Planet Money
00:30:18 · Amanda Aronczyk, Jerome Greco
[00:30:18] S2: A lot of the reps from the tech companies are also former police officers themselves, which Jerome worries gives the products a kind of stamp of approval without due diligence. [00:30:29] S10: How much are we evaluating what they're saying? Right? They say, oh, this worked this way, and it'll capture this. It's like, well, did did you evaluate that at all before you before you decided to sign on the dotted line? [00:30:41] S2: And before spending what is usually taxpayer money. Now today, the NYPD says they have a strict procurement and vendor review process. But back then, the main reason Jerome knew that the NYPD was buying all of this tech was because of what he was seeing in courtrooms. But the contracts themselves with the names of the companies, the cost of the products, and those signatures on the dotted lines, those were mostly hidden from the public. And these kinds of surveillance tech contracts have also been kept quiet in police departments around the country through nondisclosure agreements or off the books funding, funding like from those police foundations that raised a bunch of money after nine eleven, or sometimes through federal grants. Police have more latitude to spend that kind of outside money without public oversight. For years, civil liberties groups had been pushing for more concrete information. In New York, Jerome says that they tried but could not get answers. [00:31:43] S10: The NYPD had been stonewalling everybody then either got very limited or none.
00:31:43 · Jerome Greco, Amanda Aronczyk, S11, Scott Stringer
[00:31:43] S10: The NYPD had been stonewalling everybody then either got very limited or none. [00:31:48] S2: It wasn't until 2020 with the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd by police that something kind of shook loose. The protesters were being videotaped, and there was lots of debate about them ending up in police databases. A wave of cities passed laws that forced police to be more transparent about the tech they were using. In New York, former city council member Vanessa Gibson had already introduced the POST Act, the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act. Now because of the protests, it passed. [00:32:21] S11: Today, today is a very important day in our city where the New York City Council will take a very bold step forward in recognizing that a sleeping nation has finally woke up following the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. [00:32:36] S2: A couple of weeks after the post act passes, former comptroller Scott Stringer also decides to end that wink wink nod nod agreement with the police, officially withdraws from it. [00:32:45] S9: I decided at that point, we need to disclose all of this.
00:32:45 · Scott Stringer, Amanda Aronczyk, Jerome Greco
[00:32:45] S9: I decided at that point, we need to disclose all of this. [00:32:50] S2: Now Stringer says that unless the NYPD can make an urgent and specific argument for why something should remain secret, when the police propose adopting a new technology, they have to tell the public about it on the NYPD post act disclosure page. And then when they buy something new, that goes online too. But we still don't know the full story of what the NYPD bought or who they bought it from before the post act. A few months later, Scott Stringer released his office's copies of the special expenses, but they were heavily redacted. So Jerome from Legal Aid, he is still on a mission to make sure his team of public defenders has the tech they need to counter what the NYPD is using. He says he still wants to see all those old contracts. Legal aid filed a lawsuit asking for their release. [00:33:40] S10: So in response to our lawsuit, part of what they said was that it would be a Herculean effort to provide us with all these documents that they'd have to go through because it was a 165,000 pages of documents.
00:33:40 · Jerome Greco, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:33:40] S10: So in response to our lawsuit, part of what they said was that it would be a Herculean effort to provide us with all these documents that they'd have to go through because it was a 165,000 pages of documents. [00:33:54] S2: A 165,000 pages worth of files and contracts between the police department and tech vendors. Those are the contracts the NYPD says exist only on paper in 22 filing cabinet drawers. Because of Jerome's lawsuit, the NYPD is now required to make those documents public, and they have started to. So now you can see that the NYPD paid 45,000,000 to SecureWatch twenty four for their cameras or that they paid $11,500,000 to MorphoTrak for improving the identification of biometrics, like things like fingerprints and palms and irises. There is also a contract for purchasing and maintaining cellular tracking systems. But so far, they have turned over about 600 of the 165,000 pages. NYPD not making it easy. [00:34:48] S10: But I don't care. And I will continue. And if it means, you know, we'll be litigating this until I I am at my grave, then maybe that's what we'll do. But, you know, there's also a principle here at this point too, which is that you shouldn't be allowed to hide these things from the public. Right? You shouldn't... It shouldn't be acceptable, and it's not. [00:35:12] S2: Now Jerome is just one guy in one city. But with flock license plate readers all over the news, across the country, people are showing up at their local city council meetings. In San Diego, one guy, went dressed up as Darth Vader.
00:35:12 · Amanda Aronczyk, Scott Stringer, Joe Pascarella
[00:35:12] S2: Now Jerome is just one guy in one city. But with flock license plate readers all over the news, across the country, people are showing up at their local city council meetings. In San Diego, one guy, went dressed up as Darth Vader. [00:35:27] S9: The emperor is a fan of flock. [00:35:30] S2: Back to our former police captain turned professor at a desk, Joe Pascarella. He says people should be asking for more transparency everywhere. He says when the public doesn't know what their local police department is doing, there's no way to verify or even know if these tools are effective, and it's hard to put in guardrails. [00:35:48] S4: It's a problem because it doesn't give a... What we call a bright line rule in law enforcement. Law enforcement needs a bright line rule. They need to tell you, alright. You can only keep this data for sixty days. If you tell them, you know, you can keep it within reason, they're just gonna do whatever they want. [00:36:01] S2: A bright line rule? [00:36:02] S4: Yeah. That's... It's called a bright line rule, you know, like Miranda. Essentially, if you're gonna accuse someone, you have to give them their rights. Right? If they're in custody, that's a bright line rule. It's pretty simple. Surveillance does not have any bright line rules.
00:36:02 · Joe Pascarella, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:36:02] S4: Yeah. That's... It's called a bright line rule, you know, like Miranda. Essentially, if you're gonna accuse someone, you have to give them their rights. Right? If they're in custody, that's a bright line rule. It's pretty simple. Surveillance does not have any bright line rules. [00:36:15] S2: Now police departments are being forced to put in some bright line rules kind of after the fact, after they've adopted things like flock cameras or facial recognition software. And these bright line rules might be more relevant than ever with the spread of AI. Like in the past, it was hard to imagine that anyone could actually watch all of those videos that the police were collecting. It was just, like, too time consuming. But once you start using AI to say, look through the hours of footage and look for unusual behavior, Surveillance just got that much easier. If you like stories like this one, you can get more planet money in your inbox. Join a 150,000 other readers, that's a lot of readers, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can sign up at npr.org Planet Money newsletter or at the link in the show notes. Today's episode was produced by Vito Emanuel and edited by Marianne McEwen. It was engineered by Sina Lofredo and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Thanks this week to Ron Kraswell and to Matthew Goriglia. I'm Amanda Oronczyk. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.