The report, which was published by LatinoJustice, a civil rights group, claims that nearly 200 NYPD officers were caught lying to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) about misconduct while on the job. According to the report, from 2010 to 2020, 181 NYPD officers gave false statements to the CCRB about misconduct. Among the 181 officers, 80 faced no discipline, while 42 received “instructions or a command discipline,” the report said.

The report comes as New York City has seen a rise in crime over the past several months, which prompted Mayor Eric Adams to recently announce the revival of a controversial NYPD anti-crime unit.

According to the report, the CCRB investigates incidents in which NYPD officers are accused of using excessive force, “abusing their authority, being discourteous, or using offensive language.”

Following the repeal of a law that shielded records of misconduct by NYPD officers, LatinoJustice filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIL) request to the CCRB, which allowed the nonprofit group to review 144 cases involving 181 officers accused of misconduct while on the job, from 2010 to 2020.

“In more than one-half the cases the CCRB forwarded to the NYPD, an officer’s testimony was contradicted by recorded video or audio evidence,” the report said. “Nearly one-half of the officers who lied to the CCRB were never disciplined at all, even for the underlying misconduct they lied about.”

According to the report, in five cases in which an officer was disciplined for lying to the CCRB, the NYPD “downgraded” the allegation to “misleading.”

The report also states that under NYPD policy, officers who are found to have made false statements will be dismissed from their post.

The report discusses several incidents in which NYPD officers lied to protect their partners about misconduct.

One of the incidents included in the report claims that NYPD Officer Welinton Gomez lied about misconduct committed by his partner, Officer Felix Acosta.

“When he was shown security camera footage showing his partner punching the man while he watched, PO Gomez changed his story to say he could not remember what happened despite giving a detailed description of the event earlier,” the report said.

In a press release, Lourdes M. Rosado, LatinoJustice president and general counsel, said: “The Department’s disregard of evidence on officers lying not only violates its stated policy, but it means future defendants are denied fair trial when history of officer lying is not disclosed.

“The NYPD must show that their policy that intentional false statements will result in dismissal is not itself a lie.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD disputed the report’s findings in a statement sent to Newsweek, saying that it “is by no means an objective examination of the facts. It is rife with inaccuracies and fundamental misunderstandings of the processes between CCRB and the NYPD.

“Among the many falsehoods in the report is the assertion that an officer denying an allegation to avail themselves of due process is itself a ‘false statement.’ Another basic error is to blame the NYPD for failure to act on cases that have not been turned over by CCRB due to CCRB’s delays in completing investigations or failures to move forward with prosecutions.”

The report also included several recommendations for the NYPD, including removing sole disciplinary authority from the NYPD commissioner, discharging officers who lie to the CCRB, and disclosing lying incidents by NYPD officers to the public.