Council passes bill compelling NYPD to share surveillance strategies
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Photo by Paul Sableman via Wikimedia
By David Brand
The City Council has passed legislation forcing the NYPD to explain how it uses facial recognition and other surveillance technologies to track New Yorkers.
The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act was first introduced in March 2017 and had picked up 38 council sponsors ahead of today’s vote. If signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the measure would require the NYPD to report and evaluate its surveillance technologies and would compel the department to create a “surveillance impact and use policy.”
On Tuesday, Speaker Corey Johnson announced the upcoming vote, the council’s latest police reform effort since the killing of George Floyd touched off weeks of demonstrations against police violence, secrecy and surveillance in New York City.
“New Yorkers deserve to know the type of surveillance that the NYPD uses and its impacts on communities,” Johnson said. “Thanks to the POST Act, the department will finally begin disclosing information that has long been kept from the public.”
Though the bill would not curb the use of facial recognition technology and other forms of surveillance, privacy activists and civil rights groups say the legislation would foster transparency and enable the public to see the extent of NYPD surveillance techniques.
“This moment couldn’t have happened without New Yorkers taking to streets and demanding racial justice and police accountability,” said Ángel Díaz, counsel for Brennan's Liberty & National Security Program. “The POST Act brings surveillance oversight to the nation’s largest police force, and is a first step in addressing the NYPD’s reliance on broken and biased.”
The NYPD has employed increasingly sophisticated technologies to track New Yorkers and identify potential crimes suspects in recent years, including drones, license plate readers and cell-site simulators that identify the source of a call or text. The artificial intelligence, created and operated by people, has been plagued by the same racial biases that affect human investigations.
Facial recognition technology has been shown to routinely misidentify people of color, especially women. Police have also uploaded thousands of arrest photos of children — including kids as young as 11 — into the city’s facial recognition database even though the technology is often inaccurate when dealing with young people, The New York Times reported last year.
Councilmember Donovan Richards, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said the practice “should be banned.”
The NYPD said the process was approved by its legal department and told the Times that officers would not make arrests based solely on a facial recognition match.
Richards told the Eagle last year that navigating privacy concerns with counterterrorism efforts is a “delicate balance that has to strike the right tone” to stop attacks while “preventing our city from becoming a surveillance state.”
“New Yorkers should not have to give up their Constitutional protections in order to feel safe, which is why our Committee is ready to hear the Post Act and work with advocates and the NYPD to find that balance while shedding light on the department’s use of surveillance technologies,” he added in a statement.
