The Civilian Complaint Review Board “dumped” hundreds of cases on the NYPD for review with little time left for a decision on whether to discipline the officers involved, police sources told The Post.
In one instance, the NYPD was fielding nearly 1,000 cases in a month from the CCRB with less than 30 days to go before a required decision, the sources said.
The CCRB even sent some cases for review after the statute of limitations had expired, the sources claimed.
The CCRB and the NYPD have 18 months to decide discipline against an officer accused of misconduct, with the legal clock beginning the day a civilian files a complaint.
Word of the tight deadline came days after Legal Aid made public an analysis that found NYPD Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell sat on 346 cases where the CCRB substantiated police misconduct, allowing the officers to avoid punishment by letting the statute of limitations on the charges to expire.
The last-minute cases kept on coming even after “concerns” of timely delivery had been discussed dating back to 2021.
Sewell broke with recommendations for discipline from the CCRB over substantiated misconduct in more than 400 of the total 754 cases last year, according to the Legal Aid study released this week.
But when the analysis took into account how much time the commissioner had to consider each case, the police sources countered the Top Cop “deviated” from just 70 of the CCRB cases — added that Sewell In 2022 agreed with the CCRB’s recommendations 84% of the time.
Of the 117 cases delivered to her desk so far this year, they noted, Sewell has agreed with CCRB recommendations 99 times — or 85% of the time.
The tight timeline for deciding discipline came even after the usual 18-month statute of limitations was increased to 26 months during the pandemic.
Before COVID-19, the CCRB delivered “around 40 to 50 cases” for NYPD in any given month.
But in April 2022, for example, the board “dumped” 839 cases on the department, 98% of which had less than 30 business days left before the deadline to decide discipline ran out, the sources contended.
The NYPD contends the cases were sent to the NYPD “with a severely protracted timeframe with which to evaluate them.”
“If the CCRB thinks the NYPD is doing this on purpose, they need to come forward and deliver their timeline for when they received the complaint, when they started their investigation and how long it took them to reach their conclusion because the clock starts when the complaint is made and not when CCRB delivers their findings,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The CCRB could not immediately be reached for comment.