A police officer who responded to a dispute between a mother and her teenage daughter suddenly grabbed the arm of the mom-of-four, shoved her into an apartment wall and cuffed her.
A cop responding to another domestic dispute, in which a woman in her 60s locked out her husband, threatened to arrest them both, damaged their front door with his baton and shouted through it, “You fucking psycho, you let him in.”
An officer who investigators previously found had punched a suspect in the face while his colleagues restrained the man’s arms, and also used a prohibited chokehold, pushed a scooter driver against a van in The Bronx and warned him to “stop fucking bumping into me.”
The three cops were charged with serious violations of NYPD regulations that typically would have cost them the loss of at least 20 vacation days.
Instead, theirs were among 25 recent cases in which NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch dismissed the charges and ordered all but one of the officers to undergo training, to which they all agreed. The remaining officer lost five vacation days.
Strikingly, Tisch acted on the recommendations of officials and prosecutors of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates police misconduct and has historically criticized the department for being too lax in holding its officers to account.
Tisch, too, has publicly signaled an interest in enforcing tougher discipline since Mayor Eric Adams appointed her as commissioner in November 2024 amid a corruption scandal that took down her predecessor. Her soon-to-be boss, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, favors bolstering accountability at the department, as well.
In opting for low-level penalties, Tisch and CCRB officials brushed aside the range of prescribed sanctions in guidelines developed in January 2021 through what is known as the disciplinary matrix.
The guidelines stipulate that only in “extraordinary circumstances” should the penalties be pre-empted, and until this September that’s what took place.
In the 4½ years between the launch of the matrix and this August, police commissioners wrote 15 such “deviation letters” — 10 fewer than Tisch signed between September and early December. Under prior commissioners, six of the deviations, all downward, were proposed by the CCRB.
Tisch’s disciplinary policies and decision-making are being closely watched, particularly as she moves from reporting to Adams, a former police captain who’s had a heavy hand in the department’s operations, to Mamdani, who has been a frequent critic of police conduct in recent years.
Within the department she’s earned a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, certainly when compared to former Commissioner Edward Caban. He employed a variety of tools — including simply taking cases away from CCRB prosecutors in a process known as “retention” — to dismiss disciplinary charges far more often than Tisch has.
In a recent decision on a fatal police shooting case, however, Tisch overruled an administrative judge’s recommendation that a police officer be terminated — upsetting advocates and some elected officials.
Former CCRB Board Chair Fred Davie said Mamdani needs to work with Tisch and CCRB leadership, including members Mamdani will appoint, to ensure there aren’t unjustified reversals of penalties.
“Crucial to public safety is ensuring the public has confidence officers will be held accountable for their actions,” said Davie, who served as board chair from 2017 to 2022. “To do anything less makes a mockery of oversight and undermines public safety.”
‘Shaken Up’
The letters explaining the departures, which are required under an agreement between the CCRB and the police department, are periodically posted to an NYPD website. But mistakenly, the names of misconduct victims were not redacted from some of the incident summaries in recent postings. That enabled THE CITY to contact a number of victims, two of whom said they were scarred by their encounters.
Jakeem McKenzie told THE CITY that officers suddenly surrounded him and a pregnant friend at gunpoint just after he started his parked car in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in May 2022. A search failed to turn up the car’s registration and other issues but a detective told him he’d be let off with a summons.
When he asked multiple times why he was stopped, the detective said, “Fuck it,” ordered him out of the car and arrested him in retaliation, according to a CCRB summary of the incident. The summary makes no mention of the officers drawing their guns.
McKenzie told THE CITY he had to fight various charges stemming from the arrest for three to four months in court, and had to secure video footage to disprove one of them. He said the encounter left him rattled.
“It impacted me a lot,” said McKenzie, 33. “To this day I don’t trust the cops. Sometimes when I’m driving and a cop gets behind me, I get nervous or shaken up even though I’m not doing anything wrong.”
Asked about the specifics of a half-dozen of the most serious cases, neither the CCRB nor NYPD would discuss what made them worthy of a full deviation from the disciplinary standards, which already allow for raising or lowering the presumed penalty based on factors such as an officer’s disciplinary record and any complicating circumstances of an encounter.
An NYPD spokesperson, who did not provide his or her name, said the NYPD gave deference to the CCRB’s recommendations since it was the board’s staff prosecuting the cases and proposing the penalties.
“After review of the case and CCRB’s recommendation, the department determined that there was no reasonable basis to disagree with CCRB’s recommendation and agreed with the penalty that the CCRB recommended,” the spokesperson said.
Downgrades Going Up
The NYPD has not historically deferred to CCRB recommendations. The department’s agreement rate with the board’s recommended penalties was 56% in 2023, 30% in 2024 and 76% in the first half of 2025 under Tisch, according to testimony by a police department attorney at a recent City Council hearing.
CCRB officials didn’t describe what’s driving the recent increase in deviations, but they come at a time when the board’s prosecuting unit is facing a backlog that in September was approaching 900 cases awaiting disciplinary trial.
Among the reasons cited in the CCRB’s letters to Tisch proposing downward deviations from the matrix are officers’ lack of a disciplinary history, positive evaluations, a high number of “meritorious” or “excellent” duty awards, the volatility of the incidents involved, and the short duration of the misconduct.
Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry cited the CCRB’s willingness to downgrade penalties across the 25 cases as proof the agency prioritizes “quantity over quality.”
“CCRB harvests as many frivolous and false complaints as possible and seeks the harshest penalty, then pleads them down when it is clear the case won’t hold up at trial,” he said in a statement.
CCRB spokesperson Dakota Gardner said prosecutors do weigh the likelihood of prevailing at a disciplinary trial when negotiating plea deals, through which the board can get officers to cop to their misconduct — as occurred in 13 of the 25 cases.
A review by THE CITY discovered that in some cases, however, CCRB prosecutors misstated an officer’s record or left out major markers in their disciplinary history from its letters to Tisch.
In the case of the cop who pushed the scooter driver against the van, CCRB officials said he merited a reprieve in part because of his “lack of any prior disciplinary history,” according to a March 2025 CCRB letter to Tisch.
Seven months earlier, however, records posted online show that CCRB officials had substantiated three charges of excessive force against him, including two punches to the face and a chokehold, and urged then-Commissioner Caban to discipline him for conduct they labeled “egregious.”
Caban ended up dismissing the charges, arguing that any contact to the suspect’s neck was incidental and that the officer had “utilized the necessary force to gain compliance.” But the charges, along with all CCRB findings of misconduct, remain listed in the board’s public disciplinary records. NYPD officials didn’t say how such disciplinary outcomes are noted in the department’s records.
In another case, a sergeant facing the loss of 40 vacation days for wrongfully arresting two passengers in a vehicle that crashed in Brooklyn following an attempted police car stop had accumulated 54 allegations of misconduct, of which the CCRB substantiated seven.
He was also disciplined by the police department in 2016 with a year’s probation, the highest penalty short of termination, for alerting a fellow cop about the imminent execution of a search warrant at a place the colleague was known to visit, according to online records.
Still, in a letter to Tisch in March 2025 that excluded that history, a chief prosecutor for the CCRB credited the sergeant for his 15 years of service, a 7 out of 10 on a recent evaluation — considered a good rating — and dozens of commendations from the department.
Tisch agreed in September to impose a penalty of training. The NYPD press office said training can occur at an officer’s command, at the police academy or through the legal bureau, but did not provide a description of what the training entails for various offenses.
Some of the officers awarded leniency had clean work records or committed relatively minor misconduct.
One officer in the lobby of an apartment building responded to a tenant who called a group of officers “stupid” by saying in part, “Yeah, call yourself stupid.” He was facing the loss of 20 vacation days for an offensive language charge, along with discourtesy, before Tisch signed off on a plea deal proposed by the CCRB.
But that officer’s penalty — training — was also agreed to in cases where officers used excessive force, provided inaccurate statements to investigators, or responded inappropriately to domestic incidents. In five of the cases, the negotiated penalty resolved two unrelated misconduct cases brought by the board against a single officer.
‘I Felt Abused’
Around midnight on a Saturday in May 2023, Yuberkis, a single mother of four, awoke to loud banging on her Washington Heights apartment door.
On the other side, according to Ring camera footage viewed by THE CITY, were two officers from the 33rd Precinct and her then-17-year-old daughter, who had been staying out late and told cops that she’d been locked out of the apartment, Yuberkis told THE CITY.
Yuberkis, who asked to be identified by a nickname to maintain privacy, had withheld an apartment key from her daughter in an effort to gain some measure of control over her whereabouts. She said it was a decision she felt as a parent was hers to make.
She recalled that almost immediately after she opened the door, Officer Carlos Arrecis began arguing with her, saying, “You have to give her the key.”
When Yuberkis tried to explain her recent challenges with her daughter, she said Arrecis cut her off and said, “Give me your hands.”
When she questioned why, she told THE CITY, he grabbed her arm and pushed her into the apartment, where her back struck an interior wall.
“At that point I didn’t even know what was happening,” she told THE CITY. “I felt abused.”
She was taken to the local precinct, charged with endangering the welfare of a child and other crimes and then transferred to central booking in Lower Manhattan.
After she was detained for a combined 16 hours, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges without her even appearing before a judge, according to paperwork she showed THE CITY.
But her problems were not over. The arrest triggered the opening of an investigation of her treatment of her eldest daughter by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, a particular challenge for Yuberkis, who runs a day care program out of her home. She said the investigation was closed later that year, and noted that her relationship with her daughter is now much better.
Her jail time also caused her to miss a day of work at her job on weekends as a home health aide. She works seven days a week.
In October 2024, the Civilian Complaint Review Board substantiated disciplinary charges against Arrecis for improper use of force and abuse of authority for entering the apartment without consent. A message left on a phone number believed to be Arrecis’ wasn’t returned, and the PBA didn’t respond to a request for comment on individual cases.
Yuberkis learned only recently, from a reporter for THE CITY, that the departmental charges were dismissed last month under the settlement with the CCRB approved by Tisch.
Arrecis, who was facing a presumed penalty of 20 vacation days, was assigned to training, an outcome that Yuberkis called “unjust.”
She said in the three months following her arrest she was scared to leave her home out of fear she’d run into him, and that she still gets nervous when she sees a police officer.
“The trauma and abuse I suffered are something no one can undo,” she said.
A Showdown at a Parked Car
McKenzie, the Brooklyn man who described to THE CITY his anguish over his encounter with police, said the incident began after he picked up a pregnant friend in Red Hook in May 2022. He said he left his black Chevy Impala for less than 15 minutes in a spot where parking was prohibited.
He said that when he returned and turned on the vehicle’s headlights he was surrounded by cops with guns drawn yelling for him and his friend to put up their hands and for him to provide his license and registration.
A description of the incident contained in a letter from a CCRB prosecutor to Tisch in April 2025 said the cops ultimately determined the vehicle wasn’t registered and lacked an inspection sticker, among other issues.
A few minutes into the encounter, Detective Damien Clarke told McKenzie he was letting him off with a summons, but McKenzie told THE CITY that, still shaken, he asked the officer why they had approached him.
“I wasn’t being combative, I was just generally concerned. I just wanted to know why,” McKenzie told THE CITY. “Y’all put a gun to my face and two minutes later you’re willing to let me go?”
He said that seemed to agitate Clarke.
According to the CCRB letter, body-worn camera footage of the incident shows that Clarke responded to McKenzie’s questions by saying “Fuck it.” He then ordered him out of the car and placed him under arrest, leading to the months of court appearances for McKenzie.
Reached by phone, Clarke declined to comment.
An attorney for the detectives’ union, James Moschella, noted that in Clarke’s case and nearly a dozen others with lowered penalties, the members hadn’t been found guilty at an administrative trial or pleaded guilty, and that the penalties make more sense given the absence of proven misconduct.
He also noted that the deviations were proposed by the CCRB, which he said has become too quick to level more serious charges against officers in recent years, so much so that perhaps the board is now implicitly acknowledging having gone too far in some cases.
“We could have pled not guilty and gone to an administrative trial but a disposition like this, it’s a fair and reasonable way out,” Moschella told THE CITY. “CCRB doesn’t have to admit that the charges were unjustified, the detective’s not admitting to committing any misconduct and he’s agreeing to go to training.”
The CCRB letter said that Clarke could have received a presumed penalty of 20 vacation days for the retaliatory arrest alone, but cited his 21 years of service and a recent job performance evaluation score of 8 out of 10 as its reason for recommending training instead.
In October, Tisch approved the deal, but McKenzie told THE CITY his ordeal merited a tougher response.
“I feel like it should be a heavy penalty,” he said. “It’s just a slap on the wrist.”
An Eruption on Staten Island
The domestic encounter on Staten Island in which Officer Frederick Daley called a woman in her 60s a “fucking psycho” began when her husband told a 911 operator she had locked him out of their shared home, according to a February 2025 letter from the CCRB to Tisch.
Body-worn camera footage showed Daley and a partner telling the woman, who spoke to them from a terrace at the home, that she would be arrested if she didn’t let her husband in, according to a CCRB investigators’ report. She said she didn’t want to because he had anger issues.
The footage also captured Daley saying to the woman later in the confrontation, “You fucking psycho,” which he told CCRB investigators he said out of frustration at being at the home for two hours.
It also shows him forcefully banging on the door with his fist and then switching to an expandable baton, while twisting the doorknob. Daley told investigators the baton might have left indentations on the door, according to the report.
The CCRB letter asserted that Daley also said they would both be arrested if police had to come back, and said that “Neither civilian had committed any crime, and it was inappropriate for Officer Daley to threaten them with arrest.”
Daley’s charges included discourtesy, offensive language, two counts of improper threat to arrest and property damage. The foul language alone carries a presumed penalty of the loss of 20 vacation days.
But the CCRB prosecutor said the board was proposing a penalty of training because of Daley’s 13 years of service, a 9 out of 10 on a recent evaluation, and the high volatility of the incident to which he was responding.
In September, Tisch wrote that she concurred with the proposal “for the reasons articulated by CCRB.”
Neither Daley nor the couple could be reached for comment.
