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One and only one person is leading the fight to prevent the public from learning the disciplinary history of the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death: Mayor de Blasio.
The mayor says he is bound by state law to conceal Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s record before Garner’s death — and he will surely say that he is similarly barred from revealing any punishment imposed on Pantaleo for the actions that led to Garner’s death.
De Blasio’s description of the law is dead wrong, and, under his authority, city lawyers are waging a fight to impose an unprecedented and destructive level of secrecy on police discipline.
If adopted by the courts, de Blasio’s position would end all public access to any and all information related to punishing cop misconduct.
Again, for critical emphasis, de Blasio’s legal team is not abiding by the law, it is trying to impose an excessive new secrecy rule.
Invoking the Freedom of Information Law, the Legal Aid Society filed suit for access to a summary of Civilian Complaint Review Board records that would show how many substantiated charges Pantaleo had racked up before the Garner case.
Legal Aid also sought records showing what punishment, if any, the board had recommended.
Last July, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger concluded the information fell outside a confidentiality provision of state law and should be released. Rather than celebrate a victory for transparency, de Blasio’s lawyers appealed and are awaiting oral arguments.
Choosing secrecy over openness was bad enough. Manufacturing a black-hole legal standard was the work of cover-up artists.
The Civil Rights Law bars release of records used “to evaluate performance toward continued employment or promotion.”
New York’s highest court eased that ill-advised secrecy by a police agency to show that disclosing the information would subject a cop to “time-consuming and perhaps vexatious investigation into irrelevant collateral matters in the context of a civil or criminal action.”
In her ruling, Schlesinger considered both standards and properly concluded, first, that Legal Aid was not seeking a prohibited personnel record and, second, that Pantaleo was unlikely to suffer a severe backlash in that the video of the chokehold had already made him notorious.
Significantly, Schlesinger suggested that a backlash would “more likely” be directed at the NYPD in the event that the department had mishandled complaints against Pantaleo. What are you hiding, Mr. Mayor?