A Checklist for Reforming the NYPD

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After several of its members met with incoming NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton last week, Communities United for Police Reform issued a report Monday recommending what New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio do with his first 100 days in office. The document, titled "Safety and Civil Rights for All New Yorkers," is as much a reminder as a recommendation: Bill de Blasio said he would change the NYPD, and this is how we think he should do it. Here's the Cliff Notes version of what Communities United for Police Reform would like to see from de Blasio's first 100 days:

• Drop policies like "bias-based profiling, abuse of stop-and-frisk, and surveillance of Muslim communities," and replace them with "policies and practices that ensure safety and respect for the rights and dignity of all New Yorkers, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, housing status, socio-economic status, occupation, and language."
• Stop arresting people and issuing summonses for "quality of life offenses like possession of small amounts of marijuana, trespass and disorderly conduct."
• Make the NYPD transparent; something de Blasio dinged the agency for when he was public advocate.
• Institute a zero-tolerance policy for police misconduct (which would be tantamount to declaring war on the New York City Patrolmen's Benevolent Association).
• Rather than just adhering to arrest quotas, come up with more nuanced performance measures. CUPR recommends measuring the "legal sufficiency of enforcement activities [and the] ability to build community relationships and trust." The Brennan Center also has some good ideas for how to change policing incentives.
• Implement the The End NYPD Discriminatory Profiling Act and the End Discriminatory Profiling and the NYPD Oversight Act (both of which were passed in 2013 in response to the outcry over stop and frisk), and use data collection and analysis to make sure officers comply with the law.
• Invite external researchers and analysts to help the NYPD retrain.
• Appoint a political progressive to be commissioner of NYC's Department of Investigation, make sure that person will work with the NYPD Inspector General, and give both offices plenty of funding and require the NYPD to cooperate with their investigations.
• Issue an executive order requiring NYPD patrolmen to inform the people they stop that they don't have to consent to a search, and a second executive order requiring officers to "identify themselves, explain the reasons for the law enforcement action in question and provide information about how to file a complaint or commend officers for professional and courteous behavior."
• Implement the mandates in Judge Shira A. Scheindlin's stop-and-frisk ruling (on-body cameras being one of them).
• End public housing police abuses while improving public housing with "effective security measures for all buildings, including doors, locks, lighting, cameras, and non-police civilian employees who perform the doorman function."
• End the surveillance of Muslim communities.

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