Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Celine Zhu, Civil Rights Attorney at Center for Constitutional Rights, on NYPD's Gang Database
3:47:51
ยท
4 min
Celine Zhu, a civil rights attorney from the Center for Constitutional Rights, testifies in support of Intro 798, urging the city council to pass legislation to abolish the NYPD's gang database. She argues that the database is a digitized version of stop and frisk, disproportionately targeting Black and Latino individuals and violating their rights.
- The gang database is criticized for its low threshold for inclusion, potentially labeling children as young as 13 as gang-affiliated based on arbitrary criteria.
- Zhu draws parallels between the gang database and the unconstitutional stop and frisk practices, highlighting racial disparities and the lack of accountability for officers.
- She emphasizes that abolishing the database would not negatively impact public safety, citing examples from other cities that have eliminated similar databases without seeing increases in crime.
Celine Zhu
3:47:51
Hi.
3:47:52
My name is Celine Zhu and I am a civil rights attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
3:47:57
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today regarding Intro seven ninety eight which we urge the city council to pass.
3:48:02
The Center for Constitutional Rights and the law firm of Bulldog Vine Hoffman have served for over twelve years as plaintiff's counsel in Floyd versus the City of New York, a landmark civil class action that successfully challenged the New York City Police Department's racially discriminatory and unconstitutional stop, question and frisk practices and resulted in the current supervision of the NYPD by a court appointed monitor.
3:48:27
The NYPD's gang database is a digitized version of stop and frisk.
3:48:33
The two work hand in hand to criminalize being black and brown in New York.
3:48:38
Ninety nine percent of the people in this database we've heard again and again are black or Latino.
3:48:43
The NYPD admitted that the historical threshold to being added to the database is as low as wearing the wrong clothes, listening to the wrong music or living in the wrong place.
3:48:53
You can fill in what wrong means.
3:48:55
From these criteria, 13 year old children have been deemed gang affiliated and added to the database.
3:49:02
Where is the recourse for all the children who were wrongly and arbitrarily criminalized or their collateral consequences?
3:49:10
How does the NYPD give them back their childhoods?
3:49:14
Now the NYPD tells us that their improved system gives us a new formula.
3:49:19
We've heard that today it takes two school safety officers who have decided that that kid is friends with the wrong person and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
3:49:29
Something children and youth often have very little say because not every child has good choices.
3:49:36
This directly leads to the widespread violations of the rights of black and brown New Yorkers.
3:49:42
For example, entire NYCHA buildings used to be deemed gang locations and even if this is no longer an explicit criteria to the gang database, we know they still regularly over police these areas as high crime areas.
3:49:57
And the Floyd this is especially important because the Floyd Federal Monitor found that in 2022 only 77% of stops at NYCHA properties were lawful.
3:50:10
This is a systematized racialized violation and the deprivation of rights of black and brown people.
3:50:16
The existence of the database also directly translates into more dangerous police encounters.
3:50:21
Since the database is accessible to any NYPD officer on patrol, it gives officers cover to escalate encounters with only black and brown New Yorkers who appear in the database regardless of why they were added.
3:50:34
This leads to more dangerous stops and harsher court outcomes.
3:50:37
And the Floyd team knows this to be especially true because over the past few years we have seen an increase in both unconstitutional stops by the NYPD and in the racial disparities of these stops with black and Latinx New Yorkers making up almost 90% of reported stops.
3:50:53
And the federal monitors most recent report on NYPD discipline shows that they rarely if ever are disciplined for unconstitutional stops.
3:51:02
In the same way that stop and frisk was deployed in black and brown communities as a matter of NYPD policy, the GAIN database targets the same communities by outright criminalizing their culture, their kinship and their community.
3:51:14
This is race based profiling by the NYPD.
3:51:17
We know this is wrong.
3:51:18
Why else would places like Chicago and Portland abolish similar databases?
3:51:23
Abolishing the database will not impact public safety since racial profiling does not reduce crime and neither of those cities reported any related rises in crime.
3:51:33
The gang database especially hurts black and brown children by criminalizing the circumstances of their childhoods, particularly those who through no choice of their own, grew up in public housing or as immigrants.
3:51:46
City council has an opportunity to allow a generation of black and brown children to grow up with less police, less suspicion, less violence, less surveillance.
3:51:54
City Council has the power to ensure the care for youth they deserve and which this latest NYPD discriminatory surveillance practice threatens.
3:52:02
For those reasons I urge you to pass intro seven ninety eight.
3:52:04
Thank you.