Internal reports on more than 1,000 incidents in which New York City Police Department officers fired a weapon at a civilian are about to become public as the city has decided to stop fighting disclosure, reports the New York Law Journal. Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which had sued to obtain the reports, said the police department “has a terrible record when it comes to openness.”
Dunn noted that in the city had attempted to prevent disclosure of its database of stop-and-frisk encounters, but after losing at the trial level it started then abandoned an appeal. “We keep having to sue [under freedom of information laws] and the courts rightly keep ruling that [the police department] cannot withhold important documents from public view,” Dunn said. He added: “Police shootings are of enormous public importance and all too often the public knows nothing about them other than what the police choose to release. Public disclosure of these investigative reports should shed considerable light on the circumstances of hundreds of shootings and may well point to needed reforms.”