On February 15, Amnesty International published a report exposing how the New York Police Department has constructed a vast metropolis-spanning surveillance network heavily reliant on highly controversial facial recognition technology (FRT), which serves to “reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities.”
Once a science fiction staple, the Orwellian technology is quickly becoming normalized, wholeheartedly embraced by police forces up and down the nation. FRT allows police to compare CCTV imagery and other sources with traditional photographic records, as well as databases of billions of headshots, some of which are crudely pulled from individuals’ social media profiles without their knowledge or consent. The NYPD is a particularly enthusiastic user – or, perhaps, abuser – of FRT, with 25,500 cameras spanning the city today.
There is also a clear racial component to FRT deployment in New York – Amnesty found that in areas where the proportion of non-white residents is higher, so too is the concentration of FRT-equipped CCTV cameras. As such, the organization argues it has supplanted traditional ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations by law enforcement.
Between 2002 and 2019, innocent New Yorkers were searched and questioned in public by law enforcement over five million times. This reached a peak in 2011, a year during which almost 700,000 people were stopped and frisked. While the tactic’s usage has fallen significantly in the years since, the number of FRT-equipped surveillance devices in the city has multiplied significantly in the same period.
And all too often, the technology is used to “identify, track and harass” protesters.
In August that year, FRT was used to track down a protester who’d committed the egregious crime of yelling near a law enforcement official, leading to over 50 officers surrounding his apartment and shutting down the surrounding streets, while NYPD helicopters hovered menacingly overhead.
In sum, Amnesty judges New York’s FRT network to “violate the right to privacy, and threaten the rights to freedom of assembly, equality and non-discrimination.”While unambiguously shocking, its report represents the tip of the iceberg in respect of FRT usage by the NYPD – not least because the department refused to disclose public records regarding its acquisition of FRT and other surveillance tools in response to Amnesty’s requests, prompting the rights group to take legal action, which remains ongoing as of February 2022.
Much of New York City’s modern surveillance infrastructure falls under the Domain Awareness System (DAS), conceived following the 9/11 attacks – the NYPD is supported in this effort by partnerships with surveillance camera company Pelco, tech giant Microsoft, and the FBI’s counterterrorism wing.
Events such as the attempted 2010 Times Square police car bombing provided justification for an even more expansive FRT rollout, meaning that today, local forces in all of New York’s five boroughs have carte blanche access to databases containing extensive data on citizens and vehicle registration plates, among other things.
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