“We don’t tolerate misconduct or corruption anywhere,” the mayor said in his annual State of the City address. “And we have the very highest standards for those we entrust to enforce the law.”
But Mr. Bloomberg’s plans were met by skepticism among those who view the entity, the Mayor’s Commission to Combat Police Corruption, as a flawed watchdog. Tiny, with a modest budget, it has no subpoena power and relies on the department’s good will for relevant information. Even its chairman, Michael F. Armstrong, who was the counsel to the Knapp Commission on police corruption in the 1970s, has acknowledged the commission’s limitations.
Richard Aborn, the president of the Citizens Crime Commission, said, “If we were to have effective oversight of the N.Y.P.D., it would have two elements, independence and transparency, and you only achieve independence if you have subpoena power and funding that cannot be eliminated.”
Mr. Armstrong has taken the position that the department, under Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, does not need outside oversight.
One former law enforcement official who closely tracked the commission’s work for many years said the department’s refusal in some instances to cooperate with the commission and the agency’s lack of subpoena power made the addition of the new lawyers “form over substance — window dressing.”
“Without the department’s cooperation and full subpoena power, it means absolutely nothing,” the former official said.
Following a year in which the police force suffered a series of black eyes from scandals, the mayor used his speech to hail Mr. Kelly for ensuring that the department is “the most upstanding.”
Still, corruption accusations reached all parts of the city in 2011. In the Bronx, 16 police officers were indicted, and hundreds more ensnared, in a long-running inquiry into ticket-fixing.
Separately, an elaborate F.B.I. sting operation led to several current and former New York City officers, many of whom worked at the same Brooklyn police precinct, being charged with taking payments to drive guns into the city. Prosecutors in Queens saw seven narcotics investigators convicted of planting drugs on people to meet arrest quotas.
The mayor’s proposal would most likely include an increase of more than $400,000 to the commission’s current $560,000 annual budget.
Some analysts pointed out that as the mayor spoke of adding staff at one agency, he was silent on the problems faced by another, the Civilian Complaint Review Board. A hiring freeze imposed by City Hall leaves unfilled the position of prosecutor for a two-year-old review board program meant to prosecute city officers in certain internal disciplinary matters. Thus, the authority to prosecute substantiated misconduct complaints — as the program envisioned — is delayed.
The program, known as the Administrative Prosecution Unit, has handled a total of three cases since September 2010, when Laura Edidin, a former assistant United States attorney, was hired at an annual $105,000 salary, officials said. She moved in early November to another position at the board.
The situation is frustrating for the board, particularly since its chairman, Daniel D. Chu, said this week that overall financing for the new program would continue to flow. Last summer, Mr. Chu issued a sober warning that financing to keep the program running was set to run out by the end of December.
That a policing oversight program announced in February 2010, with much fanfare, has survived a threat to its dedicated financing stream, only to be paralyzed by a hiring freeze, struck many analysts as nonsensical.
“It is a perfect Catch-22,” said Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It is bureaucratic perfection; they have a line, it’s funded, but they cannot spend the money because of the hiring freeze.”
“They can’t do any prosecutions because they don’t have any staff,” Mr. Dunn added.
A spokesman for the mayor said the board’s staffing needs were under review.
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