The New York City Department of Investigation on Tuesday rebuked top Police Department officials for combative social media posts, saying in a report that the messages were unprofessional and irresponsible.
The 41-page report was the conclusion of an investigation by the city watchdog agency into the Police Department’s use of social media. Adrienne E. Adams, the speaker of the City Council, requested the inquiry in May after department executives — including John Chell, who is now the top uniformed officer — published a weekslong barrage of attacks on critics.
“New York City deserves public officials who use social media responsibly, to communicate accurate information and to prompt respectful dialogue on issues of importance to the community,” Jocelyn E. Strauber, commissioner of the investigation department, said in the report on Tuesday.
“No aspect of the social media exchanges that D.O.I. reviewed in this investigation served the public,” she said.
The report serves as the final word in a once-simmering argument between the Police Department and the City Council over the use of social media. Since taking office late last year, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has made a point of improving oversight of social media by her top officers, and of warning against misbehavior.
“We appreciate D.O.I.’s comprehensive report,” the Police Department said on Tuesday. “As the report notes, the N.Y.P.D. has already made significant changes to its social media practices. We look forward to reviewing the report and recommendations.”
Many of the officials involved in the investigation have retained their posts under the new commissioner, and some have climbed to higher ones. Commissioner Tisch named Chief Chell as chief of department, a job from which he oversees crime-fighting strategies, quality-of-life initiatives and operations.
The Police Department, the largest in the country, has just under 50,000 civilian and uniformed employees, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office. It has been under scrutiny in recent months as it struggles to right itself from a series of scandals, including accusations of misconduct among high-ranking officials, rampant overtime abuse and mismanagement.
The investigation focused on the department’s social media policies as well as on specific online exchanges between officials and members of the public, including a City Council member and journalists.
According to the report, the watchdog department reviewed all posts made on X between January 2022 and August 2024 by @NYPDnews, the department’s official account, as well as accounts belonging to Chief Chell, who for much of that time was chief of patrol, and Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations. The investigation also reviewed posts made by journalists and politicians to which the police officials had responded.
In one protracted exchange in March, Chief Chell and Deputy Commissioner Daughtry called a Daily News columnist “deceitful” and a “gadfly.”
“The problem is that besides your flawed reporting is the fact that now we are calling you and your ‘latte’ friends out on their garbage,” Chief Chell wrote.
In another post on X, Chief Chell attacked Tiffany Cabán, a Queens City Council member, after she criticized the police for the arrests of pro-Palestinian demonstrators at City College and Columbia University. “I started to read this garbage and quickly realized this is coming from a person who hates our city and certainly does not represent the great people of NYC,” he wrote.
At the time, some former Police Department and city officials said the posts had gone too far. In her letter urging the Department of Investigation to look into the matter, Ms. Adams called the comments “a deeply troubling pattern.”
In Tuesday’s report, the investigation department called some of the posts “unprofessional” and said that they violated police policies on civility and courtesy. The report also raised the question of whether the posts qualified as prohibited political activity, though it made no determination.
In addition, the report found that several Police Department social media practices did not comply with citywide policies, that top officials with individual accounts operated them “without sufficient oversight” and that the department did not provide training on appropriate content to officials who have their own accounts.
The investigation department also recommended that the police create a formal internal review process for social media posts on accounts held by executives.
The post N.Y.P.D. Chiefs Failed Public by Attacking Critics Online, Report Finds appeared first on New York Times.
