This story was originally published by ProPublica.
Lawmakers and advocates have slammed New York City Mayor Eric Adams and called for changes in the wake of ProPublica’s investigation into a secretive, problematic police unit led by allies of the mayor.
ProPublica found that the mayor championed the New York City Police Department’s Community Response Team despite a pattern of aggressive and often abusive policing flagged by department officials. An officer in the unit killed a motorcyclist after swerving his police car into him. A team commander punched and kicked a driver in the head. And another commander shoved a man into a car window after the man complained about being stopped for no apparent reason.
Two of the unit’s founders, who are close to the mayor, have their own problematic records.
One, Chief of Department John Chell, once shot a man in the back, killing him. While Chell argued he fired by accident, a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. The jury awarded the man’s family $2.5 million dollars. Chell did not respond to requests for comment.
The other CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, has been repeatedly found by the city’s police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, to have engaged in misconduct, including pointing a gun at a motorcyclist and threatening to kill him. Daughtry was docked 10 vacation days for that. Daughtry did not respond to requests for comment. Adams recently made him deputy mayor for public safety.
State Sen. Jessica Ramos told ProPublica that Adams’ “reliance on cronyism makes New York City less safe.” She added, “People like Chell and Daughtry should have never been trusted with the authority they were given — and wouldn’t have been by a serious mayor. If we’re going to have a professional police department and real community policing, the rot needs to be cut out.”
Local civil rights organizations, meanwhile, demanded that the Community Response Team be shuttered. “It’s time to dismantle this unit,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union in a statement.
“The CRT is a dangerous unit, and ProPublica’s reporting shows it operates without accountability under the protection of a corrupt and compromised mayor,” said civil rights group LatinoJustice. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch “should disband this unit.”
The Community Response Team was started in the early days of Adams’ administration. It focused on so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in groups, which Adams had identified as a priority. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” Chell told a local TV station in 2023.
But Tisch may be reducing the role of the CRT. At a recent City Council hearing — held on the day ProPublica’s story published — the commissioner described how she is changing the NYPD’s approach to the quality-of-life issues that have long been the CRT’s focus.
Tisch said the department is shifting away from using centralized units such as CRT for these problems and moving instead to rely on local officers at precinct houses.
“Over the past several years, quality-of-life enforcement at the NYPD has been led by a unit called CRT,” Tisch said. “We are proposing to create a quality-of-life division at the NYPD so that we can make precinct commanders and the resources that they control responsible for quality-of-life complaints.”
Asked about the unit and the commissioner’s comments at a recent mayoral press conference, Adams offered support for the team.
“CRT is here,” the mayor said. “I support all my units. And if they don’t all stand up and do the job the way they’re supposed to do, those who don’t will be held accountable.”
Over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints alleging improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Another NYPD team with a similar size and mandate has had about half as many complaints.
The scrutiny of the CRT will almost certainly continue. One of the police department’s oversight agencies, the office of the inspector general for the NYPD, has been digging into the unit. The watchdog put out a report last fall criticizing the CRT’s “lack of public transparency” and “absence of clear rules.” A spokesperson said that the unit is still under investigation.
The role of the CRT was not the only reform related to ProPublica’s reporting that Tisch discussed in her recent testimony. The commissioner also said the NYPD has stopped its policy of throwing out misconduct cases without looking at the evidence. ProPublica investigated that practice last fall and found that the department ended hundreds of cases of alleged misconduct simply because it had received the referrals from civilian investigators within three months of a deadline for discipline.
The cases had already been investigated and substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board and were sent to the NYPD for disciplinary action. In one case, an officer punched a man in the groin, the oversight agency found. In another, officers tackled a young man and then wrongly stopped and searched him.
An NYPD spokesperson said the department has already begun processing such cases again.
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