establish CCRB within the Charter in 1993, they envisioned an independent reviewer of civilian complaints against police officers, not an independent disciplinarian and certainly not a separate public safety policymaking body.
Police officers’ daily activities are not directed by CCRB. Police officers work for the police commissioner, who sets agency priorities and sends orders down the chain of command. Whenever the commissioner considers disciplining an officer for potential misconduct, that disciplinary action must be considered in the context of those directives.
The commissioner and mayor are responsible for keeping New Yorkers safe. It must be the leadership, not the rank-and-file, who are held accountable for the results of their policies.
CCRB, on the other hand, doesn’t have to answer for public safety. In its current biased composition, board members answer to only the most extreme anti-police activists whose policy goals are the polar opposite of those the NYPD pursues to protect New Yorkers.
Khalid recently joined eight of his fellow activists on the board to substantiate charges and recommend termination for two police officers after CCRB’s own investigation cleared the officers on all misconduct charges by finding their actions “Within NYPD Guidelines.”
This outrageous vote makes clear that CCRB is not interested in merely enforcing compliance with NYPD guidelines. Instead, it wants to forcibly change the guidelines themselves by scapegoating two police officers who did not write those policies.
Right now, the NYPD is experiencing a historic staffing crisis, made worse by CCRB’s gross abuse of its Charter powers. Police officers know that we have zero chance of getting fair hearing from the anti-police activists who dominate CCRB’s board.
Granting CCRB final disciplinary authority will spell the end of policing in this city. Any police officers who remain on the job will have to balance the directives of our NYPD supervisors against the threat of unreasonable, unfair, willfully biased CCRB board members every time they respond to an emergency.
If the next mayor pursues this plan to empower radicals like Khalid, he will be responsible for decimating police headcount, morale and public safety throughout this city.
Hendry is president of the Police Benevolent Association.
