By Alice Speri
The New York Police Department has quietly expanded its gang
database under Mayor Bill de Blasio, targeting tens of thousands of
young people of color for increased surveillance even in the absence of
criminal conduct.
New Yorkers have been added to the NYPD gang database under de Blasio
at a rate of 342 people per month, nearly three times the rate of the
prior decade. That’s despite both historically low crime levels and the
fact that gang-motivated crime makes up less than 1 percent of all
reported crime in New York City.
New details about who the NYPD includes in the vast database were
revealed in response to a public records request by CUNY School of Law
professor Babe Howell, who shared the information with The Intercept.
The data reveals that as of February 2018, there were 42,334 people in
the database — a 70 percent increase since de Blasio took office in
January 2014. Ninety-nine percent of those added over that four-year
period were not white. The NYPD also maintains a database of “inactive”
gang members that includes 2,706 people.
The NYPD differentiates between crime committed to advance the
interests of a gang — about 0.1 percent of all reported crime in the
city between 2013 and 2017, according to Howell’s analysis — and crime
committed by alleged gang members but not on behalf of gangs. According
to the NYPD statistics, the latter category of crime doubled between
2013 and mid-2017, but still accounts for only 1.7 percent of all
reported crime.
But the results of a separate Freedom of Information Law request
suggest that the NYPD’s definition of what constitutes a gang is broad,
vague, and disconnected from evidence of criminal activity.
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Source: The Intercept_
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