Police Censor-in-Chief Gets Big Promotion

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The new executive director of the NYPD's public affairs unit censors news reporting by blocking access to breaking news scenes . He also arrests and bullies journalists, including what one victim called "borderline assault." 

Eugene Whyte was appointed to the six-figure-plus post, an NYPD spokesperson confirmed Monday night. It's a civil position equivalent to a 2-star NYPD chief. Previously Whyte served the NYPD as a lieutenant. The promotion will significantly pad Whyte's publicly-funded retirement pension. 

The public affairs office Whyte serves in is formally called the Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information. It's the NYPD's mouthpiece. Journalists and cops call it "DCPI," for short. Officially, DCPI “works with local, national, and international media organizations to provide the most accurate and timely information to the public," according to the NYPD website. 

In truth, “DCPI stonewalls New York City’s entire press corps--even reporters based at Police Plaza, some of whom have been there for decades,” longtime Newsday police reporter Leonard Levitt wrote on his blog, NYPD Confidential, in a 2009 column titled “DCPI Dysfunction.”

Like a lot of bad things, the history of systemic NYPD censorship began with Rudolph Guiliani. 

Before Guiliani was elected mayor in 1994, the NYPD allowed NYPD-credentialed press close access to parades, protests, fires, crime scenes and catastrophes of all kind. The NYPD's custom of allowing close access to “breaking news” scenes lead to the capture of culturally-significant and critically-acclaimed collections of gritty urban photojournalism shot on the streets of New York. For example, Jill Friedman’s 1982 Street Cops and Arthur Fellig’s work in the 1930s and 1940s collected in a 2013 retrospective at the International Center for Photography, Weegee: Murder is my Business. 

Under Giuliani, the NYPD “followed a policy, custom and practice of interfering with media access to newsworthy events in public and private places,” according to a federal civil rights lawsuit drafted in 1999. Translation: cops blocked photographers' lenses, refused to honor NYPD-issued credentials that allows journalists to cross police lines to witness news and threatened to seize or actually seized journalists’ NYPD-issued press credentials on the street, without due process of any kind. All that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, the lawsuit alleged.

The federal lawsuit, if it had been filed, would have pitted Newsday, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, the Associated Press and the New York Press Club against the NYPD. It was ready to be filed, but the City’s media powerbrokers were too scared to pull the trigger. 

No one wanted a war with the cops, even if it would be a war waged only with words in a court of law instead of bullets on the street. That's because the City’s media powerbrokers depended on the NYPD to feed their reporters information about the latest murder, rape or robberies making headlines. They could not afford to risk losing this vital pipeline of information, especially to a competitor. Of course the NYPD would retaliate if it was sued. It had frozen out reporters before and would no doubt do it again. The NYPD would blacklist an entire news organization if it felt like it.

So, instead of dropping the hammer on the NYPD and filing the federal lawsuit, the leaders of the City’s press corp negotiated an informal settlement with the cops. It wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. The cops kept on blocking journalists' camera lenses and taking the press credentials of those that insisted on doing their jobs as journalists. Sometimes the cops even arrested journalists, just for doing their jobs. While freedom of the press was dying on the streets below them, high-ranking editors in gleaming glass-and-steel towers with air-conditioned corner offices reclined in fancy designer furniture and looked the other way. 

Cowards like this guy, Col Allen (pictured partying after work at Elaine’s in 2007). Allen ran the Post from 2001 until 2016. The Post settled a lawsuit accusing Allen of sexually harassing a top female Post editor in 2022.

By the time I became a news photographer in 2006, whenever the NYPD did not want the press to photograph something, the press usually did not photograph that particular something. And it was Lt. Eugene Whyte who was out there on the street enforcing NYPD censorship, ratifying the unlawful arrests of journalists, blocking off access to breaking news scenes.

“On many occasions,” Whyte admitted under oath in a deposition in a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by former New York Times photojournalist Robert Stolarik, “I have been sent when a member of the media has been arrested.”

When asked how many times, Whyte revealed “In the last 13 years, I can tell you, with one press card holder, four times; another one, three. That's seven.”

Whyte testified more journalists had been arrested but he was not sure how many more. The number was greater than ten but less than a 100. He refused to be more precise.

NYPD records might reveal the true number, but those records may have been intentionally destroyed, according to Whyte. Whenever an NYPD-credentialed member of the press is arrested by the NYPD, the Patrol Guide requires supervisors to document it in an official report to be stored in a “central depository.” The “central depository” is located “by the press card machine” in the DCPI office on the 13th floor of NYPD headquarters, Whyte testified. The Patrol Guide says nothing about destroying the reports. Nevertheless, Whyte said that they may have been destroyed pursuant to “what they call—used to call burn orders, and I'm unsure of that administrative rule.”

On the street, Lt. Whyte’s word was law. He represented the NYPD Police Commissioner himself. He had the power to declare an arrest unlawful and “void” it.

“Case by case, sometimes,” Whyte explained. “I can say that I made recommendations on prisoners, on how they're processed, and recommendations on whether their pass should stay with them, or maybe they should not be charged at all, where the arrests have been voided that I responded to.”

Whyte treats journalists like “criminals” and “looks to put his hands on people,” another journalist testified during a deposition in a successful federal civil rights lawsuit that I filed against Whyte and the NYPD for censoring my reporting while I was on assignment for the Daily News at a fatal building collapse in 2015.

Whyte, the journalist said, “thought it was okay to put his hands on me. And my own parents don't do that.”

“Borderline assault,” is how the journalist described it.

Because this journalist still covers the NYPD today, The Free Lance is withholding their identity. 

They were outside Gracie Mansion covering a demonstration by PBA members against then-Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015 when then-Lt. Whyte attacked them from behind: “And he comes up behind me and he grabs me by the arm like I'm a perp he just caught shoplifting.” 

"It is not the way you should be interacting with members of the media particularly at an event that is particularly for your department. Treating them like they are criminals.”

Many journalists have similar stories to tell about Whyte. Most have been cowed into silence.

Stolarik lost his lawsuit against Whyte and the NYPD but I had better luck. I won, for everyone.

The City settled my lawsuit against the NYPD by agreeing to reform. The reform restricts when the NYPD could try to take a journalist’s NYPD-issued press credential to bona fide misconduct. It also requires due process hearings with full adversarial procedural rights. I helped write the regulations. The effect of the settlement was to protect journalists from false arrest, censorship and bullying police threats to revoke credentials. The City Council went further in the wake of the St. Paul police murder of George Floyd. It revoked the NYPD's authority to control press credentials entirely and gave it to the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in 2022. MOME adopted the regulations I helped draft for the NYPD. 

The NYPD's reign of intimidation over journalists should be over. 

Whyte reached the NYPD’s mandatory retirement age in October 2022. October was also about when I decided my New York City life as a journalist was over too. I thought about going to have a beer with him before I left, like two soldiers on opposite sides in a war after peace is reached. I never made it. A colleague who tangled with Whyte too talked me out of it. "Fuck him," my friend said. I figured that was the end of Whyte.

I figured wrong. The day I return to journalism with The Free Lance, I get a message from Stolarik telling me Whyte is back: "Get a load of this guy! The world lacks justice!" 

As Executive Director of the NYPD's DCPI office, Whyte is second only to the deputy commissioner of public information himself, Julian Phillips. Phillips, in a twist, went out on medical leave on Monday, an NYPD spokesman confirmed Monday night. He is not likely to return, an NYPD insider told me.

In effect, Whyte just became the NYPD's highest-ranking spokesperson--a man with a history of censoring the press.

One journalist who covers the NYPD responded to news of Whyte's promotion by slowly and repeatedly groaning into the telephone "No ... No ... No. He's a smart guy but he's a snake. Thanks for the great news."

One person who was happy with Whyte's promotion was the father of stop-and-frisk policing: former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. Bratton Tweeted "Congratulations to NYPD Lieutenant Gene Whyte on his promotion to Executive Director of Public Information. The department is fortunate to have his decades of experience and leadership."

I've asked the NYPD to comment. If it responds, I'll update this report.

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