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Q&A
Council Member Stevens and Anthony Posada discuss real-world impacts of the gang database
3:24:38
ยท
3 min
Council Member Althea V. Stevens initiates a discussion about the real-world impacts of the gang database beyond police use. Anthony Posada responds with an example of how the database affects individuals long-term.
- Stevens asks about the impact of the database on cases and other areas of people's lives
- Posada shares an anecdote about a 28-year-old man affected by the database since his teenage years
- The discussion highlights how the database information is more widely accessible than claimed by the NYPD
Althea V. Stevens
3:24:38
Hi.
3:24:39
How are you guys doing?
3:24:40
Thank you all for being here.
3:24:43
It's very funny that I'm on this side now.
3:24:47
I used to sit with these guys.
3:24:48
Actually, everyone on this panel except this young lady who's been a certain number of my hearing, so shout out to you for being civically engaged.
3:24:55
So we've been in this fight for a long time.
3:24:57
And I guess for me, Anthony, if you can just talk to me a little bit about being a lawyer and seeing the impact that it has because it was very clear today that they kept saying like, we're just storing it, we're just using it for preciseness and no one else sees it.
3:25:11
And and I mean I guess everyone on the panel, anyone who has input, but like they you know are trying to build a story that is just being used for precise policing and that's the only time it's being used, but if you guys can talk about how it's actually impacting you know, cases or whatever other other areas of people's lives, I think that would be really important to kind of help close some of the gaps.
Anthony Posada
3:25:37
Sure councilmember, I can actually give you an anecdote that is part of my written testimony that highlights a lot of these issues.
3:25:42
And in fact, it goes to show that being labeled doesn't mean that your information sits in a hard copy file in a detective's desk.
3:25:51
No, it's part of a larger electronic system so that thousands of police officers on patrol right now can pull up their cell phones if they stop somebody and input that information and boom, so now it's suddenly not dormant.
3:26:04
Suddenly it's not just information that, oh, it's very hidden like in some, I don't know, beneath the chamber or something and I can't see it.
3:26:11
No, that's not true at all.
3:26:13
This young person who reached out to us for help was a 28 year old black male who had been approached by officers who gave him a ceasefire letter in a very intimidating fashion such that he didn't want to go back to that same neighborhood.
3:26:25
He stopped going to that neighborhood as a result of those encounters because they were repeated.
3:26:29
It wasn't just once.
3:26:31
He comes to us and says, Please help me find out if I'm in the database because this keeps happening to me.
3:26:35
So we submit a FOIA request during the time that the police was denying every single of the hundreds of requests that we were making to find out if people were on it.
3:26:44
They denied us all the way until we had to file an Article 78 lawsuit.
3:26:48
We did the case was settled and the records that we got, so our client's own records of why he was added on the database showed this.
3:26:54
He was added when he was a teenager for mentioning and putting an emoji on a social media post wishing somebody a happy birthday as a teenager, right?
3:27:05
So you would say, well, now he's coming to us as a 28 year old, why is he still on the database?
3:27:09
It's because of all of these arrests that he was having with the police that had nothing to do with gangs or violent crimes at all, everything that Professor Howe was just now describing, littering, jaywalking, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, yet he was still appearing on the database.
3:27:27
Even decades and years when he had no connection with any of those groups, was not involved, he was trying to get his life together and move on.
3:27:34
So the label did not just stay somewhere quietly.
3:27:37
It wasn't doorman.
3:27:38
It wasn't part of unless that the police don't mind to inform their decisions in real time.
3:27:44
It is used in real time.
3:27:46
It does impact and in this case it was leading this young person to all these stop and frisk and we can't get him off because people are on there indefinitely even with these alleged reforms.
Althea V. Stevens
3:27:56
Yeah because I mean today that was pretty much being said like no one has access to it, no one sees it, and even when I had conversations they were saying like they've changed the criteria, it's blind now so you know an arresting officer is not doing it, it's someone else and so they're saying they're trying to do all these different things but yeah absolutely.