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TESTIMONY
Testimony by DeRay Mckesson from Campaign Zero on CCRB reform and police accountability
1:51:51
·
173 sec
DeRay Mckesson, Executive Director of Campaign Zero, testifies about the need for police accountability through reform of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB).
He argues that the current system, where the Police Commissioner has final disciplinary authority, renders CCRB oversight ineffective as recommendations are often ignored.
McKesson proposes amending the charter to grant the CCRB final disciplinary authority, aligning with its intended purpose and citing examples from other cities.
DeRay Mckesson
1:51:51
Hello.
1:51:51
I'm Doreen McKesson, the executive director of Campaign Zero, an organization that works to end police violence and mass incarceration across the country.
1:51:59
But my first job in the honor of my life was being a sixth grade math teacher in Starred City in East New York.
1:52:04
Sixth grade is still the
Abdul Nasser Rad
1:52:06
again, I
Richard R. Buery Jr.
1:52:06
have to interrupt.
1:52:07
Yeah.
1:52:07
I shout out, East New York.
DeRay Mckesson
1:52:08
I want those seconds back.
Dr. Lisette Nieves
1:52:10
That's also in Brooklyn chair.
1:52:12
I just wanna make sure.
DeRay Mckesson
1:52:13
Sixth grade is still the best grade of middle school to teach.
1:52:15
I'm not here to talk about housing directly, but I am here to talk about public safety.
1:52:19
And we think about public safety as the only issue that touches all of the other issues that people think about safety a lot both in this city and around the country, and there's no way to talk about safety without talking about the police.
1:52:31
We also think that the issue of accountability is key to talking about the issue of safety if we talk about it at all.
1:52:37
The CCRB, as you know, exists, and the power to discipline any police officer in New York City is arrested in the charter, and the charter is clear that the police chief is the only person who has the power to discipline an officer.
1:52:49
So the CCRB right now functions as a as a review and advisory body.
1:52:54
They make a lot of recommendations, some of which are ignored and some of some of which are heated by.
1:53:01
But I'll tell you, when we look at the data over time, we have seen the commissioners have just wholesale dismissed many of the recommendations of the CCRB.
1:53:09
And the question become, is it really oversight if they can write recommendations, they can do investigations, and they actually lead to nothing?
1:53:16
When I think about what I told my students, what I tell people as organizers is that we should make structures that work independent of what are the people who hold the roles, our people we like, people we don't like.
1:53:27
And right now, we have a structure that actually doesn't work, that it is beholden to who the mayor is and who the police chief is, and there are some concrete ways that we can actually change this.
1:53:36
We can give the CCRB the power to actually discipline officers.
1:53:38
It have to be in accordance with the discipline matrix, which is robust here in this city.
1:53:43
When I think about the work that we've done, we've reviewed more police unit contracts and discipline systems across the country.
1:53:49
So we've done an analysis of 3,000 discipline systems across the country of the police, and there's a real opportunity here.
1:53:56
And the last thing that I'll say is that if we are able to give the CCRB the power to discipline, this would not be an outlier in some of the major cities.
1:54:05
There are cities across the country, major police departments, where the police chief is either not the only person who can discipline a police officer, or there's some places like LA where the police chief actually cannot fire a police officer at all on his own.
1:54:18
He has to go through another process.
1:54:20
So I say this to say that I think it's possible.
1:54:22
The only people who are not in favor of this largely are the police, and what people large what people say is that if this happens, police will quit, things like that.
1:54:30
There's a 2020 study by Grumwald that says that police officers who choose to leave are not leaving because of the protests or accountability.
1:54:38
They're leaving for a host of other reasons.
1:54:41
So I'll stop there with ten seconds to spare.