An Officer Bungled a Teen Rape Case. The Victim Was Abused Again.
The New York Times & New York focus
An investigator with the Yates County Sheriff's Office failed to properly investigate a child who said her adopted father was sexually abusing her. The investigator did not believe the teen, according to an accidental recording she made of her conversation with a colleague. The child was returned to her home, where she said faced months of continued sexual abuse.
Though the county district attorney filed a formal complaint against the investigator, the investigator faced little punishment. She was given a written reprimand, and she was forced to reread a five page department policy. The following year, after she failed to investigate two more cases, she was demoted. Though her county district attorney has vowed not to call her as a witness in any criminal cases, the officer remains in the department.
This is just one of many instances of disparate punishments handed down by small departments around New York State for serious offenses, with some officers facing termination even as others face brief suspensions.
A Hidden Sexual-Assault Scandal at the New York Philharmonic
New York Magazine (Vulture)
Cara Kizer was the second woman to join the brass section of the New York Philharmonic, America's oldest orchestra. The summer after she was hired, she alleges she was sexually assaulted by one colleague. Another colleague was present the night of the assault.
Within two years, the orchestra voted not to award Kizer tenure. Another woman — the first woman to join the brass section — said that she was also not given tenure because of her support for Kizer. Kizer was given an NDA.
Kizer's two former colleagues remained in the orchestra. They were fired in 2018 after the orchestra learned of additional allegations against each of them — an arbitration in 2020 brought by their union reinstate them.
In New York, Some Police Officers Can Drink, Drive and Avoid Charges
The New York Times & New York focus
Officers in New York State crashed their official vehicles, hit other motorists and arrived to work reeking of alcohol. And yet, they sometimes evaded criminal punishment, an investigation found.
You can read more about the over 10,000 disciplinary files that I gathered for this project, and for two years of reporting, in this sidebar.
Rehired: How New York’s Problem Cops Can Bounce Between Jobs
New York Focus (Reported with Chris Gelardi)
New York State does not track officer employment histories, meaning that so-called wandering officers that move between departments after facing allegations misconduct are hard to track. In this article, we focus on one officer, Joe O'Connell, and the allegations of wrongdoing that followed him through his work in three departments.
Loose Rules Let State Police Hand Out Lax Penalties for Serious Misconduct
The New York Times & New York focus
Troopers and investigators with the New York State Police have used their badge to settle personal scores and elicit favors, thousands of disciplinary files obtained by The Times and New York Focus show. But they have been allowed to remain on the job.
The agency, the second-biggest police agency with offices in every state and most major municipalities, has no formal disciplinary guidelines, records show. Discipline remains largely discretionary, with vast discrepancies even among similar cases of misconduct.
One trooper who had sex while on duty, for example, received an eight-day suspension without pay. Two years earlier he had been caught taking a photo of his genitalia while in uniform. But two others who also had sex while on duty, records show, got suspensions of 45 and 90 days without pay, even though they had relatively cleaner disciplinary records.
Other cases — those that the office decided could be handled at a lower level — were addressed with a conversation between trooper and supervisor, such as the case of a trooper who used his Taser to stun a combative suspect and then held down the trigger for 33 seconds, over two times the Taser deployment considered to be dangerous and potentially fatal.
New Records Shed Light on Inconsistencies in New York State Prison Book Bans
MuckRock
Prisons in New York state have used an opaque, vaguely defined process to ban hundreds of books and other texts, according to documents MuckRock obtained through open records requests.
Between February and July last year, about 1,800 books, magazines and newspapers were mailed to people incarcerated in New York’s 44 prisons. The reviewing committees there blocked portions of more than 300 texts, including newspaper articles, academic texts and legal publications.
Despite their significant role in controlling access to information, these committees operate largely in secrecy and their decisions are shielded from public scrutiny. New York has never made records of individual facility bans publicly available.
Can Police Departments Be Trusted to Release Their Own Misconduct Records? Apparently Not.
NEW YORK FOCUS & MUCKROCK
The police chief in Orange County’s Village of Chester claimed his department had no recent records of misconduct. But through records requests, I learned that he was hiding at least one misconduct file: an investigation into his own alleged malfeasance.
Behind the Badge: In New York City Homeless Shelters, the Same ‘Peace Officers’ Abuse Residents
New York Focus & MuckRock
I lead a team of three reporters including Annika Grosser and Sanjana Bhambhani as we investigated the disciplinary practices of New York City's Department of Homeless Services Police, a little-known police agency that maintains security in New York City-owned shelters. Using open records requests, we obtained files pertaining to 31 officers. The underlying incidents date back to 1998; they are substantiated, meaning that the Department's has investigated incident and found that the alleged event took place.
We found that a small prevalence of officers are responsible for a large portion of disciplinary incidents — three of the 31 officers committed over one third of the 66 misconduct incidents — and it can take years for officers to be suspended after the commit misconduct.
The NYPD Descent on Columbia, Told by Student Journalists
New York FocuS
The NYPD descended on Columbia University in April, 2024 at the request of college administrators and under the supervision of New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Questioned about the purpose and process of their operation, they argue that the protests — in which students have voiced objections to their universities’ ties to Israel as it bombs, shoots, and starves Palestinian civilians — are unsafe, antisemitic, and run by outsiders looking to sow chaos.
Those who followed along live on Columbia’s student-run radio station heard the events from the students’ view. But most of the press was locked out of campus. New York Focus collected their accounts to create a lasting record of what happened. The following photos and narrative dispatches are from graduate student journalists and one recent graduate of the Columbia Journalism School.
Tainted History: Former Juilliard composition students share allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct
VAN & the Investigative reporting workshop
I spent six months investigating allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against three current and former professors in The Juilliard School's prestigious music composition department. My reporting led the school to commission an independent investigation from an outside law firm that later corroborated much of the reporting. (One of the professors was removed from his position as a result of this investigation.)