Planet Money
00:04:11 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:04:11] S1: And so we're just mass monitoring everyone for the chance that something might happen. [00:04:18] S2: Michelle's not saying that the police just sit around all day watching videos to wait and see if one of us is criming, but they have so many details about us and our lives available to them within seconds. I mean, whether this is good or bad, I just don't remember agreeing to all this. And that's because when it comes to the details, almost no one did. When I started to look into how and why the city where I live set up a massive all watching system, like picture a digital version of one of those bulletin boards with all the red strings tying together faces to names to locations to today to a year ago. I ended up talking to the NYPD, to government officials, to researchers, and to lawyers to figure out what happened. Turns out that while decisions were being made about what tech to adopt and how much to pay for it, almost no one was consulted. For a long time, the only paper trail was offline, stored in filing cabinets, kept under lock and key. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronczyk. For years, police have argued for security over transparency and spent billions of tax dollars without our permission on watching us, tracking us, recording us. Today on the show, how this all went down with the largest police department in the country and the fight to get police everywhere to tell us how they're watching us.
00:05:56 · S0, S3
[00:05:56] S0: This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. If you've listened to enough podcasts, you know a confident answer isn't necessarily a correct one. Sources matter. The same goes for AI, tax, and compliance. Aviator is grounded in twenty plus years of Avalara tax intelligence and delivers source backed, audit defensible outcomes with human oversight built in because the AI said so won't pass an audit. Visit avalara.com/aviator. [00:06:26] S3: This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business. Learn more at linkedin.com/planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com/bankguy for details. Capital One NA, member FDIC.
00:06:26 · S3, Amanda Aronczyk, Joe Pascarella
[00:06:26] S3: This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business. Learn more at linkedin.com/planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com/bankguy for details. Capital One NA, member FDIC. [00:07:05] S2: I'm going to tell you this story in two parts. The first is about how this web of surveillance ended up on every NYPD issued cell phone. The second part is about how that web grew so big without any of us agreeing to it. So it's a story about the rise of the surveillance system and the secrecy that built it. To start off, I wanted to talk with someone who remembers what policing was like back in the day without all the fancy tech and video cameras. So I got in touch with former NYPD captain Joe Pascarella, who remembers thinking back in the early two thousands, more video might be helpful for police. [00:07:42] S4: You know, at the time, I didn't think we were doing a good job in the NYPD. [00:07:46] S2: The NYPD was being heavily criticized for what was known as stop and frisk, where police officers were stopping mostly young people of color and searching them based on some vague notion of suspicion.
00:07:46 · Amanda Aronczyk, Joe Pascarella
[00:07:46] S2: The NYPD was being heavily criticized for what was known as stop and frisk, where police officers were stopping mostly young people of color and searching them based on some vague notion of suspicion. [00:07:58] S4: So I thought, you know, a good way to cut down stops, just film everybody instead. [00:08:03] S2: That that is what you thought? Or [00:08:05] S4: That that was my thought, you know, nonphysical policing. [00:08:08] S2: So, right, in the early days of more camera surveillance, it was seen as a fix for something. [00:08:13] S4: Yes. Yes. I think it was a fix for, you know, less physical policing. You know, in a camera, there's a lot. You get a field of view. You get a direction. You could get someone's gait. You can get their biometrics. You could get a lot more off a camera than a physical observation. [00:08:28] S2: And is this... I can't tell what your what your take is on that. Like, is that positive? Is that negative? [00:08:33] S4: I... You know, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's in that public safety versus individual rights. Depends on, you know, the old adage where you sit is where you stand. [00:08:41] S2: Joe now sits at a desk at Saint Joseph's University in Brooklyn. There, he's a professor of criminal justice and cybersecurity, and he's got more time to think about the ways technology might step on people's rights. But when he was first starting out all the way back in 1991, he was mostly thinking about how to stay safe. [00:09:01] S4: My first role is actually... I'm I'm walking a foot post in Times Square.
00:09:01 · Joe Pascarella, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:09:01] S4: My first role is actually... I'm I'm walking a foot post in Times Square. [00:09:05] S2: Times Square foot post in 1991. [00:09:09] S4: Times Square was actually a quite harrowing place. [00:09:12] S2: Today, you might go to Times Square to get your initials put on some M and M's at the flagship M and M store. But back in that era, if you were going to Times Square, it was probably to go get some porn. [00:09:23] S4: Then actually went from a porn haven to a place to go buy crack or, you know, illegal things like like, guns and all kinds of things you could buy at the street. It it it was quite a shock, actually. [00:09:34] S2: And that was your job? [00:09:35] S4: Yeah. That was the job. And, basically, what they wanted you to do is, quote, unquote, clear your foot post. You know, when the sergeant drove around, did not wanna see drug dealers, did not wanna see, you know, unfortunately, homeless people. [00:09:46] S2: And are you using any technology at all? [00:09:48] S4: No technology, actually. You did have a radio and, you know, obviously, you have your other, self defense weapons, but your biggest technology actually was your mouth. [00:09:58] S2: You know, Joe's talking to everybody on the block. He's making connections. He's trying to keep it peaceful, keep it orderly. And he's got his gun and his radio with him if he needs to call for backup. But if someone called in a stolen car or a break in, there wasn't much here the detectives could do. At that time, the police were solving fewer than a fifth of property crimes.
00:09:58 · Amanda Aronczyk, Joe Pascarella
[00:09:58] S2: You know, Joe's talking to everybody on the block. He's making connections. He's trying to keep it peaceful, keep it orderly. And he's got his gun and his radio with him if he needs to call for backup. But if someone called in a stolen car or a break in, there wasn't much here the detectives could do. At that time, the police were solving fewer than a fifth of property crimes. [00:10:19] S4: There used to be an old joke where, you know, how'd you arrest this burglar while he jumped into the back of my patrol car? [00:10:25] S2: Yeah. Fingerprinting and DNA profiling existed, but both were pretty limited. There just weren't that many tools. Over the nineteen nineties, though, police all over the country adopted lots of the new innovative technologies, cell phones and computer databases and video and mapping. But what truly transformed the NYPD was not one single tech innovation. It was actually a conceptual shift of what the police department was for. This came in the aftermath of nine eleven. Up to that point, had counterterrorism been a thing that had been part of your workload? [00:11:02] S4: It it was not a part of our workload. And more importantly, we thought it was someone else that was gonna take care of it.