Officer Richard Haste, who is awaiting a disciplinary finding after a departmental trial over his actions leading up to the killing of Ramarley Graham in 2012. (AP)

Last spring, the NYPD suddenly stopped posting summaries of the outcomes of internal trials in a 13th floor press room, a practice that had been ongoing for decades. The summaries, posted on a clipboard alongside notices of officers going on parental leave and being promoted or transferred, provided reporters with one of the few windows into how the police department disciplines those of its 35,000 officers who investigators have found to be what former commissioner Bill Bratton once called, "the brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent," officers who he said had no place in the department. Summaries of internal trials and pleadings would include an officer's name, rank, and command, what they were charged with, and if found guilty, what discipline was called for—docked vacation days, departmental probation, or in rare cases, dismissal.

"If you inquired about a disposition that you came across, they sometimes would fill you in on some of the details," Daily News police bureau chief Rocco Parascandola explained. "Some of the cases we were going to follow, because it was something we wrote about initially, or other times we'd see a disposition up there and it might strike us as interesting based on the penalty, so we'd ask about it, and sometimes we would get the details."

"Knowing that this was public let the rank-and-file know that certain behaviors would not be tolerated," an unnamed anti-corruption official told the watchdog blog NYPD Confidential.

In August of last year, when the NYPD first explained the change, then-commissioner Bratton told reporters that the department's lawyers realized they had been breaking Section 50-A of the state Civil Rights Law, which makes the personnel records of police officers and other civil servants confidential. The explanation came, he said, after a reporter filed a Freedom of Information Law request seeking the dispositions.

"One of your FOIL requests caused us to take a look at it based on an inquiry," Bratton said. "So if you have somebody you wanna blame, blame whoever filed that FOIL request, http://gothamist.com/2017/01/27/nypd_disciplinary_records_secret.php