The new chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board held a little-publicized special public meeting on Tuesday with board members to announce ideas and directions for the agency.

Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed civil rights attorney Richard Emery to chair CCRB on July 17. Emery said he wanted the agency to conduct open meetings with transparent transactions, have greater communication between the New York police department, city government and CCBR, inspector general and Peter Zimroth.

Emery suggested several ideas for the agency. Whether allegations of police misconduct are currently voted on by the board could be handled by different panels as long as they had one City, Mayoral and Police appointee -- a method that might dispel the idea that citizen's cases are prejudiced. Meditation as been underutilized and could be introduced early on in the complaint process. The agency, which has limited resources but needs to get things resolved quickly, could grade cases by the seriousness of the complaint, could hand over Stop, Question and Frisk cases to the court-appointed Peter Zimroth, and study trends in complaints and make recommendations about training or transfers

When it came to questions from the public, Chris Dunn, Associate Legal Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union said the public was only given one day's notice about the special public meeting and said that was wrong as it is supposed to be about public engagement. He reminded the board that CCBR's goal wasn't to create better police community relations but "to investigate complaints of misconduct, to pursue discipline, and to make policy recommendations on patterns of practices that avoid misconduct in the future. It is not in my view the role of CCBR to make the police officers feel better about the community or the community feel better about the police officers, it may be a byproduct but it is not the goal. What is valuable about this agency, and what the chokehold study will show, is when you investigate cases and find out about misconduct, you have something to say not only about a police officer that should be disciplined but about a policy that should be corrected."

The board directed the agency to undertake a study of bystander video allegations, where bystanders were observing police activity with the community, using audio or videotaping it and this resulted in an interaction with the police. There are 43 cases that are being reviewed. They plan to increase the scope of the study, reviewing cases going back the last two years. The report will analyze what precincts they took place in, how long the officers were they on the job, whether or not they understood the patrolman guide requirement that allows civilians to take photos, audio, video of an incident as long as it does not interfere with the police activity.

CCRB Chair, Emery said, "There has got to be a way where we can train people to be secure in their jobs not to react this way.

Earlier in the day, at a press conference held by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Pay Lynch said of the video that went viral from the Eric Garner death, "Sometimes the use of force is necessary, but is never pretty to watch."

The CCBR announced they were conducting a chokehold study the weekend after the death of Eric Garner. 

"We reported already that over the last five years, there are 1128 chokehold allegations; 608 were not fully investigated for one reason or another, and 520 were fully investigated. It is unclear how many chokehold allegations actually came into the CCBR, as at the first instance they are not categorized as chokehold cases but at some point when an investigator writes up a report and puts that statistic into the mix," said Richard Emery. "We don't know yet how many chokehold allegations actually came to the CCBR in the first instance, whether there was a drop off from that to the 1,128 cases, and why from the 1,128, we ended 10 substantiated cases."

Those 10 chokehold cases will be presented to the public in the report, by the last week in August or first week in September, given with sufficient time for a review, and then the board will respond in a public forum.

There is a formal CCRB public meeting on Wednesday, August 13.