NYC seeks to overhaul system
Leaders to vote on Bill forcing police to detail surveillance tools
New York City politicians are expected to vote next week to force the largest police force in the United States to divulge the surveillance technology it uses, one of many reforms of law enforcement being considered across the country.
City council members will vote on Thursday on a long-delayed oversight Bill that would force the New York Police Department to give details about its surveillance tools, the council’s speaker’s office said on Friday.
The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act already has enough co-sponsors to win the two-thirds support needed to override veto from the mayor, who has opposed the Bill.
“New Yorkers deserve to know the type of surveillance that NYPD uses in communities and its impacts,” Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in a statement.
Like other proposed police reforms, the POST Act has been in limbo for years. Backers said anger over the death of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis and its aftermath helped push the legislation forward.
Similar rules exist in other cities, but politicians and privacy advocates said a surveillance audit for the NYPD was likely to have a particularly significant effect.
The NYPD has vehemently opposed the Bill.
In 2017, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said it would “require us to advertise sensitive technologies that criminals and terrorists do not fully understand”.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office said it was reviewing the legislation. Lawyer Albert Fox Cahn, who directs the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said allowing citizens to understand how police watch over them would help curb abusive surveillance – and abuses more generally.
Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo officially signed 10 laws that the two houses of the state legislature passed earlier in the week.
Among the measures signed on Friday is a law forbidding chokeholds being used by law enforcement officers that was named in memory of Eric Garner, a black man suffocated by New York police in 2014.