NYPD Misconduct Complaint Database FAQ

What do the abbreviations and acronyms mean?

Many database values may be ambiguous without further context or clarification, such as the entries in the “Command” column, which include hundreds of acronyms for specific units in the NYPD.

For information on abbreviations or acronyms, visit the NYCLU’s GitHub page. This information not yet complete, and the NYCLU will continuously update it.

What does the “Race of Impacted Person” column mean?

The “Race of Impacted Person” column shows the self-reported race/ethnicity of the person impacted in misconduct complaint. The CCRB refers to this field as “Race of Victim.” Some complaints in the database are filed by people who are not the impacted person. In that case, the column nevertheless reports the race of the impacted person whether the impacted person was the person who actually filed the complaint.

What does NA mean?

“NA” reflects any fields that were blank in the original database the NYCLU obtained from the CCRB.

Why are there complaints from before the CCRB was founded?

The database includes complaints from before the Civilian Complaint Review Board was founded, when the CCRB operated within the NYPD. Over 100 complaints indicate an incident date in the year 1900, which is a clear entry error.

How are the complaints classified?

This database reports each allegation of misconduct as a unique complaint. In many instances, a single incident involves multiple allegations of misconduct and thus results in multiple complaints in the database for the incident. For this reason, the number of complaints in the database is significantly larger than the number of incidents.

Please be aware that the CCRB uses the term “complaint” to refer to an incident, which may include multiple allegations of misconduct. For this reason, CCRB reports will show fewer “complaints” for any given period of time than will this database, which reports each allegation as a complaint.

Why are there some duplicate entries?

There are about 19,000 complaints that contain the exact same information and most of them have an incident date before the year 2000. It is unclear whether these duplicates are erroneous or simply reflect two allegations with the exact same information.

The NYCLU will continue to update this page. If you have questions, please email CCRBdata@nyclu.org.