Council will consider bill that sheds light on facial recognition and police surveillance

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By David Brand  

The City Council Committee on Public Safety will later this month consider a nearly 3-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 31 council sponsors. The Committee on Public Safety will hold a hearing on the POST Act on Dec. 18. The last hearing on the legislation took place in June 2017.

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.”  

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. 

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 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.”