Loose Rules Let State Police Hand Out Lax Penalties for Serious Misconduct

New York State troopers used the badge to settle personal scores and elicit favors. Still, they remained on the job, an investigation found.

By Sammy Sussman

Sammy Sussman pored over thousands of State Police disciplinary records of active and recently retired officers to report this article, which is part of a series by The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

An investigator with the New York State Police helped get a friend’s traffic tickets reduced “in exchange” for her sexually explicit photos, according to a disciplinary letter from 2017.

Another stunned a combative suspect with his Taser in 2020 and held down the trigger for 33 seconds, twice the amount of time widely considered dangerous and potentially fatal.

Some officers with the agency neglected their duties; others had sex while on duty. Some used their badges to elicit favors; others to settle personal scores. Some failed to call for medical aid when needed; others lied in police reports.

The circumstances of any case of officer misconduct vary. Still, most large police agencies in New York State thoroughly outline steps to be taken in their investigative processes and have explicit disciplinary guidelines that recommend specific punishments — in some cases, even firing — for these types of offenses.

But the State Police, New York’s second-biggest law enforcement agency, has no such formal disciplinary guidelines. How a misconduct complaint is investigated, and any resulting discipline, is discretionary. All of these officers remained on the job.

The New York Times and New York Focus, a nonprofit newsroom, obtained through records requests thousands of State Police disciplinary files dating back to 1998. For the most part, the files do not include cases of officers committing crimes, which are generally investigated by prosecutors. But they do include confirmed cases of misconduct handled by the agency itself.

An examination of agency files from 2014 to 2024 revealed a far weaker disciplinary system than those used in other large departments in New York. It is one that has routed complaints of flagrant wrongdoing to low-levels of scrutiny, and that has addressed abuses of power and derelictions of duty with lax punishments.

Some cases were investigated by an internal affairs office, but without formal guidelines, discipline was applied inconsistently. One trooper who had sex while on duty, for example, received an eight-day suspension without pay. Two years earlier he had been caught taking a photo of his genitalia while in uniform. But two others who also had sex while on duty, records show, got suspensions of 45 and 90 days without pay, even though they had relatively cleaner disciplinary records.

Other cases — those that the office decided could be handled at a lower level — were addressed with a conversation between trooper and supervisor.

And despite repeated calls for reform, the State Police’s disciplinary system remained largely unchanged for decades.

The State Police declined multiple requests for interviews with agency leadership. Beau Duffy, a director of public information with the State Police, wrote in a statement that “allegations involving serious misconduct are thoroughly investigated” and that the agency began developing a formal disciplinary model in 2025. It is not yet complete.

“The circumstances and facts revealed during an investigation can vary widely” and influence possible discipline, Mr. Duffy wrote, adding that “past precedent, and an employee’s previous history” also play a role.

In a statement, a representative for Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York wrote that “this Administration fully investigates any claims of wrongdoing” and supports Steven G. James, who took over the State Police as superintendent in 2024. The representative declined to comment on actions of past administrations.

Suat Cubukcu, a professor of criminal justice at Towson University who studies discipline in large law enforcement agencies, including those in New York, said that weak disciplinary systems and inconsistencies in punishments could lead to more bad behavior.

“People see that their colleagues aren’t being punished,” he said.

A ‘lack of attention’ to accountability
With more than 5,200 officers across roughly 200 stations, the State Police has a reputation for investigative work; troopers are often brought in to aid local law enforcement in serious cases.

But disciplinary files from the agency’s 11 regional troops, many of which had never before been reviewed by journalists, revealed a lack of scrutiny when the department policed its own.

The internal affairs office, called the Professional Standards Bureau, independently investigates “serious or complex” allegations of officer misconduct, per the agency’s website, but generally assigns those of a “routine nature” to the commanders of troops.

Commanders resolve these cases with troopers, who waive their right to appeal a decision. Following a conversation with the trooper, commanders must write a letter summarizing their findings, and, if they feel it is warranted, issue a suspension not exceeding five days, or a loss of five or fewer vacation days.

This process was designed so that commanders could handle minor complaints, like lost equipment or cursing on the job. But without formal disciplinary guidelines, the bureau’s determination of which complaints are serious — and which are minor — is subjective.

This includes the case of the trooper who stunned a suspect and “inadvertently held the trigger” of his Taser for 33 seconds, per a disciplinary letter. The trooper’s commander found his actions were “excessive” and summed up the “informal inquiry” in the one-page letter: “We discussed the importance of attention to detail,” wrote the commander. “Handling a Taser requires your complete attention.” The trooper lost one vacation day.

Mac Muir, a former investigator for New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct by members of the New York Police Department, questioned the State Police’s handling of the case.

“Show me a large police department that doesn’t require more than a supervisory review for a 33 second Taser deployment,” said Mr. Muir, who also supervised disciplinary investigations in Oakland, Calif. “I’ve literally never heard of that.”

He also criticized the report for lacking an interview transcript, which is not required in troop-level investigations. “Without a recorded statement, there’s no meaningful way to hold the officer accountable,” he said.

Without a more robust disciplinary record, the complete context of the case is unclear. But in the New York Police Department, the state’s largest agency, disciplinary policy would suggest that an officer who used excessive force with a stun gun face termination or, at minimum, a 10-day penalty.

Concerns about how complaints at the State Police are designated, and who looks into them, are not new. In 1997, a special prosecutor appointed to investigate troopers who tampered with evidence in multiple cases criticized the State Police for resolving complaints of serious misconduct at the troop level, recommending that such cases be investigated by the standards bureau.

Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who studies police accountability, called it “troubling” that some cases she viewed as serious were investigated at the troop level.

“When you see such a large agency that doesn’t even have a systematic way of deciding when discipline is appropriate and at what level,” she said, “it suggests a lack of attention to the issue of accountability entirely.”

In 2022, a trooper responding to a “shots-fired” call missed a loaded revolver in a suspect’s pocket, allowing the suspect to bring the weapon into the police station. Ten months later, his commander talked to him and issued a disciplinary letter.

That year, another trooper responded “telephonically” to a larceny call at a Lowe’s store, interviewing employees over the phone while he and his sergeant ate breakfast. After conversations with their commander five months later, the trooper lost two vacation days; the sergeant lost three, according to records.

In a separate incident two months later, records show, the same sergeant was caught adding false information to a police report. He lost four vacation days.

Mr. Duffy said he could not comment on previous leadership, adding that the bureau currently does “not assign cases involving serious misconduct to troop level.”

In November, the agency faced public scrutiny when The Albany Times Union reported that some high-ranking agency leaders had used their police credentials to access exclusive areas of the Ryder Cup, a golf tournament on Long Island, two months earlier.

The day after the article was published, the agency’s superintendent wrote in a statement that it had learned of the allegations the week prior and was turning the case over to the state inspector general. Many involved in the incident, including the first deputy superintendent in charge of agency discipline, have since resigned.

In a statement, a representative for the troopers’ union wrote that the scandal exemplified a “two-tiered system, in which rank-and-file Troopers are held to stricter standards than those in leadership.”

An agency exempt from many police reforms
In the weeks following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the New York Legislature passed a number of police reform laws.

But the State Police was one of a handful of multicounty agencies excluded from most of the changes, and it unsuccessfully fought in court one of the few that did apply: the repeal of a 1976 law that kept officer disciplinary records secret.

The New York Police Department made most of its files public in 2021. But despite a court order, the State Police has yet to make its entire body of misconduct files public. WKBW, a Buffalo TV station, reported on some records obtained from a local district attorney about state troopers in their area in 2022. The thousands of State Police files obtained by The Times and New York Focus came through records requests of county district attorneys’ offices.

“They say it’s too burdensome to identify all the files,” said Cory Morris, an attorney on Long Island who in 2021 sued for the disciplinary files of troopers across three counties. He continues to fight the agency for prompt access to the records.

“Well then, how much misconduct is there?” he asked in an interview.

In 2020, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed an order requiring hundreds of police agencies to submit police reform plans to the state. The Legislature passed a law requiring police agencies to report to the attorney general repeated allegations of misconduct against an officer over a two-year period. Neither requirement applied to the State Police.

Al Taylor, a state assemblyman and author of the bill, said in an interview that he thought the agency faced oversight from the state inspector general’s office. That office investigates waste, fraud and abuse — exploiting overtime, for example — but it does not routinely investigate allegations of law enforcement misconduct, like excessive force. There is no regulation or statute requiring the State Police to report repeated allegations of misconduct to the inspector general.

“It’s worth taking a look at it again,” Mr. Taylor said in an interview.

In its most recent reports, from 2020 and 2022, the state inspector general’s office criticized the State Police for its disciplinary practices.

Discipline “was extremely lenient and lacked transparency,” the inspector general wrote in a 2020 report about an off-duty officer’s car crash of a federally leased vehicle. The agency lacked policies “to ensure consistency and transparency in the classification of violations,” the inspector general wrote, “as well as the assignment of discipline.”

After the 2022 report, the Professional Standards Bureau began sharing cases it investigates in monthly meetings with the inspector general’s office, according to Mr. Duffy, the agency representative.

But in not yet making the bulk of its misconduct files available to the public, many complaints — and how they were handled — remain concealed.

In some instances, records obtained by The Times and New York Focus show, state troopers evaded public scrutiny — even, in one case, when an officer from another agency faced significant criticism over the same incident.

In 2021 a police officer in the village of Monticello ended a traffic pursuit by firing his stun gun at a motorcyclist through the passenger-side window. The motorcyclist sustained serious injuries. The officer was suspended, and he resigned in the face of public scrutiny and a disciplinary investigation.

What was not widely reported was that a State Police trooper was riding in the passenger seat. The trooper, records revealed, failed to render aid to the motorcyclist, or call an ambulance. He turned off his body camera, and didn’t report the use of force, a disciplinary letter later noted.

The Monticello officer was criminally charged for impeding an investigation and lost his certification to be a police officer in New York.

Following an investigation by the standards bureau, the trooper was suspended without pay for three days. He remains on the force.

Sarah Cohen contributed reporting.

This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University, and with support from MuckRock, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project.

Correction: a correction to this article was made on January 28. This sentence was corrected to remove “not” from “…viewed as serious were not investigated at the troop level.” The full sentence now reads: Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law who studies police accountability, called it “troubling” that some cases she viewed as serious were investigated at the troop level. A correction was made on Jan. 30, 2026: An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to union representation in investigations by commanders. A union representative can represent a trooper in their meeting with a commander, but troopers must consent in writing to waiving their right to appeal any decision.

Image Credit: Cindy Schultz/New York Times