New York's police review board chair said it has found dozens more allegations of chokehold complaints against the NYPD after discovering the cases were misclassified.

"There was a lack of uniformity in the way that allegations were categorized as chokeholds or not categorized as chokeholds," Richard Emery, chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, told a public meeting in Staten Island this week.

The preliminary findings also show there is a "significant difference" between officers who have faced chokehold allegations and those who haven't, Mr. Emery said. And those officers might be more prone to receiving other allegations of abuse.

"That's going to be a very serious finding and a red flag, a potential red flag for training purposes," Emery said, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"The prospect that the CCRB failed to identify and investigate a significant number of chokehold complaints is alarming," Chris Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Wall Street Journal. "If there is any category of police misconduct that deserves intense scrutiny it is the use of serious physical force."

CCRB was due to release a report this month on the outcomes of over 1,000 chokehold complaints that occurred between 2009 and June of this year. This latest discovery will delay the report for another few weeks.

The Civilian Complaint Review Board is the agency responsible for investigating and prosecuting police misconduct. Its chairman is a political appointee, and many of the board members have ties or links to the police department. Over the decades it has had a reputation in the city for being ineffective in holding police officers accountable and public trust has eroded.

Between 2009 and 2013 the CCRB received over 31,000 complaints, over 26,000 for allegations of excessive force, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union in its testimony regarding the NYPD's training in excessive force delivered at a City Council hearing on Monday over police training and reform.

"Eighty-one percent of the complaints made to the CCRB are from black and Latino New Yorkers, (55 percent from blacks, 25.3 percent from Latinos). Given that the second most common complaint alleges excessive use of force, we can conclude that people of color are often targets of unnecessary force by the NYPD. This disparity is not only counter to our values as a diverse and inclusive city, but counterproductive to efforts at building community trust," Dunn said.

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said very little at the hearing about police brutality or use of excessive force. Bratton produced charts to show the number of cases of excessive force had dropped to 2 percent in 2014, compared to 8 percent a decade ago. What was missing from the report was the number of arrests per year in order to know what 2 percent represented.