The New York City Police Department (NYPD) actively monitors public activity in New York City, New York, United States. Historically, surveillance has been used by the NYPD for a range of purposes, including against crime, counter-terrorism, and also for nefarious or controversial subjects such as monitoring political demonstrations, activities, and protests, and even entire ethnic and religious groups.

Following the September 11 attacks, the NYPD developed a large and sophisticated array of surveillance technologies, generating large collections of data including billions of license plate readings and weeks of security footage from thousands of cameras. This data is now used in the department's day-to-day operations, from counter-terrorism investigations to resolving domestic violence complaints. The system consists of an interconnected web of CCTV cameras, license plate readers, physical sensors, machine learning software, data analytics dashboards, and mobile apps.

Now centered around the Microsoft-built Domain Awareness System, the NYPD surveillance infrastructure has cost hundreds of millions of US dollars to produce and maintain. Many of its core components are being sold to or emulated by policing departments across the world.

The NYPD has credited surveillance systems as preventing numerous terrorist attacks on the city and helping to provide evidence for hundreds of criminal cases.

Unlike intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the NYPD does not disclose the budget or funding sources for its surveillance system. However, this may change in December 2020 when the POST Act goes into effect.

History

The NYPD has been involved in numerous surveillance activities of NYC throughout its history.

Black Panthers and the Handschu Agreement

Between the 1950s and 1970s, the NYPD conducted extensive surveillance on the Black Panther Party, Nation of Islam, the Young Lords, suspected communists, and other individuals of interest. The surveillance was conducted by the then anti-communist division known as "The Red Squad", which has since become the more general purpose Intelligence Bureau.

The red squad surveilled and recorded information about targets day to day behaviors on index cards which were then stored at police headquarters. These routine behaviors included granular detail such as which table individuals were seated at during a fundraiser dinner, and how much they paid for the meal. In 2016, 520 boxes of notecards were discovered in a Queens warehouse. The city records department has yet to release these boxes to the public but has stated it is working on rules to allow access.

Since the 1980s the surveillance records from the red squad were required to be open to the public, allowing individuals to request copies of files written on them. However many requests for such files have been rejected, and the files themselves shuffled such that indexing of the documents is not possible. Civil rights attorneys and critics of the NYPD such as Jethro Eisenstein have argued that this difficulty in obtaining documents is the result of a concerted effort by the department to restrict public access to policing data. Prior to the discovery of the notecards, historian Johanna Fernández sued to have surveillance information on the Young Lords released and was told by the NYPD that no such documents existed, and that officials searched for over 100 hours for any pertinent files without success.

In 1969, twenty-one members of the Black Panthers were indicted on charges of planning bombings on police and civilian targets. The police were found to have been conducting comprehensive surveillance of the group, and after only ninety minutes all defendants were acquitted. The Handschu agreement was made following a class action lawsuit on the behalf of the defendants, which regulates the capacity for police surveillance.

in 1971 a lawsuit was opened against the NYPD arguing that the surveillance data such as those collected by the red squad violated the Handschu agreements and the constitution, the lawsuit remains open to this day and police officials claim it will last forever.

CompStat and the Dropping Crime Rate

In the early 1990s, then-deputy police commissioner Jack Maple designed and implemented the CompStat crime statistics system. According to an interview Jack Maple gave to Chris Mitchell, the system was designed to bring greater equity to policing in the city by attending to crimes which affected people of all socioeconomic backgrounds including previously ignored poor New Yorkers.

Also at this time, the Dirty thirty (NYPD) police scandal was unfolding in Harlem, which involved illegal search and seizures of suspected and known drug dealers and their homes.

Methods

Domain awareness system and cameras

The NYPD uses the Domain Awareness System (DAS) to perform surveillance across New York City - the system being composed of numerous physical and software components, including over 18,000 CCTV cameras around New York City. This surveillance is conducted on all people within range of sensors including people walking past security cameras or driving past license plate readers, it is not restricted to suspected criminals or terrorists. Additionally, individuals may be tracked across the country through nationwide sensor systems. Data collected from the DAS is retained for varying amounts of time depending on the type of data, some records being retained for a minimum of five years.

In 2014, speed cameras were introduced into 20 school zones within the five boroughs. Since July 2019, 750 school zones have speed cameras operating between 6 A.M. and 10 P.M.

The images in the DAS are used for facial recognition. The NYPD's privacy statement for the Domain Awareness System specifies that it does not use facial recognition."Public Security Privacy Guidelines", NYPD, 2009. Retrieved on June 8, 2019.

Surveillance of ethnic and religious groups

In 2001, the NYPD established a secret program (known as the Demographics Unit, and later the Zone Assessment Unit) to surveil American Muslim daily life throughout New York City and the nation. The Demographics Unit was tasked with monitoring 28 "ancestries of interest, ranging from Arab ethnicities like Palestinian and Syrian to heavily Muslim populations from former Soviet states such as Chechnya and Uzbekistan to Black American Muslims".

In June 2012, NYPD Assistant Police Chief Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single lead.

The Moroccan Initiative was a similar ethnicity-based surveillance program of Moroccan Americans following the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

The Intelligence Division units that were engaged in the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program include its Demographics Unit, renamed the Zone Assessment Unit (now disbanded); the Intelligence Analysis Unit; the Cyber Intelligence Unit; and the Terrorist Interdiction Unit. In 2017, The Daily Beast reported that the NYPD continues to perform surveillance on the Muslim community in NYC.

The New York Times reported in 2013 that four CIA officers were embedded in the NYPD in the decade after September 11 attacks, and those officers were involved in nationwide surveillance operations. One of these officers, Lawrence Sanchez, was significantly involved with the founding of the Demographics Unit.

Undercover investigations of activists and protestors

Judge Charles S. Haight ruled in 2003 that the NYPD issued a request to eliminate all rules related to the Handshu agreement, but that relaxed rules would be reasonable and comparable to similarly relaxed regulations adopted by FBI in 2002. He amended his ruling to add these relaxed rules into a court order stating that the "NYPD is in need of discipline, following interrogation of anti-war demonstrators by the NYPD where the activists were required to fill out a "Demonstration Debriefing Form" which asked about individual ideologies such as their opinions on Israel and their political affiliation which was then entered into a database. Following this judgement, police no longer required "specific information about criminal activity" to surveil a political or religious gathering, and instead only needed to show "A law enforcement purpose".

Videotapes recorded between 2004 and 2005 revealed NYPD officers posing as activists to surveil at least seven Iraq War protest events, including wearing of political pins and participating in mock arrests by riot police. Prior to the 2004 Republican National Convention New York police broadly spied on people planning protests during the convention, and sent undercover officers nationwide to infiltrate various grass-roots political groups. Officials with the city and the Police Department defended their tactics, saying they needed to ferret out potential terrorists and protesters who intended to act violently or to commit vandalism.

In January 2019, NYPD e-mail messages were released which indicated surveillance of activists within the Black Lives Matter protests. These e-mails included references to the activists being "idiots" and "ninjas".

Following an internal investigation on compliance to the Handschu agreement in 2016, the NYPD inspector general found that in the cases reviewed both NYPD investigations and their use of informants and undercover officers continued after approval expired.

Stop and Frisk

The tactic of "Stop and Frisk" increased dramatically in 2008 to over half a million stops, 88% of which did not result in any fine or conviction, peaking in 2011 to 685,724 stops, again with 88% resulting in no conviction. On average, from 2002 to 2013, the number of individuals stopped without any convictions was 87.6%."Stop-and-Frisk Data." Nyclu.org. New York Civil Liberties Union, 2013. 10 Mar 2014.

Stop and frisk became the subject of a racial profiling controversy, in part because of the large majority of people of color who were stopped - in 2011, 91% of stops were performed on Black and Latino New Yorkers.

Mugshots from stop and frisk arrests are used by the facial recognition system used by the NYPD and personal data of those arrestees used to increase charges if arrested again, even when no charges were filed based on the initial stop.

Cellphone tracking

The NYPD has employed a number of cellphone surveillance strategies including Stingray phone trackers and cell tower dumps. In 2014 the International Business Times reported that the NYPD conducted cellphone tower dumps in response to unknown individuals raising a white flag on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Tower dumps give lists of all phone numbers which were near a cell tower at a given time.

According to the NYCLU, the NYPD "disclosed the use of Stingrays more than 1,000 times between 2008 and May of 2015 without a written policy and following a practice of obtaining only lower-level court orders rather than warrants" without revealing "what models of Stingrays [are used] or how much taxpayer money is used to purchase and maintain them." In January 2019, a judge ordered that the NYPD must officially disclose if a Stingray phone tracker was used by the NYPD to monitor activists cellphone communications.

Gang databases