This story was co-published with New York Focus and supported with funding from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University.

A cop watched one evening in August 2014 as a teenage girl stepped out of the truck of his colleague, Joe O’Connell. A sergeant had asked the cop to monitor O’Connell’s interactions with the teenager that night; their coworkers had heard rumors that O’Connell, a patrol officer with the Coxsackie Police Department assigned to a local school, was known at his previous police department for inappropriate interactions with underage girls, according to a report written by a local official.

In an interview later at the police station, O’Connell admitted that he had a sexual relationship with the girl, whom he’d met “while acting” in his “capacity” at the school, according to disciplinary records. The relationship wasn’t illegal, he insisted. She had turned 17, New York’s age of consent, before it became sexual.

Still, the department launched an internal investigation. The young woman signed a statement two days later confirming the sexual relationship. The following day, O’Connell resigned.

It’s unclear whether the Coxsackie Police Department’s leadership knew of O’Connell’s rumored past. Documents suggest that they had no record of it.

Nor, it seems, did a nearby police department, where O’Connell continued working after he resigned from Coxsackie. O’Connell faced an internal inquiry at each of the three departments where he worked, as well as numerous complaints and, eventually, a criminal investigation, according to discipline records obtained by New York Focus and MuckRock. O’Connell resigned from every department while under suspicion of sexual misconduct.

Reached by phone, O’Connell said that his lawyer had advised him not to discuss his police employment history. The Coxsackie Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Policing experts and advocates call cops like O’Connell, who jump from department to department after resigning or being fired in connection with misconduct, “wandering officers.”

It’s impossible to know how many wandering officers remain in New York, as there are no statewide databases of police employment or misconduct records. Lawmakers have enacted new transparency laws for disciplinary records, and journalists have pushed for access to employment histories, but law enforcement agencies and police unions have fought their release with lawsuits and public pressure campaigns. And while the state keeps a list of unhireable cops who were fired or resigned after misconduct, O’Connell, along with other wandering officers, do not appear on it.

O’Connell’s wandering only comes to light after an investigation by New York Focus and MuckRock that has unearthed tens of thousands of pages of misconduct records from over 250 police departments across the state. O’Connell is one of several wandering officers the investigation has so far identified. And that might be just scratching the surface.

The prevalence of wandering officers in police forces across the country has only begun to come to light in recent years.

Research and reporting in Florida and California helped break the issue open. The phenomenon then reentered the national spotlight this July after a police killing in Illinois. Sean Grayson, a sheriff’s deputy charged with murder for shooting Sonya Massey, worked for six police departments over four years, with a record of harassment complaints and discipline, including one instance that nearly led to his termination.

In New York, scrutiny of wandering officers has faltered amid the state’s stop-and-start approach to expanding law enforcement transparency.

In 2020, the state legislature repealed a law, known as 50-a, that had shielded police disciplinary and misconduct records from public disclosure. Some police departments and unions have filed lawsuits attempting to block journalists, researchers, and civil rights groups from accessing them. They also successfully pressured the state legislature into adding an administrative hurdle: Public records officials are now required to notify employees when their disciplinary histories are requested before releasing them, likely adding to agencies’ already lengthy response times.

But the public can’t use misconduct records to identify wandering officers without comprehensive police employment records, which other states have started to release. Last month, the Invisible Institute, an investigative journalism outfit, published a National Police Index of employment history data, including, where applicable, the recorded reason for a cop’s departure from a police job. The tool includes data for 18 states, with plans to add more.

Absent from the list: New York.

New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, or DCJS, refused to release its statewide list of current and former officers when an Albany Times Union journalist requested it in 2022. The agency handed over a list of former officers who’d had their police certification revoked, but said that some of the 68,000 cops employed across New York may be working undercover and that revealing their names would “endanger” their “life or safety.” Public rosters already exist for some New York law enforcement agencies, like the New York City Police Department and the New York State Police.

Police agencies in other states, including Delaware and Virginia, have used the same excuse to shield their own police employment data. The Times Union remains locked in a legal battle with DCJS over the records it withheld. Preliminary court decisions have mostly come out in favor of forcing the agency to release the records.

DCJS declined to comment on pending litigation.

As the transparency battle continues, New York has taken steps to address wandering officers, though with notable gaps. In 2016, the state enacted regulations to “decertify,” or revoke the training certifications, of officers who are fired or resign in connection with misconduct or discipline. A police officer can’t work without that certification. But as New York Focus found in 2021, some fired officers were simply recertifying after finding jobs at new departments. Three months after the New York Focus investigation, the state enacted new regulations based on a recently passed law that permanently invalidated the credentials of decertified cops.

Other holes remain. The state’s list of over 2,300 decertified officers doesn’t include officers who, like O’Connell, were fired or resigned before its creation. None of the three departments that O’Connell worked for have reported officers to the decertification list. Because O’Connell has never been decertified, he could work as a police officer in New York again.

So, too, could a former Macedon police officer who was suspended at least once over multiple car crashes before he found a job in East Rochester. And so could a former deputy sheriff in Montgomery County who resigned in 2001 after a series of misconduct incidents, including one in which he drunkenly pointed his gun at a woman. He found a new job at a local police department, where he worked for two more years before leaving in the face of more complaints, including about making inappropriate comments about arrested girls.

The decertification list also depends on the willingness of individual police agencies to investigate misconduct — a process that can vary widely from department to department, as New York Focus reported this week — and report it to DCJS, which maintains the list. Departments must also part ways with the officers who committed the misconduct, as DCJS is only allowed to add officers to the decertification list if they were fired or resigned.

New York is one of the only states in the country that doesn’t have a state agency that’s able to unilaterally fire or suspend officers, and relies solely on individual departments to facilitate the decertification process, according to Josh Parker, deputy director of policy at the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law.

Elsewhere in the United States, a state agency “provides a necessary backstop when an employing agency fails to do its job,” Parker said. Doctors and lawyers can lose their licenses even if they’re not fired. “Police officers in New York are the exception,” he said.

Take Ethan Paszko. In 2021, while working at the Rochester Police Department, he pepper sprayed a woman holding her toddler while responding to a shoplifting call, according to records from the department. The department launched an excessive force investigation. At the same time, Paszko was facing a federal lawsuit for allegedly beating and pepper spraying a protester five months earlier.

Paszko quit before officials completed their review and before the lawsuit concluded. He found a new job in the suburbs, at the Gates Police Department, before joining the FBI, according to minutes from a 2023 Gates town board meeting. It’s unclear whether leadership at Gates knew of his conduct in Rochester. He never showed up on the decertification list.

Paszko did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the cities of Rochester and Gates, nor their police departments. A request for recent disciplinary records from the Gates Police Department yielded no files relating to Paszko.

In a statement, a spokesperson for DCJS said that “New York State has taken significant legislative action to prevent police officers removed for misconduct or who resigned or retired while facing allegations of misconduct from being hired by another police agency, and to require police agencies to comply with hiring standards to ensure that individuals employed as police officers in New York State are qualified, ethical, physically, and psychologically fit to serve.”

The Coxsackie Police Department appears to have had no formal record of Joe O’Connell’s disciplinary history before hiring him, even though officers at the department knew he might have one: It was “well known in police circles” that O’Connell left his previous job, at the nearby Greenport Police Department, after “inappropriate contact with young girls,” a sergeant told the Coxsackie village mayor during an investigation into the circumstances of O’Connell’s resignation.

Had Coxsackie obtained O’Connell’s Greenport records, they would have learned of a 2002 incident, a few years after he was hired by Greenport, in which O’Connell was asked to explain why he had talked about taking photos of an underage girl.

In a memo, O’Connell explained that he was off duty at the time and he “was told she was of legal age,” adding that “in no way shape or form was there any malicious intent.” O’Connell claimed he was “working on a project for a future photo show.”

In 2009, the Greenport police chief met with O’Connell after he’d been caught with a woman in his police vehicle. O’Connell claimed that the woman was in his vehicle so he could “show her how police work was done,” but decided to resign at the end of the meeting.

After O’Connell began in Coxsackie, the department started receiving complaints about him. From February to April 2014, a woman repeatedly called Village of Coxsackie police chief Donald Meier to express concern over O’Connell’s interactions with her daughter, according to a report the mayor wrote. (The redacted report is unclear about whether the woman’s daughter was the same student O’Connell admitted to having a relationship with.) The school superintendent also called Meier that spring with “a concern” about school officials “seeing too much contact between O’Connell” and a person whose name was redacted.

Meier claimed that he spoke with O’Connell twice to tell him to “knock it off,” the mayor’s report says.

“He was a good patrolman, a damn good patrolman,” Meier said in an interview with New York Focus. “But he had a dark side.”

After O’Connell admitted to his sexual relationship with the teenager from the stakeout, Meier explained, “It was handled cleanly before it got to be a problem.”

“In the police world, when someone has a problem, we tell them what the problem is,” Meier said. “It was his choice, you know, ‘Let me resign so there’s no charges.’” He allowed the resignation.

In a letter to the chief sent shortly after his resignation, O’Connell admitted that he had a problem. “I deeply apologize for misleading you, lying to you about what was actually going on,” O’Connell wrote. “I will seek what ever help that I need to make things right.”

Mark Evans, the mayor of the Village of Coxsackie, where O’Connell was assigned to the school, learned of the officer’s resignation three weeks after it happened. He confronted Meier, the police chief, who said that he hadn’t informed village leadership because he “wanted to ‘let things settle out,’” the mayor wrote. Meier also said that he “did not feel based on what he knew that any sex had occurred” — a statement Evans would later characterize during a meeting with the village board as a lie, given O’Connell’s earlier admission.

In December 2014, Meier resigned. He explained in an interview that he left because of the disagreements with the mayor and the Coxsackie village board. “I didn’t handle things right and I could have handled it better,” he said. “I don’t blame Mark [Evans] or anybody. I blame myself.”

Reached via email, Evans said that the documents New York Focus and MuckRock obtained “are the best source of information” about O’Connell and Meier, and that the village had “no further comment.”

After he learned of O’Connell’s resignation, Evans referred the case to the Greene County District Attorney’s Office. The DA eventually decided not to pursue charges.

Before and after O’Connell resigned from Coxsackie, he worked as a part-time dispatcher across the river at the Hudson Police Department, where he was sending romantic and graphic emails and photos from his work address.

O’Connell was worried that his wife might discover what he had been doing. At one point, he instructed an email recipient to only send messages to his Hudson police email because “the hammer has dropped” and she had gained access to his cell phone.

Later, in the middle of a series of sexually explicit emails, O’Connell flirted with a woman on his police department email by joking about bribery and sexual assault.

A year later, the Hudson Police Department received a tip. An informant claimed to have seen O’Connell pick up a sex worker in his truck. Hudson investigated. That’s when the department found the explicit messages he had sent from his work email. In September 2015, Hudson police filed formal disciplinary charges against O’Connell, and he left the department soon after.

In response to a request for comment, the current Hudson council president, Tom DePietro, wrote in an email, “I know nothing about this episode, which was before my time in office.” Other Hudson administrators and police department officials did not respond to questions.

O’Connell finally left law enforcement later in 2015, more than 13 years after the first allegations emerged against him.

Sanjana Bhambhani and Annika Grosser contributed reporting. Public records from this article and more information about this reporting project can be found at policefilesny.com.