New head of the detectives union pledges to meet 'tough' challenge

Scott Munro, the new head of the Detective Endowment Association, is unbowed before the challenges facing his union. 

Top of the to-do pile for the 32-year NYPD cop, who ascended to the 5,300-member union's top spot following Paul DiGiacomo’s retirement late last month, is contending with the declining number of detectives. He’s also grappling with the ever-thinning department’s demands on his members. 

“Our detectives do everything. That’s the thing here,” Munro said during a recent phone interview. “I had guys work on homicides and then the Hispanic Day Parade. The next day they had them directing traffic.”

Some of that multitasking eased after he made a few calls to department brass.  But with the NYPD’s headcount hovering around generational lows, detectives continue to be tasked with those more routine policing assignments. Munro said he found it “crazy” for the department to deploy detectives, with their specialized expertise, on more conventional police matters.

But also top of his agenda is ensuring that his members are dealt with fairly when they stand accused of misconduct. Munro has pledged to stand by detectives he feels are being unjustly disciplined by the department. 

He said those occasions were particularly prevalent under the former chief of the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, Joseph Reznick, who was forced out soon after Mayor Eric Adams took office in January 2022. That “nonsense,” as Munro called it, has since abated. “This job has changed drastically with this administration,” he said. 

But, like the heads of the four other NYPD unions, Munro maintains that the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent agency that investigates allegations of NYPD officer misconduct, continues to overstep its authority. Such is his conviction that the agency is unjustly harsh on his members that he said the union will be hiring private detectives to follow up on cases brought by the CCRB.

“And basically I'm gonna be full force with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. We’re going to be all over that, which we have to. That’s the playbook,” he said. 

Retirements loom

Munro, 55, joined the NYPD in 1992, deploying first with the 77th Precinct in Crown Heights before moving to the Brooklyn North Task Force, where he worked the car theft unit. He later transferred to the Organized Crime Control Bureau, from where, in 1997, he earned his promotion to detective.

He was elected DEA delegate, representing his colleagues in auto crime, in 2005, before moving on to become a union welfare officer. He was appointed sergeant-at-arms in 2018 and then as secretary in 2021. DiGiacomo brought him on as union vice president in October. 

DiGiacomo noted that his and his successor's NYPD career arcs were similar, and said he was leaving the DEA in more than capable hands. “I feel confident in him and his team bringing this union to a new level,” he said. 

The union, though, counts about 2,500 fewer than it did some 25 years ago, DiGiacomo has said. 

Thirty-five joined the rank in a recent promotion and Munro expects another 80 detectives to come on board next month and about 135 later this year.

But the rank is facing the prospect of an outsized number of retirements. Munro said the majority of detectives who joined the department as Tier 2 members on or after July 1, 2000, will be leaving in the coming months since their pensionable earnings will be based on what they made in their final 12 months, when they accumulated significant overtime. Those detectives who were hired before that date have their pensionable earnings based on a three-year period when they earned the most. 

“I’m losing my experienced detectives,” he said. “They may not want to retire but they have to.”

Munro said he would take up the matter with with Albany lawmakers as well as with members of the City Council later this year. “That’s going to be my big push,” he said. 

Munro wants more detectives, certainly. But he also wants to keep experienced detectives on the job. And one big key to retention is, in effect, recognition. Unlike other NYPD ranks, officers earn promotion from officer to detective third-grade and then to second and ultimately first-grade on merit rather than by exam. 

“Getting more grade-two [promotions] is very important for our guys to stay on the job,” he said, adding that the rank currently has too few first- and second-grade detectives. “We have to try to keep that experience here. That's important, so they could teach the younger detectives … just like I was taught.”

The NYPD's  public information office declined to provide a breakdown of the rank by grades or a historical headcount of detectives.

While the obstacles ahead, for both the union and department, were “very tough,” Munro said he was confident of his ability to navigate them, in part because he can lean on his predecessors. “There's three past presidents that I can call tomorrow and ask questions and to be guided with,” he said, referring to DiGiacomo, Michael Palladino and Thomas Scotto.  

Munro’s team otherwise includes the union’s first Hispanic vice president, Rick Simplicio, a 29-year cop who was most recently the DEA’s Bronx trustee. And the union’s 23-member board, created in 1917, also now has its first female member, Cristina Reyes, who serves as the union’s Bronx welfare officer. “Law enforcement is changing, and we as a union have to change with that,” Munro said. 

About 28 percent of NYPD detectives are Hispanic while 17 percent are women, according to NYPD data. 

Munro also noted that in another first, a special operations detective, Peter Keszthelyi, had joined the board as the Brooklyn South welfare officer.

Among Munro’s other stated challenges, but one that could prove difficult to negotiate, is to cultivate a better relationship with the City Council, whose current, largely politically progressive makeup has not endeared it to the NYPD’s unions. 

Munro would like the Council to repeal or at least amend its so-called “diaphragm bill,” which passed by an overwhelming margin in June 2020 and was signed into law by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio that July. The legislation, upheld by the courts, make it a misdemeanor for officers to use maneuvers that restrict a suspect’s breathing or blood flow. 

All five city police unions as well as NYPD officials have argued that the law hampers officers such that it could discourage them from confronting suspects. Munro said he would like his union colleagues to work together and demonstrate to the Council how the law could impede cops from essentially doing their duty. 

Still, for all that’s before him, Munro said he’s looking forward to his tenure at the DEA’s helm.  “I love fighting for the rights of detectives,” he said.