NEW YORK -- Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday dismissed a report by the city's public advocate, Mark Green, on lapses in the Police Department's disciplinary process, calling it an unfounded attack by a politician primarily interested in advancing his own mayoral ambitions.
"This is another one of those guffaws by Mark Green," said Giuliani, who accused Green of selectively using statistics unfairly to portray police officials as too lenient in their handling of misconduct by officers. "I guess he wants to position himself as the anti-police, anti-law-enforcement candidate."Green's report, which was based on a review of 420 police disciplinary files, said that hundreds of officers found by an independent review board to have engaged in misconduct were never disciplined because their cases were dismissed by police officials without further investigation. Green said his review showed that officers against whom citizen complaints had been upheld by the Civilian Complaint Review Board between 1994 and 1997 escaped punishment, in large measure because the department was unwilling to police itself aggressively.
But Giuliani accused Green, a liberal Democrat who as public advocate is first in the line of succession for the mayoralty, of focusing on old cases as a means of ignoring recent increases in the number of officers disciplined. "Mark Green cuts off his analysis of the numbers in 1997, leaves out 1998 and half of 1999, so he can come to a different kind of political conclusion," the mayor said during a news conference at City Hall.
Green said he intended to review all the cases decided in 1998, but that he had not yet been provided with all of those records.
In 1994, when Giuliani took office, 40 percent of the civilian complaints substantiated by the review board resulted in discipline. During the six months that ended in July 1999, the proportion rose to 53 percent, police officials said.
Although the review board investigates civilian complaints of abuse and brutality, the decision to penalize officers is left to police officials, to whom the board forwards cases it has substantiated. Only a small proportion, 6 percent, of the 5,000 civilian complaints received each year are substantiated, which is why critics of the disciplinary process have found the dismissal of substantiated cases by police officials so troubling.
Green said the Giuliani administration was attacking the messenger because it did not like the message. He said it was particularly disingenuous for Giuliani to complain that the study data was stale, since the administration had blocked his access to the disciplinary files for two years. Green won the right to review the files in a court decision earlier this year.
Police Commissioner Howard Safir said Green's report ignored recent improvements in the disciplinary process that came with the expansion of its investigative staff.