Surveillance system violates rights and is full of errors

The NYPD is placing people into a secretive database and surveilling them. This practice could even include you, and you would never know.

There’s no independent oversight of NYPD’s “Criminal Group Database,” to which officers add names based on vague criteria infected with racial bias rather than based on facts. Thousands of New Yorkers have been placed in the database with no notice or opportunity to be heard. There’s no meaningful mechanism for members of the public to confirm whether they are in the database or the reason for their inclusion: the NYPD almost always denies requests from those seeking information about placement in the database.

Once a person is labeled a gang member or gang affiliated by the NYPD — even if there is no actual evidence of involvement in criminal activity or if the NYPD violated the law by using sealed records — there’s no process to have the label removed.

Recently, the findings of the Department of Investigation’s NYPD inspector general confirmed what the community has long known: the NYPD’s database unreliably labels New Yorkers as gang members with no documented public safety benefit. In fact, the database undermines public safety by diverting extensive resources to a mass surveillance effort replete with racial bias.

The NYPD currently designates more than 16,000 New Yorkers, 99% of whom are Black and Latino, in this surveillance database based on bizarre and imprecise criteria — without any evidence of any involvement in any crime, let alone a criminal conviction. Something as innocent as “Friending” someone on Facebook or wishing them a “Happy Birthday” has gotten people placed in the database.

It gets worse. The database operates without meaningful oversight, and the NYPD does not even follow its own policies. While the database ostensibly requires a reporting officer, supervisor, and endorsing NYPD staff to sign off on an entry, officers often signed off as their own supervisors and endorsers. Unsurprisingly, a number of people — who could be your friends, your classmates, your children — were added into this database with no basis for their inclusion.

The inspector general’s office claimed, without basis, that they found “no evidence of harm” of placement on the database. By their own admission, identifying harms of the database required investigatory steps that the OIG determined were “beyond the scope” of the report. That’s why it’s imperative to truly examine and understand the harms of the database — the racial discrimination that leads to people being placed in it and the surveillance and aggressive gang policing practices that happen once they’re in it.

This dystopian law enforcement tool is a new strain of the NYPD’s long legacy of racially-biased policing. From the Exonerated Five to stopping and frisking people without cause, the NYPD has been known to engage in discriminatory policing. In every iteration, Black and Brown people are unlawfully arrested, harmed, and even killed.

The NYPD has successfully been challenged in court for some of these practices, and in turn, the NYPD has simply shrugged and recreated stop and frisk, including through this database. Secretive practices that lack transparency and accountability — and that place Black and Brown children as young as 11 to senior citizens in their 70s under the often discriminatory and dangerous eye of the police — do not create safety.

The “criminal group” database criminalizes and racially profiles Black and Latino people, including children, and subjects them to harmful police surveillance and increased and escalated police encounters, which create a real danger of police violence. Being subjected to this type of discriminatory and unequal policing is itself a harm — and too often leads to added downstream consequences from affecting employment status to making homes and neighborhoods a nexus of police surveillance that results in many not feeling safe in their own community. Entire NYCHA complexes, home to thousands of hard-working families, have been designated by the NYPD as “gang” locations.

Some may argue that the “criminal group” database should be reformed, but that would be a mistake. The very existence of the database encourages officers to criminalize and target Black and Brown adults and children. This database and the associated surveillance and enforcement practices that arise are steeped in false and harmful racial stereotypes that have too long been used to justify the harms to communities of color, and particularly their youngest members.

There is no fixing this. The only way forward for any database that has clear harms and no established utility for public safety is to scrap it. To do anything less leaves countless Black and Latino people, including children, at severe risk.

Jason is assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where Afriyie is a community organizer.