Carroll Gardens' Precinct Among Lowest For Cop Misconduct: Data

CARROLL GARDENS, BROOKLYN — The NYPD precinct based in Carroll Gardens has some of the borough's most well behaved officers, new data shows. The 76th Precinct, which oversees Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and parts of Gowanus and Cobble Hill, was one of three in Brooklyn that had the least number of lawsuits filed against its officers.

The three precincts — Park Slope's 78th, Bensonhurst's 62nd and Carroll Gardens' 76th — each had four lawsuits filed against its cops since 2015, a CAPStat database launched by The Legal Aid society shows. Only about seven precincts in other parts of the city had less than four lawsuits.

This number falls drastically below the precinct at the top of the list for both Brooklyn and the entire city, the 75th Precinct in East New York, which had 91 federal lawsuits.

The new online tool tracks, which tracks federal police misconduct lawsuits how much taxpayer money has been spent settling these, aims to spot patterns of misconduct and discipline cops who are repeat offenders, Legal Aid says.

"With today's launch, we join a national movement including fellow defenders, advocates, and community members to shed much needed daylight on police departments and their actions," said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a staff attorney with the Special Litigation Unit in Legal Aid's Criminal Practice.

It will also help the general public "hold the NYPD accountable" for such patterns, which it "routinely ignores," Conti-Cook added.

The 76th Precinct was also an outlier in that it only had to pay $3,000 in settlements for the lawsuits, though this could change given that three are still pending. Other precincts with the same number of lawsuits, like Park Slope, had to pay tens of thousands in settlements.

The precincts at the top of the list paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars, or as much as $9.1 million in the 75th precinct's case.

The one lawsuit that ended in a settlement was for an officer that grabbed and searched a man at a the Smith and 9th Street subway station, arrested him and had him strip-searched at the station for a medication that he was prescribed, records show.

Read more about the database and how it works here.