When she was the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Ms. Wiley was criticized for not being more aggressive in pursuing discipline against officers.
Maya Wiley’s bid to become mayor of New York City is based largely on her promise to overhaul the Police Department, and she often highlights her one-year stint as head of the city’s police watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, as evidence of her commitment.
In particular, she focuses on the agency’s role in the 2019 firing of Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death in 2014 — a flash point that became the impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement.
But a review of her time leading the agency paints a more complicated picture of her actions in that case and of her experience holding officers accountable. Her critics say that the board felt more beholden to City Hall during her tenure, and they charge that the agency’s management and performance suffered.
Ms. Wiley also faced criticism that she did not use her time at the board, where she was chairwoman from mid-2016 to mid-2017, to pursue cases more aggressively.
In 2012, the agency recommended charges in about 70 percent of cases. The number declined steadily until 2016, when it was 12 percent. In 2017, it was 11 percent, according to agency reports.
In the same period, the agency was much more likely to recommend training and instruction for officers, one of the least serious forms of discipline. That recommendation was issued in 5 percent of cases in 2012 and 44 percent in 2016.
“The dramatic changes in C.C.R.B. recommendations over the last three years raise serious questions about the C.C.R.B.’s commitment to meaningful civilian oversight,” Christopher Dunn, then the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a 2017 letter to Ms. Wiley.
Board leaders have said that they decided to seek lesser penalties in a bid to compel police officials to agree to impose discipline more often. Ms. Wiley added in an interview that the city had also expanded the array of disciplinary actions that could be recommended, allowing the review board to opt for less severe punishment.
“It’s not really surprising that you would see charges going down as you had more tools, recommendations for those things that are the less extreme versions of some of those cases,” she said.
Of all the cases that came before the review board, none was as highly charged or closely scrutinized as the death of Mr. Garner. It took five years for Mr. Pantaleo, who was never criminally charged in the case, to lose his job.
Ms. Wiley, on the campaign trail and in candidate debates, has referenced her role in the process that ended with the firing of Mr. Pantaleo, and recently released an ad entitled “Breathe,” a reference to Mr. Garner saying repeatedly, “I can’t breathe” as officers tried to detain him.
In the ad, Ms. Wiley said it was “time the N.Y.P.D. sees us as people who deserve to breathe.”
At the time of Mr. Garner’s death, Ms. Wiley was serving as counsel to Mr. de Blasio. As such, she was one of his top two legal advisers, along with Zachary W. Carter, Mr. de Blasio’s corporation counsel.
The de Blasio administration settled on a legal strategy of not pursuing its own administrative charges — a necessary prelude to firing a police officer — against Mr. Pantaleo, while the city deferred to the Staten Island district attorney and federal authorities, who were considering more severe criminal penalties.
Mr. Carter said in an interview that City Hall did not want to initiate an internal Police Department trial at the N.Y.P.D. that might risk producing testimony that could muddy the state and federal cases.
The decision allowed Mr. Pantaleo to remain on the city payroll for five years, as investigations by the district attorney’s office and the civil rights division of the Obama administration’s Justice Department wound down with no criminal charges ever filed.
Mr. Carter defended the administration’s strategy and said that it was common procedure for local law enforcement agencies to defer to federal investigators.
He said that when he was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and prosecuting the Abner Louima police brutality case, he had similarly asked other authorities to suspend their investigations until he was done with his own. Justin Volpe, the officer who sodomized Mr. Louima, was not fired until the day that he pleaded guilty, Mr. Carter said.
Mr. Carter said that Ms. Wiley was a “conscientious lawyer” who understands that lawyers have to respect the law, “when it favors you and when it doesn’t.”
Despite her role in the administration, Ms. Wiley has faulted Mr. de Blasio for the city’s handling of the Garner case. During a mayoral forum held by WPIX-TV last month, she said that had she been mayor, “Daniel Pantaleo would have already been off the force.”
But if she ever advised the mayor to more promptly fire Mr. Pantaleo while she was the mayor’s counsel, Ms. Wiley declined to say, citing attorney-client privilege.
Two people who were in meetings with the mayor and his executive staff about the Garner case could not recall an instance in which Ms. Wiley argued for swifter discipline, though she might have done so privately.
Anthonine Pierre, deputy director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, said that while Ms. Wiley worked to maintain relationships with police accountability organizers while leading the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Ms. Wiley was never “out of step with de Blasio.”
“When we look at the fact that it took five years for Pantaleo to be fired and part of that time was under her watch, I think a lot of people should be asking her questions about what that was about,” Ms. Pierre said. “We’re not looking for another mayor who is good on rhetoric and bad on accountability.”
Mina Malik, who was executive director for two years at the police review board until November 2016, accused Ms. Wiley of overstating her role in Mr. Pantaleo’s dismissal.
“Frankly, for Maya to take credit for bringing Pantaleo to justice is not accurate,” she said. “The investigation, chokehold findings and recommendations were made before Maya came on board.”
But other current and former agency board members defended Ms. Wiley, who has also taken credit for ensuring that the review board’s civilian prosecutors bring the administrative case, rather than the Police Department’s lawyers.
Angela Fernandez, a former C.C.R.B. commissioner whose tenure overlapped with Ms. Wiley, said that the Pantaleo prosecution was the highlight of Ms. Wiley’s leadership.
John Siegal, another C.C.R.B. commissioner, still remembers the day the police commissioner ratified an internal judge’s determination that Mr. Pantaleo should be fired.
“I called Maya, and I said, ‘Congratulations, you were the one official in American who utilized her official responsibilities to move this case,’” he recalled. “‘The attorney general didn’t do it. The Justice Department didn’t do it, nobody else did it, you did it. And you are to be congratulated on that.’”
Ms. Wiley’s leadership also came under fire for allowing the board to make decisions out of public view — a criticism that echoed similar assessments of her work as counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
As counsel, Ms. Wiley argued that the mayor’s emails with a cadre of outside advisers did not have to be disclosed to the public because the advisers were acting as “agents of the city.” Thousands of pages of those emails were eventually released, to the mayor’s embarrassment.
Under her watch at the review board, questions of transparency arose when a highly anticipated report on the use of Taser stun guns was released in October 2016.
A draft report that had been leaked that spring said the police should prohibit the use of the stun guns on handcuffed subjects and highlighted that officers used the stun guns on people who were unarmed. But in the final version, released after the draft report had been circulated to City Hall and the Police Department, that language was absent — a change that officials said was part of the usual rewriting process.
In February 2017, Mr. Dunn sent another letter to Ms. Wiley asserting that “the board has ceased to engage in any meaningful public business.”
“In the 16 years I have been attending board meetings and monitoring the C.C.R.B., I have never seen the board abandon its public responsibilities as it has in the last eight months,” he wrote.
In an interview, Ms. Wiley suggested that should an Eric Garner-like tragedy arise on her watch as mayor, she would defer to the Biden administration before taking action herself, much as Mr. de Blasio deferred to the Obama administration.
“If for any reason, there was any indication that we were not going to get movement, then it would be a different story,” she said. “But look, we’ve got the A-Team in this Department of Justice on civil rights right now.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
