Thread by @georgejoseph94

NEW: Civilian complaints have unique tags linking NYPD officers together. @mrejfox & I put tens of 1000s of those links into a network map, revealing tightly-knit police clusters which civilians have repeatedly accused of abuse:
gothamist.com/news/mapping-c…

2/ Most NYPD officers, who have ties to their colleagues through civilian complaints at all, only have a handful. But a small % had TONS of ties. The piece has an explorable map showing only cops who had at least 99 ties to colleagues (See article for our tie count methodology):

3/ Many of these highly-connected officers are at the center of distinct network communities + have controversial histories. One big officer node in this isloated cluster represents a detective who recently retired after he was seen on camera using an alleged banned chokehold:

4/ 2 hops south of the detective in the same cluster stands another large node representing an officer who was caught in an NYPD sting ferrying cocaine. That officer had 254 network ties with 29 other officers (Note: the image doesn't show all his ties bc of the 99 tie filter)

5/ Daniel Pantaleo, who was fired in 2019 after an investigation into his fatal chokehold of Eric Garner, pops up in this top tie count network. He had 184 network ties with 27 other officers, putting him in the top 150 NYPD officers of the data we analyzed.

6/ The officer ranked highest—based on unique co-appearances with some and repeat appearances with others—is Robert Martinez, a decorated sergeant who worked for nearly 2 decades across Brooklyn. He had 600+ network ties with 60+ colleagues since 2010.

7/ Martinez worked for many years in Anti-Crime, a plainclothes unit which hunted for guns in neighorhoods suffering from violent crime. Police advocates note that high-activity officers like him make numerous, combative arrests, thus generating more chances for complaint ties.

8/ In 2007, a 23-year-old Black resident accused Martinez + a colleague of pushing him up against a wall for a search. The young man claimed Martinez placed his elbow on his throat “trying to wrestle” him. The CCRB substantiated a force finding but the NYPD issued no discipline.

9/ In 2013, another Black man accused Martinez of punching him in the face + pressing his boot down onto his lip during a search outside his home in East New York. The man filed a civilian complaint + sued, winning $50K plus. The NYPD docked Martinez ten vacation days.

10/ In the following years, Martinez continued to generate substantiated allegations for improper stops, searches + using foul language resulting in minor or no discipline. In the meantime, a dense cluster of officers tied to him through civilian complaints gradually formed.

11/ Are the outlier officer nodes in this network "viral," influencing misconduct across their mini-networks? Or do they simply represent high-activity cops? We couldn't tease this out because we don't have precise NYPD unit assignment + entry data. We have requested it.

12/ But others have taken this further step. Even controlling for variables like unit assignments, @AVPapachristos + other academics found in Chicago that key officers can exert negative influence, spreading misconduct across their networks:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

13/ Examining force complaint data in Chicago, they found officers working with a higher proportion of colleagues with use of force histories were more likely to be involved in future use-of-force complaints themselves. Several residents we spoke to felt the same was true in NYC.

14/ On an April evening last year, Adegoke Atunbi says he was attempting to record a police encounter he had stumbled upon on a street in East NY when an officer suddenly pushed away his camera and began assaulting him. Video of their encounter here:

15/ Video shows an officer in a blue Under Armour shirt telling Atunbi to back up before suddenly jerking his arm towards the camera. “He just lunged at me, he grabbed me, punched me in the face, and threw me to the ground, and a bunch of officers just tackled me,” Atunbi claims.

16/ The officer’s badge number in the video matches that of Adnan Radoncic, a sergeant in the 75th Precinct, as @kduggan16 first reported. Turns out Radoncic is the 5th biggest node in the network map with 400+ network ties spread out between 68 colleagues since 2010.

17/ Atunbi asserts that Radoncic was a catalyst for a group assault on the street that day.
“As soon as he grabbed me, all the officers was hands on. It’s like they just followed his lead,” he said.

18/ While he was on the ground, Atunbi says he felt a group of officers on top of him. He remembers being punched in the face and kicked in the head. “You would have thought I had a rocket launcher in my hand, the way they tackled me to the ground. All I had was my cell phone.”

19/ In response to our story, the Civilian Complaint Review Board Chair Fred Davie said his agency @CCRB_NYC could learn from network analyses like this as it studies how to investigate racial profiling + other forms of bias-based policing. The NYPD decided not to comment.