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A man filed a complaint to Syracuse’s Citizen Review Board in 2019 that a group of five Syracuse Police Department officers used excessive force on him after pulling him over for driving while playing loud music.

The man, who self-identified in his incident report as Black, Hispanic and white, said he turned the music down once he knew he was going to be pulled over. Both he and an officer stated in their reports that the man quickly presented his ID.

The officer who approached the car, took his ID and told the man to exit the vehicle, he said. The man asked the officer why and then asked to speak to a supervisor when the officer did not respond. The officer then replied that if he did not get out of the car they would “spray” him, the man said. After the man turned to his passenger to tell him to record the encounter, the officer pulled him out of the car and began using excessive force, he said.

Students from Syracuse University professor Jodi Upton’s Applied Research for Magazine, News and Digital Journalists course analyzed this incident, along with over 250 others involving officer arrests and misconduct, using data provided by Rochester’s Democrat & Chronicle. The class’s data shows that the majority of incidents end with written reprimands or verbal warnings, and officers are rarely suspended for their misconduct. Some officers have also reported verbal abuse within the department.

According to the police report, the officer took the passenger’s phone and placed it on the dashboard of the vehicle. The man reported bruises on his face, arms and hands in addition to serious neck and back pain as a result of the incident.

An officer’s report of the incident said that the man refused to exit the vehicle, as he asked why he would need to for a noise infraction. The officer then justified their subsequent force, writing that, in their experience, when a subject refuses to exit a vehicle, they could be trying to conceal a weapon or contraband.

The sergeant who investigated the incident recommended verbal counseling and further training for the officers involved due to their use of harsh language. With regards to the use of excessive force, the sergeant closed the case, stating the claim was “unsubstantiated.” The sergeant also reported the person’s racial profiling claim was “unsubstantiated” as there is no evidence in either the passenger’s recording or the officer’s body cameras.

Minimally punitive punishments, such as verbal warnings and written reprimands, make up 59.0% of SPD’s final decisions about incidents involving personnel.

Another officer was suspended without pay for ten days in October of 2019 for not using verbal techniques to de-escalate an arrest, and for striking a person already in handcuffs. A man reported he was leaving the scene of a fight to seek medical care, to which the officer claims he offered to call an ambulance, but the man became continuously more agitated.

According to the officer, the man continued to come closer, and he felt his safety was at risk. Additionally, the officer claimed he could smell alcohol on the man’s breath. He then executed an arrest while the man struggled and spit in his face. According to the report, the officer claimed he punched the man in the face unintentionally, and that it was a “reaction” to being spit on.

However, excessive force reports are not a regular occurrence for SPD. Of incidents analyzed, only 16, or 6.2%, were related to “excessive physical force.”

Megan Thompson | Digital Design Director

Incidents related to driving are much more common. Of the individual incidents, 69.8% were related to “reckless driving” by officers.

In a span of 11 months, an SPD officer was involved in three reckless driving incidents. Under New York state’s point system, the incidents could have resulted in 15 points, which would suspend a private citizen’s license. SPD issued the officer two written reprimands and deducted two furlough days.

The same officer was also involved in two other driving incidents, one in 2015 and the other in 2016. The five incidents include striking another vehicle while backing out of a driveway, knocking their patrol car against a concrete pillar, disobeying a traffic control device and hitting a parked civilian car as well as another responding police vehicle.

The accidents caused nearly $7,000 in estimated damages for the police department.

Upton’s class also found that 61 police personnel, or 36.1%, appear multiple times in the dataset.

Another officer reportedly recklessly drove and then failed to perform his duty the next day while transporting a person and their property to a hospital. Though the officer delivered the man to the hospital, they failed to safeguard, return or submit the person’s belongings to SPD’s Property Division. The items were subsequently lost.

The next day, the same officer backed their car into another officer’s car, causing damage to both vehicles, an interdepartmental memo read. In total, the crash only cost the department $18.57 in repairs, and the incidents resulted in two written reprimands for the officer.

At least one document the Democrat & Chronicle collected notes that an officer was reprimanded on three separate occasions for digital communications. In November 2014, the officer sent a message regarding a dispute they had with a fellow employee. In the message, she used the phrases “c*ck sucker,” “sh*t,” “a**hole,” and “I want to punch PPL right now.” As a result, the officer lost one furlough day.

In a 2015 Facebook post, the same officer complained that SPD’s “brass” or “command staff” had “conveniently” lost her complaint against a 911 dispatcher. As a result of the incident, she lost two furlough days. She also messaged fellow officers about a dispatcher, calling them a “b*tch.” SPD gave her a two-day suspension.

Additionally, an officer was suspended without pay for two days after claiming their lieutenant “bullied” them, which the department cited as a violation of courtesy rules. The officer reported the lieutenant requested they remove a non-SWAT baseball cap, despite other officers in the room also wearing non-SWAT items. The officer claimed they were “singled out.”

In the overall dataset, only 6.6% of cases ended in a suspension.

The Democrat & Chronicle’s data collection was a part of a larger project from USA Today, its parent company. Laurie Robinson, the Clarence J. Robinson Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, spoke about the project with USA Today in 2019.

“It’s about the people who you have hired to protect you,” Robinson said. “Traditionally, we would say for sure that policing has not been a transparent entity in the U.S. Transparency is just a very key step along the way to repairing our relationships.”

News Editor Kyle Chouinard and Asst. News Editor Katie McClellan contributed reporting for this story.

Published on May 16, 2022 at 12:09 am

Contact Paola: pggonzal@syr.edu