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Q&A
NYPD's lack of transparency on surveillance contracts
2:55:24
·
3 min
Jerome Greco from Legal Aid Society discusses the ongoing struggle to obtain transparency regarding NYPD's surveillance contracts. He highlights the difficulties in accessing budget records and the NYPD's efforts to keep this information hidden.
- Legal Aid Society and STOP have been fighting for over four years to access surveillance contract information
- NYPD provided heavily redacted contracts, often hiding vendor names and spending amounts
- The department intentionally kept records in non-digital format to avoid transparency
- A recent court ruling will require NYPD to turn over the requested information
Tiffany Cabán
2:55:24
Thank you.
2:55:24
And mister Greco, I just wanted to ask you, could you tell me about the status of the SPEC's budget records?
Jerome Greco
2:55:29
Sure.
2:55:30
So, know, LegalAve strongly believes in transparency and that's part of the reason why we supported the post act.
2:55:37
When the post act first went into place, both us and STOP separately and then later, kinda jointly, had filed request to the comptroller for these these contracts, surveillance contracts that had been hidden from the public for over a decade.
2:55:53
We both received heavily redacted contracts including some of them don't even say the vendor name or how much they spent.
2:56:01
And so we also submitted a request to the MIPD.
2:56:05
And it has taken over four years of litigation to finally get a ruling from the first department that's going to now require them turn it over.
2:56:13
And so when they talk oh, everybody knew these, you know, we weren't really hiding these, that's absolutely false.
2:56:19
They were hiding these from everyone, and they fought us tooth and nail even after the post act passed to prevent us from getting copies just to even know what vendors they were using and how much money they were spending.
2:56:32
And and it seemed like the baseline level for the general public should be transparency.
2:56:39
They should know how their money is being spent.
2:56:41
Right?
2:56:42
And as council members, that's part of your responsibilities too, and so they were deceiving you as well because they have not been providing these fully unredacted copies.
2:56:52
In fact, they intentionally kept them so they wouldn't be digitized and they couldn't be electronic.
2:56:58
And their excuse for doing that, approximately a 65,000 pages of of expenses and budgets, that because it was so sensitive and confidential, yet they digitized homicide records, rape records, confidential informants.
2:57:15
All those things are not more sensitive apparently than these contracts that they wanted to hide from everyone.
2:57:21
And big shout out to the Open Data Portal, a big fan, Gotham Ruhr, So I I support your your wish to get more of more stuff from the NYPD on there.
Sharon Brown
2:57:31
Thank you.
Jerome Greco
2:58:13
Yeah.
2:58:13
There was apparently a a large filing cabinet where all of it was kept inside the NYPD, and that they were not electronic, and they were off the NYPD's network, which also made it very difficult for anybody to actually have any sort of real oversight over it.