Police surveillance in New York City
[1] Historically, surveillance has been used by the NYPD for a range of purposes, including against crime,[2] counter-terrorism,[3] and also for nefarious or controversial subjects such as monitoring political demonstrations, activities, and protests,[4][5][6] and even entire ethnic[7] and religious[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] groups.
The system consists of an interconnected web of CCTV cameras, license plate readers, physical sensors, machine learning software, data analytics dashboards, and mobile apps.
[1] The NYPD has credited surveillance systems as preventing numerous terrorist attacks on the city[3] and helping to provide evidence for hundreds of criminal cases.
Between the 1950s and 1970s, the NYPD conducted extensive surveillance on the Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, the Young Lords, suspected communists, and other individuals of interest.
[18] Civil rights attorneys and critics of the NYPD such as Jethro Eisenstein have argued that this difficulty in obtaining documents is the result of a concerted effort by the department to restrict public access to policing data.
[18] Prior to the discovery of the notecards, history professor Johanna Fernandez sued to have surveillance information on the Young Lords released and was told by the NYPD that no such documents existed, and that officials searched for over 100 hours for any pertinent files without success.
According to an interview Jack Maple gave to Chris Mitchell, the system was designed to bring greater equity to policing in the city by attending to crimes which affected people of all socioeconomic backgrounds including previously ignored poor New Yorkers.
[22] Also at this time, the Dirty thirty (NYPD) police scandal was unfolding in Harlem, which involved illegal search and seizures of suspected and known drug dealers and their homes.
[9][11][15] In June 2012, NYPD Assistant Police Chief Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single lead.
[33] Following this judgement, police no longer required "specific information about criminal activity" to surveil a political or religious gathering, and instead only needed to show "A law enforcement purpose".
[34] Videotapes recorded between 2004 and 2005 revealed NYPD officers posing as activists to surveil at least seven Iraq War protest events, including wearing of political pins and participating in mock arrests by riot police.
Officials with the city and the Police Department defended their tactics, saying they needed to ferret out potential terrorists and protesters who intended to act violently or to commit vandalism.
[42]In 2014 the International Business Times reported that the NYPD conducted cellphone tower dumps in response to unknown individuals raising a white flag on top of the Brooklyn Bridge.
When the system fails to generate a response, officials have been recorded passing celebrity look-a-likes through the database, such as in 2017 when a photograph of Woody Harrelson was used to generate image matches for a person stealing beer,[54][55][56][57][58] or an unknown New York Knicks player (name redacted by the NYPD) used in pursuit of a man wanted for assault, which were both revealed after a two year court case between the NYPD and Georgetown University Law Center.
[29]The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund released a statement in August 2019 stating that the "It is well-documented that facial recognition technology routinely misidentifies darker skin, women, and young children.
"[54] A Georgetown law report disagrees with this NYPD assessment, citing specific instances such as a case where an officer arrested a suspect after text messaging a witness “Is this the guy…?"
[61] The NYPD has declined to describe how they employ their X-ray vans, stating that any information about past uses could give terrorists adequate knowledge to foil future missions.
[62] After a 3-year legal battle with ProPublica and a brief from the NYCLU, the NYPD is now required to share any documents detailing the health and safety risks associated with deploying the vans around the city.
[64] In 2016, the NYPD collected hundreds of genetic samples from individuals in the region around Howard Beach, Queens in an attempt to solve the murder of Karina Vetrano.
[71] Policies on the use of drone technology include that it will not use facial recognition and will only be deployed to monitor pedestrian and vehicle congestion and for security observation at shootings and large scale events.
[72] Critics such as the NYCLU argue that the generality of the term 'large scale events' allows for drones to be used in a broad range of applications, including the monitoring of protestors and activists.
[72] As with other video collected by the NYPD, drone footage is retained for a minimum of 30 days upwards to an indefinite period if needed for unspecified legal purposes.
[82] Originally proposed to the New York City council in February 2018 by Daniel Garodnick and coauthored by sixteen other counsel-members, the act was opposed by the NYPD because they "cannot support a law that seems to be designed to help criminals and terrorists thwart efforts to stop them and endanger brave officers".
"[84] The Brennan Center for Justice gave support for the bill, stating "None of the information required by the POST Act is granular enough to be of value to a potential terrorist or criminal [and] will not make surveillance tools any less effective.
It also encourages the NYPD to be thoughtful in how it approaches new surveillance technologies, so as not to engage in activities that harm individual rights, undermine its relationships with communities, or waste scarce resources".
This includes the recommendation of the creation of a "hot list" of license plates to be monitored, consisting of Gang members/associates, Sex offenders, Crime suspects, Fugitives and Search warrant targets.
[89] Several large corporations are involved in developing the technology which composes the current surveillance systems in NYC, these include but are not limited to IBM,[90] Microsoft[1] and Palantir.
