The narrative is familiar: a police reform bill stalls for years in the face of NYPD opposition. But now, in the aftermath of historic protests against police violence, the measure is poised to pass, shining a much-needed spotlight on NYPD misconduct. But this isn’t the long-delayed repeal of 50-a, but the years-long fight to see how the NYPD watches us with invasive and biased surveillance.
After more than 1,200 days of dither and delay, the New York City Council will finally vote on the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act this Thursday. Just like the NYPD spent years hiding officers’ disciplinary records through 50-a, the department spent years hiding its biased and broken surveillance systems. Using federal funding and private donations, the NYPD buys advanced spy tools without any City Council oversight. And then it aims those tools at the same exact communities that have been overpoliced for years.
Reforming surveillance is a matter of life and death. More surveillance means more stops, arrests and potential for police violence. As we’ve all seen too clearly, any police interaction can be deadly, especially for black New Yorkers. Surveillance abuse is a national issue, but the NYPD’s surveillance might just be the worst in the country.
For decades, the NYPD profiled Muslim New Yorkers, tracking where hundreds of thousands of people lived, worked, ate and prayed. The de Blasio administration promised to roll back some of the most controversial tactics. However, even after these “fixes,” 95% of NYPD intelligence investigations still targeted Muslim New Yorkers, as the department focused too little on white supremacist and nativist threats.
The same pattern has repeated itself over and over again. When a federal court forced the department to stop its biased stop-and-frisk campaign, the NYPD merely started a surveillance version. It built up a so-called “gang database” with more than 42,000 New Yorkers, almost all of whom are black or Latino. New Yorkers, even children, have been added to the database for trivial reasons, like wearing so-called “gang colors,” which include red, blue, yellow and almost every other hue.
And some of the NYPD’s most-high-tech toys are the most disturbing. Purported “predictive policing” algorithms effectively tell officers to over-police the same communities they’ve targeted for years. Facial recognition turns our bodies into government tracking devices, but one that’s more error-prone for black and Hispanic New Yorkers. Each false “match” raises the risk of wrongful arrest and a deadly police encounter.
From thermal imaging, to the drones flying overhead, to tens of thousands of CCTV cameras, and high-sensitivity microphones that listen for gunshots (and may capture snippets of more than the occasional conversation), the NYPD has built a surveillance network that would make George Orwell shudder.
And those are only the tools we know about. Until the POST Act passes, we simply will have no idea what other technologies the NYPD uses.
But soon that will change. With more than two-thirds of the City Council, the public advocate and even The New York Times editorial board supporting the POST Act, we are set to join the more than a dozen cities that have civilian surveillance oversight. Except that many of those cities, such a San Francisco, Oakland and Somerville, go much further. They not only require surveillance transparency, but also ban biased systems like facial recognition.
The POST Act is just the start of surveillance reform in New York, and it’s a crucial first step. Until we know how surveillance is targeted at New Yorkers, we won’t know how we can stop it.
Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) at the Urban Justice Center, a New York-based civil rights and privacy group and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law. Silver is a legal fellow at STOP.