{"$schema":"https://ejfox.com/schema/page-twin@1.json","kind":"project","url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/ccrb-clusters","json_url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/ccrb-clusters.json","generator":"ejfox.com/json-twin@1","data":{"cacheVersion":"2026-05-13-gear-cards","html":"
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Force-directed network graph of NYPD civilian complaint clusters showing officers connected by shared misconduct patterns
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Scrolling the published Gothamist investigation — the officer-cluster network as readers met it
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The network visualization in the published piece
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In 2021, WNYC/Gothamist got the NYPD's full civilian-complaint dataset through a FOIL request and handed it to me — every complaint and every officer since 2000, including officers named only as witnesses and complaints the CCRB never substantiated. Noisier than the data ProPublica had published a year earlier, but for mapping a network that noise is the signal: being named on a complaint alongside another officer, even an unfounded one, means the two of them interacted in a way the public noticed.

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Complaints are often the first and only warning that an officer is on a course of escalating violence. Derek Chauvin had at least 22 complaints across 19 years before he killed George Floyd; the officer who choked Eric Garner had 7. Nothing disrupted either pattern.

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So I built the network — 29,915 officer nodes, 159,671 relationships, in Neo4j (with a lot of Cypher help from David Allen at Neo4j) and laid out in Gephi (love-hate relationship, but unrivaled for networks). Two officers get a link — a CO_OCCURANCE — when they appear on the same complaint, weighted by how many they share: three complaints together, weight 3. I filtered out everything the CCRB marked exonerated or unfounded first, and only labeled an officer by name if they'd had a complaint substantiated — a caution I was told lawyers would appreciate. Everyone else stays an anonymous ID.

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One sign it was working: when I ran community detection, the clusters mirrored real NYPD precincts — officers appear on complaints with the officers they actually work beside.

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Then the big nodes surfaced — Martinez, Radoncic, Grieco — officers co-appearing on complaint after complaint. When Gothamist reporter George Joseph took those names to the street and interviewed victims, the graph held up: the central nodes were acting as catalysts in real life. One man described a big node, Adnan Radoncic, sparking a group assault — \"As soon as he grabbed me, all the officers was hands on. It's like they just followed his lead.\" Math and reality matched up.

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I documented every query and every decision so anyone could rebuild this for their own police department: the full methodology write-up →

","title":"Clusters of NYPD Misconduct","metadata":{"title":"Clusters of NYPD Misconduct","date":"2021-06-15T04:00:00.000Z","category":"Journalism","modified":"2025-08-26T19:52:56.000Z","url":"https://gothamist.com/news/mapping-clusters-nypd-officers-repeatedly-accused-misconduct","tech":["Neo4j","SQLite","Gephi","Network Analysis","Cypher"],"featured":true,"state":"deployed","ai-involvement":"human-only","context":"client","tags":["data","nypd","journalism","database"],"words":395,"images":3,"imageDetails":{"total":3,"cloudinary":3,"withDimensions":0},"links":4,"codeBlocks":0,"headers":{},"toc":[],"type":"post"}},"_links":{"self":"https://ejfox.com/projects/ccrb-clusters.json","html":"https://ejfox.com/projects/ccrb-clusters","index":"/projects.json"}}