Council will vote on bill forcing NYPD to explain surveillance strategies

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The POST Act would require the NYPD to report and evaluate its surveillance technologies and would mandate that the department create a “surveillance impact and use policy.” Photo by Jonathan McIntosh/Flickr

The POST Act would require the NYPD to report and evaluate its surveillance technologies and would mandate that the department create a “surveillance impact and use policy.” Photo by Jonathan McIntosh/Flickr

By David Brand

The City Council will vote Thursday on a three-year-old piece of legislation that would force 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 has picked up 37 council sponsors. The bill would require the NYPD to report and evaluate its surveillance technologies and would mandate that the department create a “surveillance impact and use policy,” according to the text of the bill. That policy, the bill states, would include “description and capabilities, rules, processes and guidelines, and any safeguards and security measures designed to protect the information collected.”  

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. 

“As the NYPD continues to employ technologies and databases to police New Yorkers, we must ensure that the constitutional rights of the public are protected,” said Jerome Greco, supervising attorney of the digital forensics unit at The Legal Aid Society in December.

The POST Act is “necessary legislation that would require transparency about the NYPD’s acquisition and use of new surveillance technologies,” Greco added.

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. 

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.

The POST Act would shed more light on the use of facial recognition and other high-tech surveillance tools and allow the public to weigh in, wrote Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center, in a column for Gotham Gazette last month. 

“At a time when the NYPD is buying invasive and discriminatory tools to track and spy on communities of color, the POST Act simply demands transparency,” he said. “That’s it, that’s all this simple bill requires, and, mind-bogglingly, it’s still not law.”

A version of this story was published December 2, 2019 when the Committee on Public Safety scheduled a hearing on the bill.