The Guardian has dome some digging up into statistics posted by the FBI and discovered some interesting missing details from these reports.

Killings by police that unleashed a new protest movement around the US in 2014, including those of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, are missing from the federal government’s official record of homicides by officers because most departments refuse to submit data.

Only 224 of 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US reported a fatal shooting by their officers to the FBI last year, according to previously unpublished data obtained by the Guardian, which sheds new light on flaws in official systems for counting the use of deadly force by police.

The Counted, an investigation by the Guardian to report all deaths caused by police in 2015, had already logged deadly shootings by officers from 224 different law enforcement agencies by 10 April this year. Crowd-sourced counts in 2014 recorded deaths at a similar higher rate.

Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said exclusions were inevitable because the program remained voluntary. “We have no way of knowing how many incidents may have been omitted,” Fischer said in an email.

Amid mounting pressure on public authorities to overhaul the recording of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, an extensive review of all data on “justifiable homicides” by police collected by the FBI from police departments between 2004 and 2014 found:

• No police departments from the state of Florida reported any homicides by officers, meaning deaths caused by police in the country’s third-most populous state were not logged by the FBI. The New York police department, by far the country’s biggest, submitted data for just one year during the past decade.

• The FBI records only basic personal details of each person killed and not information such as whether they were armed with a weapon – a critical factor in ongoing debates over the use of force by police around the country.

• A chaotic approach was applied to recording other high-profile deaths over recent years. Some were logged, some filed to a separate category with general homicides without noting the subjects were killed by police, and others were ignored.

• An increase in the number of homicides by police publicly reported by the FBI over the past five years was effectively matched by a rise in the number of individual departments reporting any homicides, casting doubt over purported trends in the data.

• Details of other controversial deaths that prompted protests were entered incorrectly in the FBI database, damaging government efforts to monitor demographic information about people killed by police.

The analysis of raw FBI data was carried out as the US Department of Justice announced it was trialling a new open-source system for counting homicides by law enforcement. The system’s methodology closely resembles those of The Counted and a Washington Post record of fatal police shootings.

News of the pilot program, which is being run by the department’s bureau of justice statistics, came following strident comments from both US attorney general Loretta Lynch and FBI director James Comey, who reiterated calls for better official records of homicides by police.

Comprehensive records of killings by law enforcement officers has been a demand of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has risen to prominence since the fatal police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown in August 2014. It was also among the recommendations made by Barack Obama’s White House policing taskforce, which was convened following Brown’s death, which was among those recorded in the FBI database.

While the people killed were not named in the FBI database, some could be identified by matching entries with publicly-available information on their age, sex and race, as well as those of the officer who shot them, the location of the incident, and the month it occurred.

But the death in July of Eric Garner, who was placed in a chokehold by an NYPD officer allegedly confronting Garner about selling loose cigarettes, was not included in the official federal record. The NYPD has not submitted data to the FBI since 2006. It pledged earlier this month to release more detailed data on officers’ deadly use of force from next year.

Erica Garner, Garner’s daughter, said she was “outraged but not shocked” by the omission. “It’s just another part of the cover-up and erasing of his murder from the record,” Garner said. “It says to the NYPD and the city and state of New York that my father’s life doesn’t matter.”

No other department in the state of New York had any homicides by officers recorded by the FBI during the decade except for one, by Rochester in 2006. In its annual Firearms Discharge Reports, NYPD has recorded 117 “subjects shot and killed by officers” between 2004 and 2014. Its total of 13 shooting deaths for 2006, however, exceeded the 10 reported to the FBI that year, the only 12-month period in which the department participated in the FBI’s count.

NYPD’s own counts also did not include non-shooting deaths such as Garner’s. By contrast a more comprehensive count of incidents and details of the demographics of the people involved would be “a huge help in this so-called ‘push to improve police relations with the Black community’,” said Erica Garner.

Florida keeps its own annual record of justifiable homicides by law enforcement, despite no departments in the state filing a report to the FBI in the past decade. The state data from 2013 was provided to the Guardian but did not list the departments responsible for each death, instead it recorded a single, statewide figure of 60 deaths from all departments who submitted records that year. NBC South Florida was provided with records dating back over a decade, showing the number of recorded justifiable homicides has risen from 14 in 1999 to 67 in 2012.

Departments behind some of last year’s most controversial homicides by police, including Cleveland and Beavercreek in Ohio, whose officers shot dead 12-year-old Tamir Rice and 22-year-old John Crawford respectively, also did not file reports on those incidents to the FBI.

A review of data collected over the years by the FBI showed that high-profile homicides in which officers were found to be at fault were not recorded or were logged inconsistently. Problems stem from the fact that only one of the FBI’s 32 classifications for all homicides – which are precise enough to include “child killed by babysitter” and homicides linked to gambling – makes reference to the person who carried out the homicide being a police officer. This classification, “felon killed by police”, is automatically counted as a justifiable homicide.

Apparently because the FBI offers no category for recording killings by law enforcement officers of people who were not felons, some departments have filed unjustified homicides by their officers among the general stack of murders, manslaughters and other killings between civilians.

A record matching the case of Yvette Smith, a 47-year-old black woman who was shot dead by Bastrop County deputy Daniel Willis in Texas when she opened the door to him, appeared among the general unjustified homicides for 2014. As a result, it was not included in the total figure for killings by police publicised by the FBI last month. The death was filed under “circumstances undetermined” and Willis was logged as a stranger to Smith rather than an officer. A prosecution of Willis on charges of murder recently ended in a mistrial.

Similarly Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player at Florida A&M who was shot dead by officer Randall Kerrick after knocking on a door when he crashed his car in North Carolina, appeared to be included among general homicides for 2013. But his death was categorised as “manslaughter by negligence” and Kerrick was recorded as having been known to the victim. A trial of Kerrick for voluntary manslaughter also ended in a hung jury.

Yet no record in either file – homicides by police officers and those by civilians – could be found that matched other major cases, including that of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black man shot dead at a transit station in Oakland, California, in January 2009. Grant’s death was dramatised in the film Fruitvale Station. Officer Johannes Mehserle, who said he meant to use a Taser, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter but cleared of murder.

No entries appeared for Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old woman shot dead by an off-duty Chicago police officer in March 2012, nor for Malissa Williams, 30, and Timothy Russell, 43, who died after 137 shots were fired into their car by police officers in Cleveland, Ohio in November the same year.

The FBI has also logged incorrect information for several deaths. Among these was the case of Darrien Hunt, a 22-year-old who was shot dead in September last year while running away from police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, after allegedly wielding a replica sword. Hunt was listed as the person who carried out the homicide, and a knife or blade was said to be the deadly weapon. Hunt and the officers who shot him were listed as acquaintances.

Hunt’s mother, Susan, said the confused logging of her son’s death came even after federal officials said earlier this year that the FBI and Department of Justice were carrying out their own review of the fatal shooting. “There has been so much wrong with the entire incident,” she said.

Fischer, the FBI spokesman, said departments had until December to submit missing or corrected data and said the information analysed by the Guardian for 2014 was “a snapshot in time” that may be updated.

A knife was also listed as the fatal weapon for a case matching the details of Chieu-di Thi Vo, a 47-year-old woman shot dead by a Greensboro, North Carolina, police officer in March last year after allegedly brandishing a knife. Vo’s demographic information was given for both the person who was killed and the officer who carried out the homicide, who was in fact a man. The FBI’s final published tally counted only one homicide by a blade, but did not state which this was.

The Counted has documented more than 900 deaths caused by encounters with law enforcement officers so far this year. The FBI count, from which basic statistics were published earlier this month, documented just 444 justifiable homicides for the whole of 2014. That total was reached by the Guardian count before the halfway point of 2015.

The FBI data showed that while the number of departments reporting killings by their officers rose 14% from 196 per year in 2009 to 224 last year, the number of homicides increased by 12% from 392 to 439 per year in the same period.

Because of the nature of the FBI program there is no way of calculating whether these increases reflect a genuine rise in the number of people killed by police over the years or simply that more agencies have decided to submit their data.

Comey said last week that it was “unacceptable” the Guardian and the Washington Post were “becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians”.

“You can get online today and figure out how many tickets were sold to ‘The Martian,’ which I saw this weekend … The CDC can do the same with the flu,” Comey said. “It’s ridiculous – it’s embarrassing and ridiculous – that we can’t talk about crime in the same way, especially in the high-stakes incidents when your officers have to use force.”

From The Guardian

Only days before the first anniversary of the killing of Eric Garner by a police chokehold in the borough of Staten Island, the New York City Comptroller announced a $5.9 million settlement with his family this past Monday.

The death of Garner at the hands of the police, the result of murderous brutality caught on videotape on July 17, 2014, triggered outrage that was only compounded when, months later, a Staten Island grand jury refused to indict the officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo.

At a press conference Tuesday, Garner’s family called for the officers involved in his death to be prosecuted. Garner’s daughter Erica said that the family will be satisfied “when we get indictments and when we get a fair trial.”

Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, said the settlement was not a win for anyone. “This is not a victory. The victory will come when we get justice,” she said. “Eleven times my son said he couldn’t breathe. Eleven times. Where is the justice?”

Garner’s widow, Esaw Garner, added “They treated my husband like an animal and I think they give animals more respect than humans.”

The news conference was called at the headquarters of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and Sharpton and the Garner family have announced a rally this Saturday afternoon at the office of the US Attorney in Brooklyn to press their demand for the bringing of federal civil rights charges in the case.

The police accused Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, of selling loose untaxed cigarettes. After he was wrestled to the ground and held in the chokehold, a procedure that had been banned years earlier by the New York Police Department, he called out, “I can’t breathe” 11 times. These final words became the watchword in massive protests in New York and around the country.

The settlement involves no admission of liability on the part of the city. Esaw Garner and Gwen Carr had filed a notice of claim with the authorities, preparing to file suit for $75 million in damages. The settlement enables the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio to avoid a trial that would likely have resulted in a far larger damages award, but only after a lengthy trial and possible appeals.

Even more crucial than the possible financial savings in the government’s decision to settle was the importance of avoiding the political consequences of a trial in the Garner case. The videotape details and other testimony would have kept the events of last July 17 before the public, but the trial testimony would also have raised crucial issues about the working of the grand jury system.

Testimony would have illustrated the initial cover-up by police officials of the use of the chokehold, and also the manipulation of the grand jury that ended with the exoneration of Pantaleo. Recent reports have confirmed that witnesses before the grand jury were cautioned not to use the term chokehold, and that eyewitness accounts of the death of Garner at the hands of the police were ignored or dismissed in order to avoid bringing an indictment, even on lesser charges such as manslaughter.

The settlement announcement was accompanied by hypocritical platitudes from de Blasio as well as Comptroller Scott Stringer. Their words were almost identical to those that could have come from the mouths of their predecessors in cases of past police murders.

“Mr. Garner’s death is a touchstone in our city’s history and in the history of the entire nation,” Stringer told the New York Times. “Financial compensation is certainly not everything and it can’t bring Mr. Garner back. But it is our way of creating balance and giving the family a certain closure.”

De Blasio spoke in similar terms, referring to hopes for “peace and finality” for Garner’s family. He added, “I think we’ve come a long way, even in the last year, in terms of bringing police and community together.”

De Blasio’s way of accomplishing this goal has been to reaffirm his support for the policy of “broken windows” policing pioneered by current Police Commissioner William Bratton on his first tour of duty more than 20 years ago, and also proposing the hiring of an additional 1,300 cops, in preparation for social unrest in the face of poverty and police abuse.

As far as the corporate elite and the political establishment are concerned, the settlement in the Garner case is part of the cost of doing “police business” in a city that is polarized as never before between a fabulously decadent and wealthy elite on the one hand and millions of working class families struggling to get by on the other.

A look at other financial settlements in police murders in the last two decades demonstrates, despite the justice of the cases brought or threatened by the families of the victims, the cynicism of the authorities when they speak of “turning the page” and putting an end to these atrocities and tragedies.

Abner Louima, sodomized and brutally beaten in Brooklyn in 1997, was awarded $8.75 million in 2001. The family of Amadou Diallo, gunned down on his doorstep in the Bronx in 1999, was given $3 million. The family of Ramarley Graham, killed in his own apartment in 2012, received $3.9 million. The award following the death of Sean Bell in 2006 was $3.25 million. These are only a few of the most prominent cases.

The list goes on an on. There is no peace and there is no “finality” when it comes to the ongoing and escalating attacks on democratic rights and the police abuse of workers and youth, with special emphasis in working class neighborhoods and the poorest sections of the city.

There are still outstanding investigations into the death of Garner, including a probe by state health officials into grossly inadequate treatment as he lay dying. The NYPD had completed its own investigation, but will not release the results pending the announcement by the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York on whether federal civil rights charges will be brought against Pantaleo in the Garner case.

The Justice Department is not expected to bring civil rights charges in the case. As various pundits and unnamed observers have indicated, such charges can only succeed if prosecutors can show willful violation of civil rights based on race, and such evidence would be hard to present in this incident. The whole process of a federal investigation is, in this and most other instances, more an attempt to quiet popular anger than it is about actually punishing guilty cops.

Published by Fred Mazelis at https://www.wsws.org

One day after settling a $5.9 million wrongful death case with New York City, the family of Eric Garner will use a press conference on Tuesday to renew calls to criminally charge the police officer who put him in a fatal chokehold last July.

A grand jury in December declined to indict the white officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who placed the 43-year-old black man in the chokehold, a maneuver banned by the New York City Police Department. A video that a bystander took of the incident sparked protests across the country over police treatment of minority groups.

Nearly one year after Garner’s death on New York’s Staten Island borough, his widow, Esaw Garner, and mother, Gwen Carr, will attend a press conference in New York alongside civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton.

“No federal charges have been filed against the officer who killed Mr. Garner, and the settlement with the city does not establish justice,” the family and Sharpton said in a statement.

The NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Garner, a father of six, was accused of illegally selling cigarettes on a sidewalk when Pantaleo put him in the chokehold from behind and brought him down with the help of other officers. Garner complained repeatedly that he could not breathe.

Raw video of the incident is available below:

The city medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide, with health problems, including asthma and obesity, as contributing factors.

New York City agreed to pay Garner’s family $5.9 million to resolve the claim over his death, city officials said on Monday.

A separate settlement was reached with the hospital that employed emergency medical technicians who responded to the scene and did not aid Garner. Terms of that agreement have not been released.

Garner’s family had filed a claim in October seeking $75 million in damages.

Tuesday’s press conference is the first of a number of events leading up to the anniversary of Garner’s death on Friday.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will speak at a service at the Mount Sinai United Christian Church in Staten Island on Tuesday to mark the anniversary. The list of attendees includes New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who beforehand is slated to visit the nearby NYPD 120th Precinct, home to the officers involved in the incident.

A rally is planned on Saturday outside a federal courthouse in Brooklyn calling for justice for Garner.

This report appeared on Reuters, with additional reporting by Sebastien Malo and editing by Lisa Von Ahn

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (h/t Brendan McDermid)

UPDATE @ 7/13/2015 4:42 AM: State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the special prosecutor named by Gov. Cuomo, appeared on a New York talk show saying he hopes his position will improve trust in the police.

Schneiderman was on John Catsimaditis’s AM 970 radio show Sunday, elaborating on why he feels the governor’s decision was significant.

“There has been this tremendous erosion of public confidence,” Scheniderman said. “People really feel that police are held to a different standard than others.”

“No one has said that any particular district attorney engaged in any misconduct, this is just a matter of the public having that assurance that [the prosecutor] is a little more distanced from the local police.”

Schneiderman also said he believes reforms are overdue.

“We’re in a period of time, and I think it’s a good thing, there are a lot of reforms coming into our criminal justice system,” he said.

Schneiderman’s office will be taking charge of prosecutions that involve fatal police shootings, following an executive order signed by Gov. Cuomo lats week.

NEW YORK — New York will appoint a special prosecutor to handle investigations when civilians are killed during confrontations with police, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Tuesday.

Cuomo told reporters he would issue an executive order valid for one year that would place Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in charge of investigating and prosecuting police-involved killings, taking those cases out of the hands of district attorneys.

“We will be the first state in the country to acknowledge the problem and say we’re going to create an independent prosecutor who does not have that kind of connection with the organized police departments,” Cuomo said, according to the New York Times.

Cuomo said the appointment of a special prosecutor would help rebuild public confidence in law enforcement, following several high profile killings of unarmed black men by officers. Among them was Eric Garner on Staten Island in New York, who was choked to death nearly one year ago.

A grand jury in March declined to indict the officer who placed Garner in a chokehold, a maneuver banned by New York City police. The decision led to weeks of protests over law enforcement’s use of force.

The phrase “I can’t breathe,” which Garner was heard saying before his death, became a slogan of “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations around the country.

Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, attended a rally on Tuesday urging Cuomo to appoint a special prosecutor to handle deaths of civilians, saying some district attorneys are too closely linked with local police to conduct a fair investigation.

“It’s for future families. We don’t ever want to see this happen, what happened to my son,” she said in comments carried on local news broadcaster NY1.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the New York City’s largest police union, called the executive order “unnecessary” and said it could lead to the indictment of officers “for the sake of public perception,” a statement said.

Reported by Victoria Cavaliere for Reuters; edited by Larry King

NEW YORK — The police officer now infamous for his role in the death of unarmed New York man Eric Garner has hired a 24-hour security detail to protect himself from the public.

Officer Daniel Pantaleo, 30, who last summer choked Eric Garner to death while arresting him for allegedly selling a single loose cigarette, is still employed by the NYPD, but has also hired his own bodyguards to watch over him all day long. The police department has even provided Pantaleo with its own redundant surveillance service while he is on the job, complete with panic button, according to the New York Daily News.

Less than one week ago, the New York Times reported that a witness in Pantaleo’s grand jury trial was reprimanded by prosecutors for describing Pantaleo’s actions — wrapping his arms around Garner’s neck while pressing his face against the ground and holding him there — as a “chokehold.” It was after this report that Pantaleo hired the security detail.

Pantaleo has come under legal scrutiny since he killed the unarmed man as well. A grand jury acquitted Pantaleo on criminal charges for killing Garner in December, which sparked waves of protests and demonstrations across the nation.

In order to quell some of the backlash, Pantaleo is trying to have his attorney step in to prevent his review by the Civilian Complaint Review Board from becoming public record. Another organization, The Legal Aid Society, is also suing to make Pantaleo’s disciplinary record public. Both NYPD internal affairs and a federal civil rights board are investigating Pantaleo’s role in the killing.

The city’s NYPD watchdog wants to review the testimony and evidence from a grand jury investigation into the death of Eric Garner in police custody so it can complete its own probe of alleged civil rights abuses.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board filed a petition in Staten Island Supreme Court last week asking a judge to grant them access to the testimony of police officers and witnesses that the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office presented to the Garner grand jury.

The CCRB had begun its own probe of Garner’s July 17 death after receiving multiple complaints of police abuse, but stopped questioning witnesses and compiling evidence when former Staten Island DA Daniel Donovan and federal prosecutors asked the agency to hold off while they completed their own investigations.

In December, Donovan’s office finished its grand jury proceeding, which ended with no criminal charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who was accused of using a chokehold to cause Garner’s death. Donovan has refused to make the transcripts from the grand jury public despite demands from civil rights groups and Public Advocate Letitia James.

Brooklyn federal prosecutors have not wrapped up their probe and have not been able to provide an expected completion date to the CCRB, the petition says.

The CCRB decided that the best way to move forward with its own investigation without interfering with the feds’ probe was to compel Donovan’s office to hand over the testimony of the 50 witnesses and the 60 exhibits it presented to the grand jury last fall.

“We felt this was the least-intrusive method,” CCRB chairman Richard Emery told DNAinfo New York.

Emery said his agency would respect the secrecy of the grand jury and would follow the court’s guidance on reviewing the evidence.

“We are perfectly happy to make sure that this remains private,” Emery said. “We’ll even go over to the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office and review it there.”

Under the city charter, the CCRB has a mandate to investigate allegations of police misconduct involving excessive force, abuse of authority, discourtesy and offensive language.

Until 2013 the CCRB could only pass along its investigative findings and recommend disciplinary action to the NYPD, which would then conduct its own administrative trial of the offending officers.

But under an agreement reached between the police department and the CCRB, when the watchdog agency substantiates allegations and recommends serious discipline, it now prosecutes the administrative trial itself.

An administrative law judge presides over the trial and issues a decision and disciplinary action. However, the NYPD commissioner has final say on any punishment.

The CCRB’s petition, filed on May 7, says it sought other alternatives before requesting the grand jury’s testimony and evidence.

The agency had asked the NYPD to share its findings from an investigation by itsInternal Affairs Bureau, but the department refused.

“I’ve asked them repeatedly since December,” Emery said. “They just simply say that this is their investigation and they want to maintain its integrity.”

Police officers stopped Garner, an unarmed black Staten Island resident, on July 17 for the suspected sale of untaxed cigarettes. He died after officers wrestled him to the ground when he refused to be handcuffed.

“This is not a case that we can ignore, especially when we have multiple complaints,” Emery said. “In any investigation, if the CCRB is doing its job — which I want it to — we have to gather all the relevant evidence. Plainly, [the grand jury testimony] is as relevant as any evidence can be.”

The Staten Island DA’s Office declined to comment. Donovan won a special election on May 5 for the congressional seat vacated by Rep. Michael Grimm.

The CCRB has a June 12 court date about the petition before Judge William Garnett, who in March denied requests by the New York Civil Liberties Union and others to order Donovan to release grand jury transcripts.

Published on dnainfo.com by James Fanelli

The relatives of eight people killed by police called on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to order a special prosecutor to investigate such deaths.

Standing outside Cuomo’s Capitol offices on Tuesday, they said they don’t condone but do understand the frustration that led to rioting Monday in Baltimore, where a man suffered a fatal spine injury while under arrest.

Gwen Carr, whose son Eric Garner died last year in a police chokehold caught on video in New York City, said it’s a matter of life and death in minority communities. A grand jury declined to charge any officers in Garner’s death, leading to protests by outraged residents.

Carr said Garner, who was black and was being arrested on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, didn’t have any weapon on him.

“He was laying on the ground dying. They wouldn’t even let the EMS attend to him,” Carr said. “The grand jury didn’t indict. Where is the justice? My son said he couldn’t breathe. Eleven times. Eleven times my son said he couldn’t breathe.”

She added: “Nobody has that right to take away our right to breathe. Our children are not animals. They did nothing to deserve this.”

Medical examiners had found that a police chokehold, banned by police policy, caused Garner’s death. Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s lawyer argued the officer used a permissible takedown maneuver. Grand jurors decided no criminal charges were warranted in a case presented by Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan, who’s now running for Congress.

The families said they came to Albany tired of waiting for a meeting with Cuomo that had been previously scheduled and canceled. An administration official said the governor planned to meet with them later Tuesday.

Constance Malcolm, whose 18-year-old son Ramarley Graham was shot to death by a policeman in 2012 in a bathroom in the Bronx home he shared with his grandmother and others, said authorities had no warrant, her son was killed in front of his 6-year-old brother and their grandmother was interrogated at the police station for seven hours afterward.

The officer said he fired because he thought Graham would shoot him, but no weapons were found in the apartment. Police said marijuana was found in the toilet.

Officer Richard Haste’s manslaughter indictment was dismissed by a judge who said prosecutors had improperly instructed grand jurors. A second grand jury decided not to re-indict the officer.

Malcolm questioned how in such cases people can count on prosecutors, judges and police officers who work together.

“We need a special prosecutor because the locals, we can’t rely on them,” Graham said. “It seems like every time they get a case, we end up with the same result.”

Cuomo, a Democrat, proposed legislation to establish a special monitor who would review grand jury investigations of police who kill unarmed civilians, but it was left out of the budget he negotiated with legislative leaders this year.

The families want Cuomo to issue an executive order to establish a special prosecutor who would be more objective. They said legislation would take too long and a special monitor would just add a step to the existing process.

Published by 4 New York