What it showed was even more damning than what was captured in the Richards shooting. As the police entered his apartment, Trawick demanded to know, “Why are you in my home?” One officer, Herbert Davis, who was Black and more experienced, then tried to stop his white junior counterpart, Brendan Thompson, from using force. “We ain’t gonna tase him,” Davis said in the video.
Thompson didn’t listen. Instead, he fired his Taser at Trawick, sending roughly 50,000 volts pulsing through him. As Trawick started rushing toward the officers, Thompson lifted his gun and prepared to fire. “No, no — don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, pushing his partner’s arm down. But Thompson fired four shots, hitting Trawick twice and killing him almost instantly, 112 seconds after they arrived at the apartment. (Davis and Thompson did not reply to requests for comment.)
There was also troubling footage of the aftermath of the shooting. Officers swarmed outside Trawick’s apartment. “Who’s injured?” a sergeant asked. Two officers replied in near unison: “Nobody. Just a perp.”
With all that in hand, the review board completed its investigation in June 2021. The agency, through one of the few powers it had gained over the years, can file and prosecute disciplinary cases against officers — which triggers a Police Department trial, after which a departmental judge sends a provisional decision to the police commissioner, who makes the final call.
This September, the police judge overseeing the Trawick case recommended that there should be no discipline. Her reason had nothing to do with the shooting itself; in fact, the judge wrote that she had “serious doubts” about the decisions of the officer who killed Trawick. But the review board, she said, had failed to file charges within the 18-month statute of limitations, as outlined under state law. In the end, the department’s refusal to give the footage to the review board had effectively run out the clock on any chance the officers would be punished.
“That should not be tolerated,” says Jeff Schlanger, the former deputy commissioner. “Both C.C.R.B. and N.Y.P.D. are city agencies. This is something the mayor needs to resolve.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, huge demonstrations for racial justice and against police brutality rolled across the country and the world. It was a global reckoning brought on by footage — the video, recorded by a teenager on her smartphone for more than eight minutes, showing Derek Chauvin ending Floyd’s life.
Napolitano and her team at the review board had collected data showing how footage could make a difference in New York too. Access to body-camera footage roughly doubled the likelihood that agency investigators would be able to decide a case on its merits rather than dismiss it as inconclusive. But the backlog was growing. That May, the board filed 212 requests with the Police Department for body-worn-camera footage — and the department sent only 33 responses. (While the pandemic slowed the work of all city agencies, the backlog predated it.)
“The withholding of footage stops investigations and prevents the C.C.R.B. from providing adequate and meaningful oversight of the N.Y.P.D.,” an internal agency memo warned. “The situation for New York City oversight of the police has steadily grown worse during the duration of a B.W.C. program intended primarily to aid oversight.”
‘We just said to police departments: “Here’s this tool. Figure out how you would like to use it.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re going to use it in a way that most benefits them.’
Napolitano campaigned internally for a law that would take away the department’s absolute control over footage and give the review board its own access. That November, she was let go, along with three other staff members who had sent pointed emails and memos about the department’s withholding of footage. The four filed a lawsuit claiming that their firing violated their First Amendment rights and received an undisclosed settlement. A review-board spokeswoman wrote in an email that the agency has “publicly and repeatedly called on legislators to support the fight for direct access. No employee has ever been fired for supporting direct access to B.W.C. footage.”
This spring, the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, and the New York City public advocate, Jumaane Williams, sponsored a bill that would give the review board direct access to footage so that it wouldn’t be beholden to the department for cooperation during investigations. “There are difficult split-second decisions that have to happen” in policing, Williams told me. “But if we’re not able to look at the same thing, if we have to take the word of the N.Y.P.D., that doesn’t make this conversation any easier.”
The Police Department has opposed the bill. A department official insisted at a City Council hearing in March that the department “does not fear transparency.” But the official argued that it would be an “insurmountable obstacle” to give the review board direct access while following state confidentiality laws. The bill has been stalled for months.
The city, meanwhile, paid out at least $121 million in settlements last year for lawsuits alleging misconduct by police officers — the highest total in five years.
With footage remaining in the control of the Police Department, body-worn cameras have made little difference to the public. This year, a federal court monitor wrote a scathing report about persistent problems with stop-and-frisk, the unconstitutional policing tactic that prompted Judge Scheindlin to order the department to adopt body cameras a decade ago. The monitor found that contrary to Scheindlin’s expectations, police supervisors weren’t using footage to flag misconduct. In a sample of cases the monitor looked at, supervisors reviewing footage of stop-and-frisk encounters concluded that 100 percent of the cases they looked at were proper stops. The court monitor reviewed the same footage and found that 37 percent of the stops were unconstitutional.
“It was an experiment,” Scheindlin says, one that didn’t anticipate issues like control over footage. Scheindlin, who stepped down from the bench in 2016, says she now believes that the Police Department should no longer be the sole custodian of its own video. “That troubles me,” she says. “It should always be somebody independent.”
In interviews with a half dozen former commanders and high-level officials, most of whom were involved in the body-camera program itself, they said that despite its public pronouncements, the department hasn’t committed to using footage for accountability. “Body cams are essential, if done right,” says a high-ranking commander who just retired and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he still works in law enforcement. “They are a game changer.” He added: “If there’s a problem, you flag — and potentially there’s discipline. But that’s not happening in most cases.” Instead, he says, body cameras have become “an exercise in just work they have to do. It’s a culture thing.”