On Wednesday, a Manhattan court ruled that the NYPD must reform its process for obtaining sealed records, including measures that prevent officers from accessing sealed arrest information — mugshots, arrest history, fingerprints and other identifying information — from its 14 citywide databases without the court’s permission.
The judge’s order also prohibits the NYPD from using sealed arrests to label someone a recidivist.
According to 1976 state law, sealed records can only be accessed via a court order, but the law enforcement agency had been found in violation of the law for decades. The prosecution laid out, in their arguments and evaluation of NYPD training materials, that officers are encouraged to use information from sealed files.
The class action suit centered on a Latino man, identified only as R.C., who was arrested for a 2015 robbery in the Bronx after NYPD detectives showed his photo from a 2011 sealed arrest to a victim.
Bronx case at the center of NYPD sealed records decision last month
R.C., the lead plaintiff, claimed in the suit that by the time prosecutors dropped charges against him the following year because he had an alibi, his life had been largely disrupted. R.C. had to make roughly 10 required court appearances, while living 75 minutes by car from the Bronx courthouse, which caused him to lose his job at a restaurant, his complaint says.
In April 2019 as part of the same case, Justice Alexander M. Tisch said the police could only access sealed arrest records with a court order. During the case, evidence uncovered by The Bronx Defenders, a taxpayer-funded legal aid group, showed the NYPD had continued to access such information without court orders and had trained its officers to do so.
“The judge’s order will hopefully make sure no one ever has to go through what I did,” said R.C. “Everyone must have the right to their personal privacy, and so I’m happy the court is making the police finally change their systems and…
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