NYPD Restores Thousands of Missing Records but Removes Case Numbers From Its Discipline Database

The department restored more than 2,000 missing discipline records to its public database of uniformed officers, weeks after ProPublica revealed data reliability issues. But it also removed case numbers, making future oversight more difficult.

by Sergio Hernandez
July 3, 5 a.m. EDT

The New York Police Department restored more than 2,000 previously missing discipline records to its public database of uniformed officers last month, weeks after a ProPublica report revealed data reliability issues that dogged the site for almost two years.

The department also revamped the site, including removing case numbers, which will make it more difficult for the public to identify or track missing cases. When the revamped site was published two weeks ago, the number of cases dropped again.

The system, known as the Officer Profile Database, was launched in 2021 after the New York state legislature repealed a law that, for decades, kept officer discipline records exempt from public disclosure. But a ProPublica analysis of more than 1,000 daily snapshots of the database found that, for almost two years, officers’ discipline records frequently vanished from the NYPD’s site for days — sometimes weeks — at a time, obscuring the misconduct histories for officers at all ranks, including its most senior uniformed officer. At that time, about half of cases that had at one point been in the system were missing.

[...]