Last spring, New York City police officers stopped a 19-year-old on the subway during her commute. She was eligible for a free transfer from the bus to the subway, but the transfer failed to register at the turnstile, so she and a friend entered through the platform emergency exit door.
Police stopped them, took their names, and let her friend go. Officers told the 19-year-old she had a prior arrest — from 2018, when she was in her early teens — and began to question her.
The cops should not have known about that past arrest. A New York state law protects juvenile records in cases without any finding of guilt from access by anyone, including law enforcement, without a court order.
The arrest had occurred after an incident involving the girl’s mother that resulted in child services filing a petition against her mother for abuse and neglect, and removal of the girl from her mother’s custody. At the time of the subway encounter, she was still in foster care.
The arrest was never prosecuted and was later dismissed and sealed. Yet officers had managed to access the sealed record from their phones and question her about it.
The young woman is one of three plaintiffs who filed a class-action suit in July against the city and NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban for what they said was a practice of illegally accessing, using, and leaking sealed youth records. The suit, which was unsealed Thursday, alleges that officials routinely share those sealed records with prosecutors and the media — specifically with pro-cop tabloids that regularly publish juvenile arrest information sourced from police.
“The NYPD routinely accesses this information, uses it, and also discloses it.”“When a case is sealed, it can’t be disclosed to any person or to any private or public agency, and that includes the NYPD,” said Kate Wood, an attorney in the juvenile rights practice at the Legal Aid Society, a legal advocacy group working on the suit. “Yet we know, contrary to both that statutory language and the underlying purpose of the Family Court Act — and really the juvenile legal system more generally........