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NYPD All Up In The Club, Knows About Your Bottle Full Of Bub
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Jun 28, 2012
Modified Jun 28, 2012
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Jun 28, 2012
Modified Jun 28, 2012
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Your credit card company and those girls from Seacaucus might not be the only ones who know you blew $600 on two bottles of Absolut last month. According to the Times, the NYPD had an unusual agreement with the West Village club Greenhouse where the club would scan patrons' IDs and keep them in a database for at least 30 days, readily available to law enforcement when they wanted to see it. “I wonder how many people would be thrilled to learn that there is a permanent record of everything they do in this club, as well as a police file with their identifying information,” the NYCLU's executive director Donna Lieberman said.
But Greenhouse (which was shut down earlier this month along with its sister-club WiP after the Chris Brown/Drake debacle) wasn't the only club to feed information to the police. The head of the City Law Department's administrative law division explained that starting in 2007 "many nightclubs in the city had entered into agreements with the Police Department to scan the identification cards of patrons."
Why? The Law Department employee says that the NYPD only uses the information "as part of an active criminal investigation," but Greenhouse's agreement has no such stipulations. They agreed to give the information as a condition of staying open after multiple instances of violence that occurred in their club. “This is using police powers as a blunt instrument, instead of a targeted law enforcement tool," Lieberman argues. Pssh whatever, the only "blunt instrument" we're using is the ONE WE'RE SMOKIN IN THE CLUB, BABY!
Tagged
chris brown
club bangers
drake
greenhouse
in tha cluh
nyclu
wip
Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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