Activists renew calls to end NYPD gang database, criticize city’s review

Arya Sundaram

Published Apr 20, 2023

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NYPD at crime scene

Kyle Mazza/SOPA Images/Shutterstock

Arya Sundaram

Published Apr 20, 2023

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Criminal justice activists are renewing their demand to abolish the NYPD’s database of people with suspected gang ties, fueled by a five-year investigation's findings of vague rules governing its use and a lack of transparency.

Activists on Wednesday criticized the Department of Investigation's review – published the day before after months of delays – as insufficient and overly gentle toward the police. They said the department’s report sometimes minimized and obscured its own damning findings.

In a noon briefing, members of the GANGS coalition of public defenders, professors, and other activists called on the City Council to pass Int. 0360, which would scrap the database and prevent the NYPD from creating a replacement.

Even if we could slightly mitigate the harms, even if we could fix the procedural failures, the gang database would still need to be abolished.

Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociology professor

“Even if we could slightly mitigate the harms, even if we could fix the procedural failures, the gang database would still need to be abolished,” said Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College sociology professor who studies policing tactics and wrote the book, “The End of Policing.”

Advocates’ concerns about the report concealing or minimizing its criticisms of the police aren’t “accurate or fair,” said Diane Struzzi, the DOI's director of communications, in a statement.

“Anyone who describes this report as ‘lax towards the NYPD’ has not read the 91-page report,” Struzzi said.

A database of 16,000 people

Investigators suggested 17 changes aimed at clarifying policies for officers and the public alike on the Criminal Group Database, as it’s officially called. It includes data on some 16,000 people, 99% of whom are Black or Latino, according to the report.

The department needs to further specify the need for the database in contributing to public safety, the report concluded.

Investigators confirmed a long list of procedural concerns that attorneys and advocates have voiced over the years, including a lack of transparency about who's on the list, along with hazy and unfulfilled guidelines over who's added and how long their names remain.

One of the report’s main criticisms is that even scant or insubstantial evidence, such as the use of certain emojis in social media posts or appearing in a photograph with known gang members, is enough to land someone in the database. Children as young as 11 or 12 were added to the database, but later removed.

The NYPD also routinely denied Freedom of Information Act requests on the database, regardless of the specifics, the report found — including about 98% of the approximately 550 FOIA requests submitted by the Legal Aid Society since 2018.

The report also unearthed instances of officers failing to follow their own department’s guidelines – and even state law. In about 10% of entries, the same officer signed off for multiple of the four required signatories to authorize an entry. And delays plagued the database's cleanup process: In a sample of nearly 500 people, over a third hadn't received the required review to stay on the list, and nearly half were late. Such reviews are mandated every three years for adults and two years for minors.

Using sealed records

Some people were included in the database on the basis of sealed arrest records, despite state law prohibiting law enforcement’s use of such documents. In a sample of 19 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 14 on the list, 16 had sealed arrests.

A key finding of the report – of no “evidence of harm" linked to the database – stood in contrast to years of concerns voiced by people on the list and their attorneys that individuals on the database are subjected to extra surveillance and prosecution. That assertion is misleading, said Babe Howell, a CUNY law professor.

“The finding of no harm is because the inspector general did not look for harms,” Howell said. She later added: “The investigator general’s job is to serve as a watchdog for the people of New York – not as a lapdog, not as a spokesperson for the NYPD.”

Locating harm caused by the database would require prospectively tracking people on it and directly linking any negative outcomes to the database, which was beyond the scope of the report, investigators concluded. Such a review is not only feasible but has been incorporated into other localities’ audits of similar gang databases, said Judy Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst with Justice Strategies.

When asked about this particular finding, Struzzi pointed to rationale discussed in the report, including how information about gang affiliations exists in other NYPD forms and systems, making it difficult to directly tie any outcomes to the database. She added that the report mentions how, in some communities, fear of the consequences of being on the list has strained police-community relations.

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Race And Justice Unit