Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at how some police officers in New York State drink and drive — and avoid charges. We’ll also get details on an appeals court ruling that upheld the $83.3 million judgment against President Trump for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Can the police police themselves? How often do they look out for their own when officers are caught drinking and driving? The answers suggested by articles published this morning are troubling. The articles, published by The New York Times and the nonprofit news site New York Focus, show that officers don’t always face criminal charges after drinking and driving. The articles were based on a review of more than 10,000 once-secret disciplinary files from more than half the law enforcement agencies in New York State. That is a huge number of records to read through and make sense of. The reporter Sammy Sussman did, first at New York Focus and now as a fellow on the Local Investigations team at The Times. He constructed a database to keep track of all the documents. They do not provide a comprehensive accounting of every officer who drove drunk, and they do not include files from the New York Police Department, which began releasing its records in 2021. Some experts speculated that the tally from the files was an undercount. From the 10,000 files, 17 cases from 2013 to 2023 stood out. They appeared to involve law enforcement officers who had seemingly driven while drunk. Some had crashed into guardrails or parked cars. But the officers sent to the scene did not perform sobriety tests, and no one was arrested at the scene. As Sammy writes, the 17 cases provide a window into how officers in New York State have avoided accountability in court despite relatively clear evidence suggesting they had broken the law. The 10,000 files that Sammy amassed had long been kept secret. Then, amid the national outrage after the killing of George Floyd — a Black man who died when a white police officer knelt on his neck in Minneapolis in 2020 — the New York State Legislature quickly repealed the law that had shielded police misconduct records. Sammy got a tip in 2023 that some district attorneys’ offices in New York State were all but overwhelmed by a sudden wave of files on misconduct cases from local police departments. Other news outlets had asked police agencies for their records, often to no avail. Sammy focused on filing requests for records with the prosecutors. That approach was productive: At least once, a district attorney’s office gave him records that a police chief had said did not exist. (It turned out that the chief, when he was a sergeant in a village of 4,000 people in the Hudson Valley, had faced allegations that he was in a sexual relationship with a woman and had directed other officers to leave the police station when she stopped by. An officer who wrote an anonymous letter about the situation faced disciplinary proceedings and resigned. The sergeant was exonerated and later promoted to chief.) The files Sammy obtained point to discrepancies in how different police departments handle misconduct. There are no statewide standards for handling police misconduct cases, and there is no requirement for an outside review of such cases by local district attorneys or the state attorney general. That has left local police departments on their own, behind closed doors. The outcomes vary from department to department: Some departments fire officers for misconduct that other departments treat with reprimands or suspensions. As Sammy worked through the 10,000 files, the State Police became a focus. That agency has not released its misconduct files, claiming in court that it would take years to do so. But Sammy obtained thousands of records on cases involving current employees of the State Police, including some documents that suggested that local police departments had given them special treatment. The standard procedure for a local police department in the Buffalo suburbs was to call the State Police when any state officer was being questioned. That procedure was followed when a state police investigator crashed his BMW into a Jeep on a Saturday night in 2021. Before long a State Police sergeant picked up the investigator and his girlfriend, who had been in the car with him, and drove them home. The investigator was not charged with driving while intoxicated. He received a traffic ticket. Later, in a disciplinary proceeding, he admitted that he had six cocktails and a shot that night. He was suspended without pay for 35 days. He remains on the job. WEATHER Expect a sunny sky, with wind and a high near 74. Tonight, clouds will move in, with a chance of rain and a low near 58. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Sept. 23 and 24 (Rosh Hashana.) The latest New York news
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. E. Jean Carroll’s $83 million judgment against Trump is upheld
A federal appeals court rejected President Trump’s argument that a Supreme Court decision extending presidential immunity shielded him from liability for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel upheld a $83.3 million jury award against Trump. Trump assailed Carroll after she accused him of a decades-old rape in a Manhattan department store, an attack for which he was separately found liable for sexual abuse, not rape. Trump called her claim “totally false” and continued his verbal attacks on her on social media, at news conferences and even during the trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan. Of the $83.3 million, $65 million was for punitive damages after the jury concluded that he had acted with malice. The appeals court said the record in the case supported the finding by the trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, that “the degree of reprehensibility of Mr. Trump’s conduct was remarkably high, perhaps unprecedented.” Aaron Harison, a spokesman for Trump’s legal team, said in a statement that Americans stand with Trump and demand “an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system.” Carroll has yet to receive any damages that juries in two trials have said Trump owes her. Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that “we look forward to an end to the appellate process so that justice will finally be done.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Getting younger
Dear Diary: I was running errands in Cobble Hill with my adult daughter, Anna, when we encountered a large group of 5-year-olds walking in a fragile, paper-doll chain. We said hello to each adorable face, cheering them on as they did their best to stay attached to one another. “Hold hands!” Anna yelled after them. “Don’t let go!” I cautioned. A few minutes later, a group of 3-year-olds toddled by, tethered by one of those belts that preschools use to prevent accidental strays and runners. “Step aside for the people,” one teacher warned. “Say, ‘Excuse me’ and ‘Thank you,’” instructed another. They did, and Anna and I did, too. Shortly after that, a parade of still tinier humans — this time in strollers — rolled by, powered by their caregivers. We greeted each little face. “The farther we walk, Mom, the younger they get,” Anna said. I nodded. As we approached Anna’s building, her upstairs neighbor bounded down the stoop with her newborn snuggled against her chest. We burst out laughing. — Jill Kampfe Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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