What we found so far in decades of NY police misconduct documents
When New York police officers took demeaning photos of an incarcerated person, crashed a police cruiser or left a gun on the floor of a school bathroom, internal reports detailing the infractions were written and filed away at their departments. The public never saw the documents — and likely never knew these things ever happened.
Until now.
In 2020, a section of New York's Civil Rights Law that shielded police misconduct records from view —section 50-a — was repealed, allowing journalists and the public to access decades of records about the conduct of police officers working at departments across the state. For five years, the USA TODAY Network has been fighting to obtain those records from every New York state police department.
So far, about a quarter of the state's more than 500 departments have responded with records, and we've added them to a searchable database, where you can look up an officer, a department, a location or a type of misconduct. We're still pursuing records to make this database more comprehensive.
In 2025, the USA TODAY Network partnered with Syracuse University students at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, and Central Current, a Syracuse nonprofit newsroom, on a series that investigates misconduct incidents and analyses data found in these records, some of which date back to the 1970s.
You can find those stories below. If you have a question about finding police misconduct records for your city or town in New York, fill out our online form.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: What we found so far in decades of NY police misconduct documents
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