By Eleni Manis, PHD and Albert Fox Cahn, Esq

In this report, S.T.O.P. documents the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s repeated failures to comply with New York City’s Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act (POST Act). Enacted in 2020, the POST Act is the first law to oversee the NYPD’s use of surveillance technology. A first attempt to regulate NYPD’s surveillance tools, the law only requires NYPD disclose its surveillance tools. As this report establishes, NYPD falls far short of the reporting norms set by other police departments subject to similar surveillance technology oversight laws. The report concludes by calling on the New York City Council to use its oversight authority to ensure that the bill is not ignored. S.T.O.P. also recommends that individual lawmakers and civil society organizations continue to evaluate potential litigation, seeking judicial intervention to compel the NYPD to comply with the POST Act.

By Helen Webley-Brown, Anna Sipek, Katie Buoymaster, Juliee Shivalker, Will Owen, Eleni Manis, PHD, MPA

U.S. cities are squandering money on ShotSpotter’s unproven gunshot surveillance technology. 

• ShotSpotter surveillance increases police activity, but it wastes officers’ time. One major study of the technology showed that ShotSpotter fails as an investigative tool, providing no evidence of a gun-related crime more than 90% of the time and producing exceedingly few arrests (less than 1 per 200 stops) and recovered guns (less than 1 per 300 stops).

• ShotSpotter fails the Black and Latinx communities where it appears to be disproportionately deployed. The tool increases police activity and the risk of police violence without producing any significant effect on firearm offenses or on shooting victims’ medical outcomes.

Police foundations allow police departments to secretly fund controversial programs and equipment.

• Foundations invest in dangerous surveillance tools like predictive policing software, digital surveillance platforms, cellphone hacking devices, and robotic spy dogs. 

• Foundations allow departments and officers to accept gifts from contractors in a way that would normally be illegal for city employees.

• Foundations violate good-government standards for city agencies and transparency standards for nonprofit organizations. Ideally, they should be abolished, but at a minimum, cities must end untraceable donations and corporate influence peddling.

By Andy Ratto, Nino Loshkajian, Eleni Manis, PHD, MPA

• Police increasingly replace stop-and-frisk practices with databases that crudely profile Black and Latinx youth based on their neighborhoods, peer groups, and clothing.

• These databases ruin lives: police typecast minority youths as gang members without evidence, putting them at risk of false arrest and wrongful deportation.

• Many police departments refuse to implement due process safeguards despite clear evidence that their databases are based on racial profiling, not evidence.

• Even the most rigorous safeguards would be insufficient to mitigate the full range of harms that these databases pose. They must be eliminated in their entirety.

By Nina Loshkajian, Anissa Arakal, Aaron Greenberg, Tanisha Narine, Corinne Worthington, and Eleni Manis

For years, the NYPD violated New York State DNA privacy protections by collecting New Yorkers’ DNA secretly, banking children’s DNA without parental permission, and conducting stop-and-spit campaigns in BIPOC communities, DNA dragnets that invade thousands of New Yorkers’ genetic privacy in the hope of stumbling across a single suspect.

Those the NYPD puts in its rogue database become permanent suspects, their DNA scanned thousands of times a year in cases where they have no connection whatsoever.

Every scan is an invitation for injustice, with DNA contamination and laboratory mix-ups driving false arrests and wrongful convictions. Even worse, the NYPD’s experimental DNA techniques may leave many of their claims (and resulting convictions) in doubt.