Fruits of My Labor

I was fortunate enough to have my second week with the NYPD’s Legal Bureau occur during a holiday week, which for the vast majority of the office turned into a holiday weekend. Given that I am the intern with both the least amount of legal education as well as the least amount of time spent actually interning here this summer due to my delayed start, it was no shock when throughout my first week I was given what felt like a lot of surface work. However last week due to the limited numbers of attorneys in the office and the overall low morale my still ambitiously eager intern desire for actual work led me to a week-long assignment.

Unfortunately, much of the software and applications downloaded on my desktop are useless given my restricted access to certain police information. When I was given this previous assignment however I was signed on with an attorney’s credentials. This was done so I could search and transcribe pertinent information to the potential case to which I was assigned. I worked alongside a law school intern and a Police Action Litigation attorney to collect the requested information from roughly 350 different “perps’ files”. Once this data was compiled it was analyzed for noticeable trends in defense representation and gang affiliations.

The nature of the work I was assigned to do is considered confidential and per explicit instruction from my supervisors I am not to speak of it in anything other than generalities. That being said discussing the fruits of my labor does not have these same limitations. The specifics of what I did were not what prompted me to write a reflection on it. Rather, the sense of worth as an intern that I felt following my completed assignment are what caused me to write this reflection. The tasks that I was assigned during my first week sometimes allowed me to access these confidential files or at least read printed versions. However, in all these instances I was merely completing rather simple tasks in comparison to last week’s. Those assignments did not contribute to a major case in even the slightest of the way these efforts did.

Following these efforts, I was granted permission to sit in on the conference call with the city’s comptroller’s office and a separate call with the individual from the Commissioner’s office. It was a bit unnerving to sit in on these calls and have to introduce myself to several parties on the line as the sole undergraduate intern on the call. As I sat in on these conversations and the subsequent conversations in the room once the calls ended I really got to take notice of how all those hours spent combing through the cases contributed to what might actually yield a “huge win for the department” per the city’s comptroller. A lot of the work they assign us as interns to do is aimed to ease the workload of already overworked attorneys. To be given an assignment that actually allowed me to actively work alongside one of these attorneys and be briefed on the facts of the case equally was quite the experience. This is not to say that I was unmotivated throughout my first week, however the motivation gained through seeing actual efforts made by higher-ups within the NYPD and city government as a result of something I assisted on definitely fueled my work for the beginning of this third week.