The NYPD Files
Search Thousands of Civilian Complaints Against New York City Police Officers
This database was last updated in July 2020 and is no longer being updated. Data on this page may be out of date. For more recent information, visit the city's database of civilian complaints against the NYPD.
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Complaint received in March 2012
Complaint closed in July 2012
These are the findings of a single complaint against this NYPD officer investigated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
Reason for Contact
Execution of search warrant
Outcome of Contact
Arrest - other violation/crime
Precinct Occurred In
77
What the CCRB’s Conclusions Mean
Substantiated: The alleged conduct occurred and it violated the rules. (Here is a breakdown of the types of discipline the CCRB can recommend. The NYPD can choose to ignore those recommendations. It has discretion over what, if any, discipline is imposed.)Exonerated: The alleged conduct occurred but did not violate the NYPD’s rules, which often give officers significant discretion over use of force.
Unsubstantiated: The CCRB has fully investigated but could not affirmatively conclude both that the conduct occurred and that it broke the rules.
| Officer | Rank at the Time of Incident | Officer Details | Complainant Details | Allegations | CCRB Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| William Buchanan | Lieutenant | White male, 34 years old | Not available | Abuse of Authority: Premises Entered And/Or Searched | Exonerated |
About This Data
For decades, disciplinary records of police officers in New York have been shielded from public view. After the state recently repealed the law that had kept the records secret, ProPublica requested and received a database from New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates allegations of misconduct against NYPD officers. The database lists the name of each officer, the race of the complainant and the officer, a category describing the alleged misconduct, and whether the CCRB concluded the officers’ conduct violated NYPD rules. Police unions have opposed New York City’s plan to make public data about disciplinary investigations. This database names about 4,000 of the NYPD’s 36,000 active-duty officers. Every officer in the database has had at least one substantiated allegation. We excluded any allegations that CCRB investigators concluded did not occur and were deemed unfounded. We also removed a small number of officers (62) against whom the CCRB had substantiated allegations, but whose substantiated allegations had not gone fully through the NYPD’s administrative prosecution process. The CCRB was not able to reach conclusions in many cases, in part because the investigators must rely on the NYPD to hand over crucial evidence, such as footage from body-worn cameras. Often, the department is not forthcoming despite a legal duty to cooperate in CCRB investigations. The CCRB gets thousands of complaints per year but substantiates a tiny fraction of them. Allegations of criminal conduct by officers are typically investigated not by the CCRB but by state or federal prosecutors in conjunction with the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau or the FBI. The NYPD’s own findings in cases in this database are not included here.
Read more about what we’ve included in the database and why, and see our answers to questions we have received about this data. If you have information about any of these officers or cases, please fill out our form.
All of the records in this data are from closed cases. But if you see an error, contact the CCRB. If the agency updates its records and lets us know, we'll do so as well.
The data used in this database is downloadable from ProPublica’s Data Store.
Source
This data was obtained through a records request made to the CCRB. It includes fully investigated allegations only for officers who were members of the department as of late June 2020 and against whom the CCRB has substantiated at least one allegation.