NYPD IS STILL MUM ON DNA – ADVOCATES
Fault police for not keeping promise on demographic info
Three years after promising transparency regarding the 32,000 DNA profiles the NYPD stores, police brass still haven’t released demographic information on the database’s contents — a lapse civil liberties advocates say makes it difficult for minorities to trust police.
The promise came at a February 2020 City Council hearing that saw elected officials raising concerns the database contained too many profiles of Black and Latino New Yorkers — including minors. Many people with DNA in the database have not been convicted of a crime or even arrested.
Then-NYPD Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison, citing “demographic transparency,” said the NYPD planned to track “the age, gender and ethnicity of individuals who are entered and those removed from the database, to monitor and review disparities”
But no such data have been publicly released since then.
“That hearing was just full of empty promises — and certainly this is just one of them,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP). “I would have expected the information would have been posted long ago. It would have taken them about an hour if they cared enough.”
The NYPD in a statement said the department is doing the best it can to provide more transparency.
“This process requires a review of profiles that were obtained and developed as far back as the late 1990s, and the demographic information of a significant percentage of these profiles are unknown,” an NYPD spokesman said in the statement.
“Based on our preliminary review, where the demographics are known, the demographics of the profiles that were removed correlate with the historical demographics of crime suspects . ... The NYPD has developed a process to improve the tracking of demographic data for new profiles going forward.”
But the spokesman did not say why the demographic data it has tabulated have not been made public.
“We think transparency around this issue is important, and that’s why we think it’s really a shame the NYPD has not followed through on its promise to have this information both collected and made publicly available,” said Phil Desgranges, a supervising lawyer with the Legal Aid Society.
“What does the NYPD have to hide here?” Desgranges added. “If their practices aren’t problematic for those communities of color in which they’re also trying to build better relations, then reveal the demographic information that you’re taking and storing in this index. When there’s a shroud of secrecy people are only going to fill that void with their own suspicions.”
The information about DNA that police do release has been posted on the NYPD website six times beginning in September 2020.The most recent posting shows the database contains 32,350 profiles of criminal suspects. So far, the NYPD says, it has reviewed 29,489 profiles and determined that about 25% of those, or 7,331 profiles, should be removed.
In March 2020, NYPD First Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Tucker said about 8,000 profiles — also about 25% of the total — would be removed “in the next year or so.”
The remaining 22,158 profiles reviewed by police should remain in the database, the NYPD says. Some 19,585 of those remaining profiles — about 66% of the total reviewed — are samples taken from people who have been convicted of crimes.
The 2,448 profiles of people not convicted of crimes either were gathered in cases still under investigation or pending in court.
The remaining profiles also include 125 people whose guilt can’t be determined because, for example, victims or witnesses refuse to cooperate with police.
At the 2020 Council hearing, the NYPD also promised to change the rules by which it collects and uses DNA samples.
Legal Aid last year filed a class action lawsuit calling the database unconstitutional and arguing it should be shut down completely, noting in part that a state-run database already exists, with DNA profiles entered following a criminal conviction.