Eric Umansky, ProPublica

In the spring of 2019, two New York City Police Department officers entered the Bronx apartment of Kawaski Trawick. The 32-year-old personal trainer and dancer had called 911 after locking himself out.

But 112 seconds after their arrival, footage showed, one of the officers shot and killed Trawick, despite the officer’s more-experienced partner repeatedly telling him not to use force.

When an internal investigation later cleared the officers — saying “no wrongdoing was found” — the NYPD offered no explanation for its reasoning. But records obtained by ProPublica can now reveal how the department came to that conclusion.

Investigators never explored key exchanges between the two officers in the run-up to the shooting. They also never followed up with the officers when their accounts contradicted the video evidence.

“Any conversation between you and your partner?” the head of the investigative unit asked Officer Herbert Davis hours after the shooting.

“No,” Davis answered.

That wasn’t true.

After arriving at Trawick’s apartment and finding him holding a stick and a bread knife, body-worn camera footage shows that Davis, who is Black, told his less-experienced white partner, Officer Brendan Thompson, not to use his Taser. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he said, motioning for Thompson to step back.

Thompson fired his Taser anyway, causing Trawick to become enraged, and Davis then tried to stop Thompson from shooting Trawick. “No, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” Davis said, before briefly pushing Thompson’s gun down.

The investigators had access to all that footage. They never asked either officer about it.

ProPublica obtained the NYPD’s full internal investigation, including audio of interviews with both officers, via a Freedom of Information Law request.

The documents and interviews provide a rare window into how exactly a police department examines the conduct of its own officers after a shooting. The newly released information also expands the public record of the Trawick case as New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board pursues disciplinary charges against both officers for wrongfully going into Trawick’s apartment and failing to render aid after he’d been shot. Thompson faces additional charges for his use of force.

The officers are contesting the charges in an ongoing administrative trial. Neither their lawyers nor their union responded to requests for comment for this story, but Thompson told police investigators that before firing on Trawick, “I feared for my safety.” The NYPD did not respond to ProPublica’s detailed questions or a request to interview Deputy Chief Kevin Maloney, the former investigative unit head who questioned both officers. He is scheduled to testify in the administrative trial on Thursday.

The NYPD’s Force Investigation Division, which conducted the investigation of Trawick’s death, was created after the killing of Eric Garner and focuses on officer shootings and other uses of force.

“You put some of your top investigators,” said then-Commissioner William Bratton in 2015 when he started the unit. “I will get a better investigation, a speedy investigation, a more comprehensive investigation.”

The investigation of Trawick’s killing took nearly two years. The two officers, Thompson and Davis, were each interviewed once, for about 30 minutes. (Bratton, who stepped down as commissioner in 2016, did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the files, investigators often refer to Trawick as “the perpetrator,” though it’s not clear that he had committed any crime — he had called 911 after he locked himself out of his apartment. They also repeatedly portray Trawick as effectively to blame for what happened.

“Due to the perpetrator becoming more agitated by the officers presence, Police Officer Thompson had deployed his taser,” an investigator wrote.

Trawick had struggled with his mental health and with drugs. A security guard in the building had also called 911 saying Trawick was acting erratically.

But by the time the officers arrived, Trawick had already been let back into his apartment by the Fire Department. “Why are you in my home?” he repeatedly asked the officers.

The interview sessions include a number of false and misleading statements by the officers.

For example, Davis told investigators that Thompson fired his Taser after Trawick started to “take a step forward, like if he wanted to come at us.” But the footage shows Trawick wasn’t advancing when Thompson, holding his gun in one hand and the Taser in the other, used his Taser on Trawick without any warning.

Thompson recalled that after he used the Taser, he again tried to warn Trawick. “I tell him to drop the knife you know a bunch of times.” The footage shows no such warnings were issued between when Thompson used his Taser and when he shot four times, killing Trawick.

Investigators never followed up. Beyond asking the officers whether they were wearing cameras, the investigators never questioned Thompson and Davis about any of the footage.

“That’s huge, they intentionally did that,” said John Baeza, a former detective who spent 16 years with the NYPD and now works as an expert witness. “That has to be intent not to question them about that.”

The investigators found no wrongdoing even when they were confronted with apparent violations of protocol.

Thompson, for instance, told investigators that he believed Trawick to be an “emotionally disturbed” person. The NYPD patrol guide says that officers facing a potentially dangerous person in crisis should “isolate and contain” them — that text is underlined — and should “immediately request the response of a supervisor and Emergency Services Unit.”

Neither Thompson nor Davis did so.

At one point, the chief investigator, Maloney, asked Davis why they didn’t call for help. “We didn’t feel we needed anybody just yet,” Davis responded. “We didn’t know how bad it was until we open the door.” Investigators did not press the issue.

A former NYPD detective who helped create de-escalation training for the department previously told ProPublica that Davis and Thompson could have simply closed the door and called in the specialized unit.

The timing and circumstances of the interviews were also significant. While Davis was interviewed just hours after the shooting, Thompson was interviewed roughly seven months later and, he said during the interview, he was given the body-worn camera footage to watch first. Advocates and many experts say officers shouldn’t be allowed to preview footage of incidents before talking to investigators in case the officers try to alter their testimony.

Though the NYPD allowed the officer who shot Trawick to see the footage during the investigation, the department long refused to show it to the public or the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The department withheld footage for more than a year and fought against a lawsuit that had sought the full recording, arguing that releasing it would interfere with the department’s investigation.

A state judge later ruled that the NYPD had illegally withheld footage and acted in “bad faith.”

When the full full footage was disclosed, it showed what happened in the minutes after the shooting. After a sergeant arrived and asked whether anyone was hurt, two officers responded in near-unison, “Nobody. Just a perp.”

The Bronx District Attorney investigated the shooting but declined to prosecute.

In the end, the NYPD investigators summarized their findings with a simple line: “No violation of department policy occurred.”

Asked about the investigation, Trawick’s mother, Ellen Trawick, called it “outrageous.” The details, she said, “show the NYPD never even tried to do a real investigation.”

The disciplinary trial of the two officers is scheduled to end in the next few days. But regardless of the ruling by the NYPD judge overseeing it, police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has the sole authority over what, if any, punishment to impose.

To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, I talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book “How Civil Wars Start” has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed why many democracies are retrenching and how the U.S. stands alone — and not in a good way.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you walk through the vital signs of democracy that you and other political scientists have been tracking and that are trending the wrong way in the U.S. and elsewhere?

So there are probably five big data sets that measure the quality of democracy and countries around the world. They all measure democracy slightly differently. But every single one of them has shown that democracies around the world are in decline. And not just the fledgling democracies, but sacrosanct liberal democracies in Sweden, the U.K. and the United States.

These indices are like vital signs, but instead of for your body, it’s for our body politic. What are the most important ones?

So, empirically, we can’t rank order them. But we know what the good things are, and if you start attacking them, you’re attacking the vital organs.

One is constraints on executive power. You want lots of checks and balances on the executive branch. Here in the United States, you want to make sure that the legislative branch is strong and independent and willing to check presidential power. You want to know that the judicial branch is the same. Another one would be rule of law. Is the rule of law actually respected? Is it uncorrupted? You don’t want a system where certain individuals are above the law. If you want to become, say, Orban 2.0, you place loyalists in the Justice Department who are beholden to you and not to the rule of law.

You also want a free and open press, so that your citizens get high-quality information and they can make good decisions. Another one is you really want a competitive political environment, so that there’s a level playing field for people who are competing for power. You could make a very uneven playing field by party. So you can restrict the vote, you can make voting more difficult.

So these are all vital: Do you have constraints on the executive? Do you have the rule of law, so that there’s accountability? Do you have a level playing field, so that there can really be popular participation?

Another warning sign you’ve talked about is when a party becomes less about policy and more about identity, a shift one can see in the Republican Party in recent years. Can you talk about it?

The Republicans have always had a challenge that they were the party of wealthy Americans and business. The problem is wealthy Americans will always be a very small minority of Americans. So for wealthy Americans, they have to convince at least some nonwealthy Americans to support their platform. How do you do that? Well, you do it with issues of identity, their sense of threat, their sense of fear, their sense of the world is changing and “I’m being left behind.” It’s very effective.

I want to get to why we see these dynamics playing out across so many countries. You cite three dynamics. One is that the dominant caste in many nations, white people, is trending toward minority status. Another is increasing wealth concentration, where rural areas are often losing out. And then there’s a new medium that has risen that is unregulated and unmediated: social media.

On No. 3, the new medium, I would state it stronger than that. It’s not that it’s unregulated per se. It’s that it’s being driven by algorithms that selectively push out the more extreme incendiary messages.

You also wrote about another concept that I hadn’t heard before: ethnic entrepreneurs. These are politicians like, say, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian strongman, who recognize an opportunity in appealing to the fears of a particular group.

Yep. He was not a nationalist. He was a straight up Communist. And again, that gets back to the difference between a political party based on ideology and one based on ethnicity. He became the leader of the Serb party.

So he saw which way the wind was blowing and he put up a sail. And that’s what an ethnic entrepreneur does?

Yes, but it can also be more strategic than that. Milosevic really had a problem in that communism was over. And if he wanted to stay in power, he was going to have to compete in elections. How is he going to get elected? And then he’s like, “Oh, like the largest ethnic group, and in this country are Serbs. I’m Serb!” If I can convince the Serbs during this time of change and insecurity and uncertainty when everyone’s a little bit on edge that unless they support a Serb, the Croats are gonna kill them, then then I can catapult myself to power. That’s classic ethnic entrepreneurship.

I want to ask you a last question I’ve been thinking about a lot myself. Like a number of news organizations, we’ve created a team devoted to covering threats to democracy. But after I read your book, I stopped referring to it as that because it occurred to me that the term threats to democracy reinforces a story that we Americans tell ourselves: that we already have a true democracy, the best darn one in the world, and we just need to protect it.

Our American democracy, even when we were happy with it and thought it was doing really well, it already had a whole series of undemocratic natures that no other healthy liberal democracy has.

Our electoral college, nobody has that. That was a compromise to rural states. We have the fact that our elections are run by partisan agents. No other healthy liberal democracy has that. Canada, this enormous country, has an independent electoral commission that runs all of the elections. Every ballot is the same no matter if you vote in Prince Edward Island or the Yukon. Or that we allow so much money to be injected into our system. Nobody else has this.

So we have not only these undemocratic features but a whole number of vulnerabilities that if you really did want to somehow cement in minority rule, you could do this legally. So in many ways we have a terrible system that’s ripe to be exploited.

Voters in Sweden this month gave a leading role to a far-right party with neo-Nazi roots. Italy is also on the cusp of putting a party in power that has fascist origins. And of course, in the United States, one party has increasingly embraced election denialism and attempted to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process.

To try to understand what, exactly, is happening, I talked with Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California San Diego who studies democracies across the world. Her book “How Civil Wars Start” has become a bestseller. Rather than talk about the prospects for political violence, we discussed why many democracies are retrenching and how the U.S. stands alone — and not in a good way.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you walk through the vital signs of democracy that you and other political scientists have been tracking and that are trending the wrong way in the U.S. and elsewhere?

So there are probably five big data sets that measure the quality of democracy and countries around the world. They all measure democracy slightly differently. But every single one of them has shown that democracies around the world are in decline. And not just the fledgling democracies, but sacrosanct liberal democracies in Sweden, the U.K. and the United States.

These indices are like vital signs, but instead of for your body, it’s for our body politic. What are the most important ones?

So, empirically, we can’t rank order them. But we know what the good things are, and if you start attacking them, you’re attacking the vital organs.

One is constraints on executive power. You want lots of checks and balances on the executive branch. Here in the United States, you want to make sure that the legislative branch is strong and independent and willing to check presidential power. You want to know that the judicial branch is the same. Another one would be rule of law. Is the rule of law actually respected? Is it uncorrupted? You don’t want a system where certain individuals are above the law. If you want to become, say, Orban 2.0, you place loyalists in the Justice Department who are beholden to you and not to the rule of law.

You also want a free and open press, so that your citizens get high-quality information and they can make good decisions. Another one is you really want a competitive political environment, so that there’s a level playing field for people who are competing for power. You could make a very uneven playing field by party. So you can restrict the vote, you can make voting more difficult.

So these are all vital: Do you have constraints on the executive? Do you have the rule of law, so that there’s accountability? Do you have a level playing field, so that there can really be popular participation?

Another warning sign you’ve talked about is when a party becomes less about policy and more about identity, a shift one can see in the Republican Party in recent years. Can you talk about it?

The Republicans have always had a challenge that they were the party of wealthy Americans and business. The problem is wealthy Americans will always be a very small minority of Americans. So for wealthy Americans, they have to convince at least some nonwealthy Americans to support their platform. How do you do that? Well, you do it with issues of identity, their sense of threat, their sense of fear, their sense of the world is changing and “I’m being left behind.” It’s very effective.

I want to get to why we see these dynamics playing out across so many countries. You cite three dynamics. One is that the dominant caste in many nations, white people, is trending toward minority status. Another is increasing wealth concentration, where rural areas are often losing out. And then there’s a new medium that has risen that is unregulated and unmediated: social media.

On No. 3, the new medium, I would state it stronger than that. It’s not that it’s unregulated per se. It’s that it’s being driven by algorithms that selectively push out the more extreme incendiary messages.

You also wrote about another concept that I hadn’t heard before: ethnic entrepreneurs. These are politicians like, say, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian strongman, who recognize an opportunity in appealing to the fears of a particular group.

Yep. He was not a nationalist. He was a straight up Communist. And again, that gets back to the difference between a political party based on ideology and one based on ethnicity. He became the leader of the Serb party.

So he saw which way the wind was blowing and he put up a sail. And that’s what an ethnic entrepreneur does?

Yes, but it can also be more strategic than that. Milosevic really had a problem in that communism was over. And if he wanted to stay in power, he was going to have to compete in elections. How is he going to get elected? And then he’s like, “Oh, like the largest ethnic group, and in this country are Serbs. I’m Serb!” If I can convince the Serbs during this time of change and insecurity and uncertainty when everyone’s a little bit on edge that unless they support a Serb, the Croats are gonna kill them, then then I can catapult myself to power. That’s classic ethnic entrepreneurship.

I want to ask you a last question I’ve been thinking about a lot myself. Like a number of news organizations, we’ve created a team devoted to covering threats to democracy. But after I read your book, I stopped referring to it as that because it occurred to me that the term threats to democracy reinforces a story that we Americans tell ourselves: that we already have a true democracy, the best darn one in the world, and we just need to protect it.

Our American democracy, even when we were happy with it and thought it was doing really well, it already had a whole series of undemocratic natures that no other healthy liberal democracy has.

Our electoral college, nobody has that. That was a compromise to rural states. We have the fact that our elections are run by partisan agents. No other healthy liberal democracy has that. Canada, this enormous country, has an independent electoral commission that runs all of the elections. Every ballot is the same no matter if you vote in Prince Edward Island or the Yukon. Or that we allow so much money to be injected into our system. Nobody else has this.

So we have not only these undemocratic features but a whole number of vulnerabilities that if you really did want to somehow cement in minority rule, you could do this legally. So in many ways we have a terrible system that’s ripe to be exploited.

It was a little more than two years ago that I really started learning about the reality of police oversight in America.

On Halloween night in 2019, my wife and our then-6-year-old daughter were walking home from trick-or-treating in our Brooklyn neighborhood when they saw a New York Police Department car go the wrong way down a street and smack into a teenager, who fell and then ran away.

When I contacted the NYPD afterward, they told me that what my family saw hadn’t happened. A police car hadn’t hit a teenager. The teenager had hit the car. Or, as an NYPD statement put it, he “ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

I ended up diving into the case and wrote about it the next summer during the global racial justice protests spawned by George Floyd’s murder.

The police had been looking for a group of Black, male teenagers who reportedly had stolen a cellphone. After the teenager who’d been hit by the car ran away, my wife, Sara, watched as officers turned their attention to other Black boys.

The police lined the boys up against the wall of our local movie theater, then arrested three of them. The boys insisted they had just been trick-or-treating. The youngest was 12. He was crying, asking repeatedly, “What did I do?”

I didn’t hear anything more about the case for a long while. Then, a few weeks ago, the city agency charged with investigating civilians’ complaints of police abuse let me know it had finally finished its investigation.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board found that, contrary to the NYPD’s assertions, an officer did hit a kid with his car. It also found that officers, including the precinct commander, had arrested the boys without justification. An officer had even drawn his gun and pointed it at one of the boys.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

The police response that night started when some teenagers told officers they had been robbed at the local park. But the officers only had what investigators later described as “varying and inconsistent descriptions” of who they were looking for.

The officers stopped a group of boys a few blocks away. There was little about them that matched the description of the assailants other than that they were Black, young and walking together. Indeed, the CCRB’s report noted, one of the officers “stated that he was not certain whether they were involved.”

Some of the boys ran, including the one who was hit by the police car. (They told investigators that they ran because they were scared.)

The boys who were arrested — a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and the 12-year-old — said that the officers never offered any explanation for why they were stopped. They were released without charges, after being held for hours. Their parents said they weren’t given any documentation on the arrests. The mother of one of the boys worked for the NYPD as a school safety officer, but even she couldn’t get any record of what happened.

It was as if the case was being pushed into a fog.

The CCRB began investigating after receiving a witness complaint. But the agency’s investigations are dependent on the NYPD cooperating. And as often happens, the NYPD has been slow to do so.

Take body-worn cameras, which are often critical in abuse investigations. The CCRB noted it faced “extremely substantial delays” in getting the Halloween night footage from the NYPD. While some cities have given civilian investigators direct access to body cam footage, the NYPD has rejected calls to do the same.

The agency also did not get to interview officers until more than a year after the incident. By the time officers did finally submit to interviews, they had serious trouble with their recollections. When the officer who drove the car was asked whether he had hit a kid, he “stated that he could not remember.”

In December, the CCRB told me it had just filed disciplinary charges against the officers: for wrongful arrests, for pulling a gun without justification, and for, as the bureaucratic lingo puts it, “Force, Vehicle.”

The next step would typically be disciplinary hearings, in which the CCRB acts as the prosecutor and the proceedings are overseen by an NYPD judge, who answers ultimately to the police commissioner. While the penalties after guilty verdicts are often wrist-slappy, like lost vacation days, it seemed like this case could be a rare, if modest, victory for police accountability.

Then, about a week after I heard about the outcome of the investigation, I learned of another twist.

The NYPD had informed the CCRB that it was invoking its authority to unilaterally end the cases against most of the officers the civilian agency had charged with misconduct. No disciplinary charges would be brought against them.

Instead of letting the CCRB’s disciplinary process play out, the NYPD said it would handle the cases internally. The NYPD wrote, as it has many times before, that allowing the CCRB case to continue “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process.”

When it came to the officer who had hit the kid with his car, the NYPD said it was an “alleged traffic accident” and that therefore the CCRB had no authority to investigate in the first place.

The NYPD did decide that the disciplinary charges against one officer could continue — for using offensive language and telling one of the teens to stop filming on his phone.

It was all remarkable, but also par for the course.

Like many police departments around the country, the NYPD has complete discretion to overrule the civilian agency that is supposed to help oversee it.

In New York City, the police commissioner can and often does choose to ignore the results of CCRB-brought disciplinary trials. The commissioner can ignore guilty pleas and can even decide there should be no trial at all, as appears to be happening in this case. Last year, the police commissioner followed through on the CCRB’s discipline recommendations in serious cases just 27% of the time.

I sent the NYPD a series of questions, asking both about its power to ignore the CCRB and about how that power has been wielded in this case. I got a one-sentence response: “The disciplinary process is ongoing.”

We do know something about what’s happened to the officers, and about their records. Thanks to legislation that New York state passed in the summer of 2020, police records are no longer secret. The CCRB’s report names the officers involved.

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

None of the officers responded to my requests for comment.

I recently shared all the developments with one of the boys from that night. He was in ninth grade when officers ordered him up against the wall. His mom and 9-year-old sister watched from across the street, where they had been trick-or-treating.

“It’s just all getting blown over,” he said, sounding deflated. “So, it’s kind of like, what’s the point of doing all this?”

But the Halloween case isn’t fully over yet.

After the NYPD said it would be overriding the CCRB cases, the agency formally objected. The NYPD has yet to give its response.

Technically, the CCRB can move ahead if the NYPD doesn’t respond. But the reality of the current system is that any discipline or trial requires the police department to be on board.

The NYPD has a new commissioner hired by New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer who has often talked about his experience being beaten by officers as a teenager. Like many mayors and politicians around the country, Adams has taken something of a middle ground on policing, rejecting calls for “defunding” the force while also emphasizing that misconduct can’t be countenanced.

“Justice and public safety go together,” Adams said recently. “I don’t subscribe to the belief of some that we can only have justice and not public safety. We will have them both.”

I’ve asked Adams’ office about the Halloween case — whether the mayor thinks that there has been justice in this instance.

I have yet to hear back.

On Halloween night in 2019, my wife and our then-6-year-old daughter were walking home from trick-or-treating in our Brooklyn neighborhood when they saw a New York Police Department car go the wrong way down a street and smack into a teenager, who fell and then ran away.

When I contacted the NYPD afterward, they told me that what my family saw hadn’t happened. A police car hadn’t hit a teenager. The teenager had hit the car. Or, as an NYPD statement put it, he “ran across the hood of a stationary police car.”

I ended up diving into the case and wrote about it the next summer during the global racial justice protests spawned by George Floyd’s murder.

The police had been looking for a group of Black, male teenagers who reportedly had stolen a cellphone. After the teenager who’d been hit by the car ran away, my wife, Sara, watched as officers turned their attention to other Black boys.

The police lined the boys up against the wall of our local movie theater, then arrested three of them. The boys insisted they had just been trick-or-treating. The youngest was 12. He was crying, asking repeatedly, “What did I do?”

I didn’t hear anything more about the case for a long while. Then, a few weeks ago, the city agency charged with investigating civilians’ complaints of police abuse let me know it had finally finished its investigation.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board found that, contrary to the NYPD’s assertions, an officer did hit a kid with his car. It also found that officers, including the precinct commander, had arrested the boys without justification. An officer had even drawn his gun and pointed it at one of the boys.

One of the officers, the report noted, was wearing a sweatshirt with a logo of the Punisher, a Marvel character who kills lawbreakers, which is popular with cops and white nationalists. The sweatshirt also had a blue line over the American flag and the acronym DILLIGAF. (“Do I Look Like I Give a Fuck.”) The officer told investigators he hadn’t known the meaning of the logo or the acronym on his sweatshirt.

The police response that night started when some teenagers told officers they had been robbed at the local park. But the officers only had what investigators later described as “varying and inconsistent descriptions” of who they were looking for.

The officers stopped a group of boys a few blocks away. There was little about them that matched the description of the assailants other than that they were Black, young and walking together. Indeed, the CCRB’s report noted, one of the officers “stated that he was not certain whether they were involved.”

Some of the boys ran, including the one who was hit by the police car. (They told investigators that they ran because they were scared.)

The boys who were arrested — a 15-year-old, a 14-year-old and the 12-year-old — said that the officers never offered any explanation for why they were stopped. They were released without charges, after being held for hours. Their parents said they weren’t given any documentation on the arrests. The mother of one of the boys worked for the NYPD as a school safety officer, but even she couldn’t get any record of what happened.

It was as if the case was being pushed into a fog.

The CCRB began investigating after receiving a witness complaint. But the agency’s investigations are dependent on the NYPD cooperating. And as often happens, the NYPD has been slow to do so.

Take body-worn cameras, which are often critical in abuse investigations. The CCRB noted it faced “extremely substantial delays” in getting the Halloween night footage from the NYPD. While some cities have given civilian investigators direct access to body cam footage, the NYPD has rejected calls to do the same.

The agency also did not get to interview officers until more than a year after the incident. By the time officers did finally submit to interviews, they had serious trouble with their recollections. When the officer who drove the car was asked whether he had hit a kid, he “stated that he could not remember.”

In December, the CCRB told me it had just filed disciplinary charges against the officers: for wrongful arrests, for pulling a gun without justification, and for, as the bureaucratic lingo puts it, “Force, Vehicle.”

The next step would typically be disciplinary hearings, in which the CCRB acts as the prosecutor and the proceedings are overseen by an NYPD judge, who answers ultimately to the police commissioner. While the penalties after guilty verdicts are often wrist-slappy, like lost vacation days, it seemed like this case could be a rare, if modest, victory for police accountability.

Then, about a week after I heard about the outcome of the investigation, I learned of another twist.

The NYPD had informed the CCRB that it was invoking its authority to unilaterally end the cases against most of the officers the civilian agency had charged with misconduct. No disciplinary charges would be brought against them.

Instead of letting the CCRB’s disciplinary process play out, the NYPD said it would handle the cases internally. The NYPD wrote, as it has many times before, that allowing the CCRB case to continue “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process.”

When it came to the officer who had hit the kid with his car, the NYPD said it was an “alleged traffic accident” and that therefore the CCRB had no authority to investigate in the first place.

The NYPD did decide that the disciplinary charges against one officer could continue — for using offensive language and telling one of the teens to stop filming on his phone.

It was all remarkable, but also par for the course.

Like many police departments around the country, the NYPD has complete discretion to overrule the civilian agency that is supposed to help oversee it.

In New York City, the police commissioner can and often does choose to ignore the results of CCRB-brought disciplinary trials. The commissioner can ignore guilty pleas and can even decide there should be no trial at all, as appears to be happening in this case. Last year, the police commissioner followed through on the CCRB’s discipline recommendations in serious cases just 27% of the time.

I sent the NYPD a series of questions, asking both about its power to ignore the CCRB and about how that power has been wielded in this case. I got a one-sentence response: “The disciplinary process is ongoing.”

We do know something about what’s happened to the officers, and about their records. Thanks to legislation that New York state passed in the summer of 2020, police records are no longer secret. The CCRB’s report names the officers involved.

Officer Christopher Brower drove into the boy, according to the report. Officer Christopher Digioia wore the Punisher sweatshirt and is the one officer still facing a disciplinary trial, for allegedly swearing at the teens. A search of their respective CCRB files shows they were also disciplined for another case together. Investigators found that, in April 2019, about six months before the Halloween incident, the two had refused to provide their names or badge numbers to a civilian. The NYPD penalized them for that with “instructions.”

The precinct commander who the CCRB concluded oversaw the wrongful arrests is Inspector Megan O’Malley. She told investigators she believed the arrests were justified because the boys ran and one had dropped a kitchen knife. O’Malley has since been promoted and now heads a precinct in midtown Manhattan.

The officer who, the report said, first ordered the boys to be stopped and then pointed a gun at one of them is Lt. John Dasaro. He told investigators he had been worried that the boy was armed. Dasaro was moved to work at the internal affairs unit that investigates use of force against civilians.

None of the officers responded to my requests for comment.

I recently shared all the developments with one of the boys from that night. He was in ninth grade when officers ordered him up against the wall. His mom and 9-year-old sister watched from across the street, where they had been trick-or-treating.

“It’s just all getting blown over,” he said, sounding deflated. “So, it’s kind of like, what’s the point of doing all this?”

But the Halloween case isn’t fully over yet.

After the NYPD said it would be overriding the CCRB cases, the agency formally objected. The NYPD has yet to give its response.

Technically, the CCRB can move ahead if the NYPD doesn’t respond. But the reality of the current system is that any discipline or trial requires the police department to be on board.

The NYPD has a new commissioner hired by New York’s new mayor, Eric Adams, a former police officer who has often talked about his experience being beaten by officers as a teenager. Like many mayors and politicians around the country, Adams has taken something of a middle ground on policing, rejecting calls for “defunding” the force while also emphasizing that misconduct can’t be countenanced.

“Justice and public safety go together,” Adams said recently. “I don’t subscribe to the belief of some that we can only have justice and not public safety. We will have them both.”

I’ve asked Adams’ office about the Halloween case — whether the mayor thinks that there has been justice in this instance.

I have yet to hear back.

The NYPD began rolling out body-worn cameras to officers in 2017, nearly four years after a federal judge found that the department's stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional and ordered the NYPD to begin piloting the use of body cams.

The cameras are now standard issue in many jurisdictions across the country, seen as a way to provide more objective accounts of police actions and rely less on the recollections of officers or anyone else.

But, as ProPublica has detailed, the NYPD has often refused to share footage with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the city agency tasked with investigating allegations of excessive force and other misconduct.

In some instances, the NYPD has told CCRB investigators no footage of an incident exists, only for the CCRB to later learn that it does. For example, during one investigation of an incident for which the NYPD said there was no footage, an officer later told investigators that she had her camera on.

Other times, the NYPD has acknowledged footage exists but refused to turn it over, citing privacy issues. In one case, an officer slammed a young man into the pavement, sending him to the hospital with a brain bleed. Seven body cameras worn by officers captured parts of the incident. But the NYPD withheld almost all the footage from CCRB investigators, on the grounds that a minor's face could be seen in some of it.

The new report, by the Inspector General for the NYPD, which is not part of the department, recommends a straightforward solution: Investigators at the CCRB should have direct access to body-worn camera footage, so they don't have to rely on the NYPD's discretion. Police oversight agencies in a number of other cities already have such access.

“Effective and independent police review requires direct access to body-worn camera footage," the inspector general, Philip Eure, said in a statement. “Oversight agencies cannot hold officers accountable for misconduct and foster greater trust between communities and law enforcement if the police withhold, redact, or delay the production of critical evidence."

In its response, the NYPD rejected the call to give CCRB investigators full access.

The department emphasized that backlogs of requests for footage — an issue ProPublica has highlighted — have been addressed. The NYPD argued that the report was based on outdated information “about past practices that are no longer applicable."

But the response gives the false impression that investigators already have the access they are seeking.

In referring to the call for direct access to body-worn camera, or BWC, footage, the NYPD stated: “The CCRB already has access to BWC footage detailed in this recommendation."

Currently, CCRB investigators have to go through a request process that depends on the NYPD's cooperation.

“Direct access has, and continues to be, one of the top needs of the CCRB," the agency's chair, the Rev. Frederick Davie, said in a statement to ProPublica.

An analysis last year by the CCRB found that investigators got to the bottom of cases — either substantiating allegations or clearing officers of charges — far more often when they were able to review body cam footage.

Two years ago, the NYPD and CCRB arrived at what was supposed to be a solution to the dispute over access to footage. Under the agreement, a CCRB investigator can observe NYPD staff as they search the system. But even then, the NYPD has limited what CCRB investigators can do with what they see. For example, if an investigator sees abuse unrelated to the case in question, the CCRB can't start an investigation into it.

The inspector general said social distancing and work-from-home measures instituted during the pandemic have hampered the protocol, but that even when fully implemented, the process would “waste limited City time and resources attempting to perfect an imperfect solution."

As ProPublica has detailed, the NYPD has also often not cooperated with the inspector general's office itself. A footnote to the new report contained further evidence of that. It said the office sought to interview NYPD officials about body-worn cameras but were rebuffed: “NYPD opted against making any representatives available for a meeting (or meetings)."