By Mahir Zaveri @ "New York Today" @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 24

More than 323,900 complaints, naming more than 81,500 police officers, spanning more than three decades. The volume of records published online by the New York Civil Liberties Union last week, after state lawmakers in July repealed a law that had kept them secret, was a huge development in a long-running battle over access to information about police discipline.

Police unions and politicians have fiercely fought against disclosure of the records, and the legal confrontation will likely continue. But the records that have been released provide new insight into cases of misconduct.

I talked to my colleague Ashley Southall, police bureau chief for the Metro desk at The New York Times, to try to make sense of what the development means.

[The records offer the broadest look to date at how officers are investigated and punished.]

Q. What are the biggest takeaways?

A. The biggest takeaway is that police discipline in New York City is no longer secret. For almost 45 years, longer than I have been alive, there was a law in New York State that allowed the police to keep these records secret. And that’s no longer the case.

People who filed the complaints with the Civilian Complaint Review Board can now learn the outcome, whereas it was near impossible before. Additionally, we now have a broad-enough data set to discern what some of the norms are for police discipline.

When Daniel Pantaleo, the officer that put Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold — when his disciplinary records were leaked, there was no way to tell if he was a bad guy who had just been a cowboy uncontrolled all these years, or if his activity was relatively normal. Now we can look at the data and see what the norms are and what the range of behavior is [....]