New York City has been ordered to pay the legal expenses of an Albany-based nonprofit group for withholding information about the number of undercover cops working for the police department.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Freed ruled that the NYPD “failed to sustain its burden” of proving that the disclosure of that number — plus the total amount spent on salaries for the undercover cops — “would in any way endanger them, impede their work or give valuable information” to the targets of their investigations.
The information was sought under the state Freedom of Information Law by the Empire Center for Public Policy which, among other things, has a website called SeeThroughNewYork that provides salary information on city and state employees.
Although most of the information on the site involves individuals who are named, the Center in its FOIL request to the city said it would accept aggregate information about undercover cops — no names, just total numbers of cops and the total spent on their salaries— for the fiscal year ending in 2015.
The NYPD refused to release that data, saying that the disclosure of any information about undercover cops would “pose a security threat” and that made the data exempt from FOIL.
Freed said that the police department provided “an insufficient basis” to exempt the broader data from a FOIL request and ruled that the city should pay the Empire Center’s legal expenses because the organization had “substantially prevailed” in the lawsuit and “the information sought is of significant interest to the general public and there was no reasonable basis to withhold” it.
Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Center, said “this case was remarkable because the city refused to answer basic questions about how many people it was paying and what they were making.” He said the judge sent “a clear message to other government agencies that would hinder the public’s right to this type of information.”
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