Planet Money
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.
00:11:02 · Joe Pascarella, Amanda Aronczyk
[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. [00:11:09] S2: Like counterterrorism. That was the CIA's job or the FBI's. But nine eleven was a massive intelligence failure. And if the federal government couldn't tell the city what was coming, then the NYPD was like, look. We have to protect ourselves. We need to see what's coming at us and stop it before it does. So the NYPD starts going from being a local police department into also being a counterterrorism force. [00:11:34] S4: You know, we had to really account for, you know, everything from all the way down to the bottom of the rivers to the top of the skies. And, you know, building by building, it's the basis of the Brooklyn Bridge, the basis of the Manhattan Bridge, and also our air. I started seeing a lot of air monitors to make sure that, you know, there's not a terror attack released in the air. It's a very, very big city. [00:11:54] S2: And all of the changes to scale up were really, really expensive. So the city lobbied the federal government to get massive homeland security grants, and so did police departments across the country. They also wanted to be ready for the next terrorist attack. There was a huge battle to get that money. Ultimately, Joe watched the NYPD get quite a lot of federal dollars. [00:12:18] S4: Lots. Billions. Billions. Just all all kinds of federal resources for counterterrorism. So we built out a lot in personnel, a lot of equipment, a lot of technology.
00:12:18 · Joe Pascarella, Amanda Aronczyk, S5
[00:12:18] S4: Lots. Billions. Billions. Just all all kinds of federal resources for counterterrorism. So we built out a lot in personnel, a lot of equipment, a lot of technology. [00:12:29] S2: With all of this money pouring in, the NYPD had the resources to, you know, send its own detectives to other countries, expand a joint terrorism task force to work more closely with federal agencies, to hire a former CIA guide to lead intelligence, and to amass all kinds of new technology to help the police see and hear and learn about anything bad that might happen in New York. At first, the aim of all this is to prevent a truck bomb or bioweapon attack by spotting a suspicious license plate or maybe an unattended backpack. But then the mission started to creep, both figuratively and geographically. [00:13:10] S4: So, you know, you could put [00:13:11] S5: up a [00:13:11] S4: camera. It's... You know, we used to call it a double bang for your buck. You put up a camera to try to stop terrorism, and you're also, you know, you have enough surveillance for, you know, local disorder and crime problems.
00:13:11 · Joe Pascarella, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:13:11] S4: camera. It's... You know, we used to call it a double bang for your buck. You put up a camera to try to stop terrorism, and you're also, you know, you have enough surveillance for, you know, local disorder and crime problems. [00:13:22] S2: Double bang for your buck. Looking for terrorists might also be able to catch a burglar. So now to do both, they've got the federal money pouring in, plus all of this private and corporate money going to groups like the nonprofit police foundations. After nine eleven, there was a surge in donations to these kinds of groups across the country. In New York, the NYPD begins to build what will arguably become the most advanced high-tech surveillance and intelligence platform in the country. It starts with gathering what they know into one place. So this means, like, databases and criminal records and nine one one calls, a ton of data. Then they centralize all that info into a twenty four hour a day, seven day a week real time crime center, which launched in 2005. So say a detective was investigating a serious shooting, they could call [00:14:20] S4: Call up, are there any cameras in the areas? You know, I have this license plate. Can you run this against the database? As opposed to going back to the detective squad officers getting on the computer. So it it evolved into a very, very, important help center to try to solve crimes.