The New York Court of Appeals on Eagle Street in Albany.

New York’s most impactful response to the national reckoning that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was the repeal of 50-a, the section of state Civil Rights Law that allowed public safety departments to stonewall the public by withholding from release most documents related to disciplinary matters.

The law stood for four and a half decades, and its scope was expanded by a series of poor court decisions. The result was the creation of a culture where it was far too easy to cover up or at least obscure everything from simple incompetence to acts of brutality by police as well as

© Times Union