New York Police Department Continues to Fail to Comply with Laws on Public Disclosure of High-Tech Surveillance Gadgets, Report Finds

NEW YORK — The New York City Police Department violated public disclosure laws by deploying new high-tech surveillance gadgets like a robot dog and a robot deployed at the Times Square subway station, according to a new report from the city’s Department of Investigation.

Under the city’s Postal Service Act, the Police Department is required to publish a document called an “Impact and Use Policy” that provides detailed information on how new surveillance devices and technologies are used 90 days in advance and takes into account public comments.

But instead, the NYPD made changes to existing policy documents to add information about the new devices, which also included a GPS telephone tracking system, a digital fingerprint reader and a device that could link a photo of a location to information in NYPD databases, according to the DOI report . he stated.

According to the report, the amendments omitted a number of key details that must be disclosed under the Postal Act.

DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber noted that the agency made similar arrangements in 2022. As a result, “individual technologies could be protected from public scrutiny and oversight,” the 2022 review said.

“This report reiterates an important finding from our 2022 analysis – that grouping surveillance technologies under a single Impact and Use Policy (“IUP”) may reduce the public transparency that the Postal Act is intended to provide,” Strauber said.

In a statement, a police spokesman said: “Protecting public safety is this administration’s top priority, and a key part of that mission is using technology to keep New Yorkers safe. We undertake to comply with the law. We will carefully review the DOI’s conclusions and recommendations.”

Albert Fox Cahn of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project said the report highlights that the New York Police Department continues to violate elements of the Postal Service Act.

“Once again, (DOI) makes it clear that the NYPD is hiding key data through boilerplate policies that hide more details than they reveal,” he said.

“You should have a new policy with a new comment period for each technology,” he added. “But the other issue is that these amendments are so opaque that they don’t tell us anything significant.”

Jerome Greco of the Legal Aid Society added: “New Yorkers did not sign up to serve as guinea pigs in City Hall’s experiments with problematic and invasive technology. There are many other solutions available to address root causes and improve public safety that do not mindlessly rely on technology like DigiDog as some kind of public policy panacea.”

The Post Act, or Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology, requires the NYPD to “publicly disclose information regarding its use of and policies relating to surveillance technology,” the DOI report noted.

The NYPD placed the five-foot-tall, 400-pound “Knightscope K5” on the Times Square subway in September and retired it in February. DigiDog has faced repeated criticism from New Yorkers, most notably in 2021 when it was used at the NYCHA development in Manhattan.