Jason Taper
3:45:45
My name is Jason Taper of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
3:45:49
This is just an excerpt of my further submission for the record which I will submit soon.
3:45:55
The gangs database is a racist, inaccurate reincarnation of stop and frisk.
3:46:01
It's racist because as previously said, of all possible definitions of gangs including white supremacists, ninety nine percent in the database are black and latino.
3:46:10
It is inaccurate because it is entirely made up of rumors and officers guessing.
3:46:15
Even if it is two independent officers guessing the same thing, an accusation does not make that accusation true.
3:46:22
You can be in a gang quote unquote without any suspicion of any crime.
3:46:27
Even wishing happy birthday is something the NYPD considers a self admission, which gives it away that self admission is basically NYPD ventriloquism.
3:46:37
From these rumors, we get this database.
3:46:40
And from this database, we get the harmful surveillance we see in our communities.
3:46:44
Surveillance itself is traumatizing.
3:46:47
When NYPD says things like they did earlier, like they need to be watched, direct quote, it leaves people afraid to walk out of their house and into the gang database.
3:46:57
And those are valid fears.
3:46:59
As my colleague says, ICE uses gang databases.
3:47:02
And under this administration, we've seen violent raids, imprisonment including on Guantanamo Bay.
3:47:08
We've seen US citizens swept up in these violent ICE raids.
3:47:12
New York City should not be complicit in a Trump police state or in the inherent harms of surveillance.
3:47:19
There is no public safety benefit to this.
3:47:22
Portland and Chicago, for example, abolished their gang databases with no increase in the crime rate.
3:47:29
When there's no benefit and when the very existence of this database is harmful, inherently only abolition will suffice.
3:47:37
That is why we are in support of Introduction seven ninety eight to abolish the gang database and any successor database like it.
