New York - Having
developed one of the most sophisticated surveillance networks in the United
States, the New York Police Department is now expanding its use, giving local
precinct commanders new powers to fight street crime with high-tech tools previously
used only in counterterrorism operations.
“The technology, having been inspired and engineered with a
sense of urgency after 9/11, has obvious applications to conventional crime
fighting,” said Paul Browne, chief NYPD spokesman. “That is in the process of
being expanded citywide, for what - after all - is our primary mission, which
is to fight crime.”
New York is among a handful of big U.S. cities that have
been developing extensive surveillance networks in recent years using federal
anti-terrorism funding. New York’s network was initially modeled after London’s
so-called ‘Ring of Steel,’ the most extensive surveillance camera network
anywhere.
There are no legal restrictions against using the
surveillance network for traditional crime fighting, though much of the network
has been built with Homeland Security grants. But the sheer scope and
sophistication of the system worries people like Christopher Dunn, associate
legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“There is no outside monitoring of the use of this system at
all…no protections now - none, zero,” said Dunn, whose group filed a lawsuit on
Tuesday accusing the police of violating religious freedoms and constitutional
guarantees of equality in its monitoring of Muslim communities.
The development comes amid recent disclosures about the
National Security Agency’s secret surveillance of phone and email traffic. With
New York mayoral elections coming up in November, policing issues have become a
point of contention among the candidates.
The NYPD is already facing litigation over its surveillance
of Muslims and over so called stop-and-frisk tactics that critics say
discriminate against minorities.
SURVEILLANCE DASHBOARD
Last summer, the department introduced what it calls its
‘Domain Awareness System,’ or DAS, developed in partnership with Microsoft and
funded by a combination of city funding and U.S. Homeland Security grants. To
date the system has cost a total of $230 million, Browne said.
The system’s customized software ties together much of the
NYPD’s wide-ranging resources - from surveillance cameras, license plate
readers and radiation detectors to 911 calls, criminal records and other city
databases - and displays the information on a user-friendly ‘dashboard.’
As part of a pilot program, commanders are accessing the DAS
system ‘dashboard’ from desktops inside some precinct houses.
Eventually - department officials declined to provide a
timeline - the NYPD will begin rolling out mobile terminals that house the DAS
dashboards to each of the city’s 76 precincts, and equipping each patrol car
and beat cop with a mobile device that can call up the dashboard from anywhere,
said NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism Richard Daddario.
The department has also doubled the number of public and
private surveillance cameras in the network from 3,000 in lower Manhattan to
6,000 citywide, Daddario said. About one third of the devices are police
cameras and the rest are existing surveillance cameras that private businesses
allow the police to tap into.
The NYPD is also deploying more license plate readers, which
now capture photographs of every single car that travels in or out of the city.
About 120 license plate readers are perched above bridges and tunnels and city
traffic lights, with plans to increase the number of fixed readers to 200,
Browne said. Another 100 or so mobile license plates readers attach to the hood
of squad cars. Browne said the department has a database containing more than
16 million plates.
Where previously the readers would alert police to cars
associated with individuals on NYPD terrorism watch lists, they are now
alerting police to violent fugitives, homicide suspects, and even drivers with
expired license plates, Browne said.
When a license plate reader sends an alert, analysts at
headquarters communicate the information to cops on the street.
With the push
of a button, the DAS system’s dashboard can geo-spatially map each location in
the city where a plate reader has spotted the car in the past five years, said
Jessica Tisch, the NYPD’s director of counterterrorism policy and planning, who
demonstrated the dashboard for Reuters recently.
Some civil liberties lawyers believe such a system is
tantamount to an end run around the Fourth Amendment.
“A comprehensive license-plate reader system is akin to
attaching police GPS devices to our cars, since the system allows the police to
track movements throughout the city,” said Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties
Union.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in U.S.
vs. Jones that police need a warrant to install such a device on a person’s
car. “The public would never stand for routine GPS tracking by the police, but
this system is moving us towards that very situation,” Dunn said.
Asked to respond to such criticism, Daddario said “We’ll see
how the law evolves, but I don’t think that in any case the (DAS system)
violates anyone’s expectation of privacy.”
NYPD officials say they have been working with Microsoft
developers to fine-tune the software underlying the system, moving through six
versions of the program since its inception.
While earlier versions could search hours of footage from
multiple cameras in seconds to spot and isolate individuals wearing, for
instance, the color red, the new version of the software can isolate a specific
article of clothing. Instead of just a person wearing red, analysts can now
isolate a person in a red baseball cap or blue pants.
A portion of the surveillance network includes so-called
smart cameras - custom-built NYPD cameras that are equipped with video
analytics software that can detect certain suspicious activities or behaviors,
like unattended packages or a car that circles a certain city block repeatedly.
The NYPD has also begun incorporating hundreds of its
so-called VIPER cameras, which are deployed in public housing complexes
throughout the city, into the DAS system. The cameras can pan, tilt and zoom,
and can be operated remotely from a precinct desktop.
City privacy guidelines require the NYPD to destroy
surveillance video after 30 days, and license plate reader and metadata after
five years.
Police officials declined to discuss terrorism-related cases
that were cracked using the DAS system, but have pointed to several violent
crimes they solved using a combination of technology and traditional detective
work.
In January, for example, the driver of a big black car tried
to grab a 13-year-old girl off the street on her way to school in Queens, and
later in the day a 14-year-old girl reported a similar incident, Browne said.
The DAS system allowed police to cross-reference a grainy
surveillance camera image of the car, a sketch based on the girls’ accounts,
data on late-model black Cadillac Escalades, license plates and ownership
records.
They narrowed it down to one suspect, a livery cab driver
with a mugshot in the system. Police drove to his last known address, and
sitting in the driveway was a black Cadillac Escalade with missing center wheel
caps - the only key detail the young witnesses had remembered, Browne said. The
suspect was charged with two counts of luring a child to commit a crime, two
counts of child endangerment, and two counts of harassment. A pretrial hearing
is set for later this month.
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