On May 27th, Philip K. Eure (read: Yore, not Eor) will start as the first Inspector General of the New York Police Department in the agency's history. At the naming ceremony on 1 Maiden Lane this morning, Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark G. Peters told reporters he interviewed a dozen people for the job, but Eure was truly a diamond in the rough.
Just look at the guy's credentials: The Boston-born Eure, 52, created the Office of Police Complaints in Washington D.C., which he's been busy running for the past decade. There, he required the officers to take a week-long training course in assisting the mentally ill, of which 500 officers have now taken. Before that, he worked as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice in its civil rights division for ten years. Needless to say, the guy knows a thing or two about justice (Oh, and ladies: he's single).
The Office of the Inspector General is an independent entity within the NYPD. It has the responsibility of watching over the agency's actions after the Muslim surveillance and stop-and-frisk controversies, further enhanced by its privilege of subpoena power. And, like his job in D.C., Eure will have to build the Office from the ground up: he has a budget of $5 million at his disposal to hire an army of 50 people to his office.
The creation of the Office was one of the main proposals passed in the Community Safety Act last May—a bill seen as "life threatening" by then-NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, whose veto of it was soon overrode by the City Council. Fast forward a year: Commissioner Billy Bratton and Philip Eure met for an hour after Eure was given the job, and Mayor de Blasio, who greatly supported the bill's passage on the campaign trail, is already way down.
"Phil has decades of law enforcement experience and is one of the nation’s premier police accountability experts, making him an excellent choice to serve as the city’s first NYPD Inspector General," the mayor said in a statement.
Having the Mayor as a friend is really great news for Eure. This is the first time he's ever lived in New York, so he's looking to couch-surf for a while. And luckily, Gracie Mansion looks like a sweet spot to crash. “If you have any suggestions on affordable apartments that are close to the office,” he told reporters. “I’m accepting suggestions.”
