By Graham Rayman
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — A pair of NYPD oversight bills will be introduced today to require the department to report more extensive body camera data and bar the city from sharing information from its gang database with federal law enforcement, including immigration authorities.
Councilman Rory Lancman’s bill would stop the NYPD from turning over any information from the gang database to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and any federal agency using the information to enforce immigration laws.
The gang database has been the topic of some controversy, as civil rights advocates have charged that the NYPD too easily lists people as gang members in the database and is slow to delete names.
“The core of the issue is less about collaboration among law enforcement agencies than it is about the unreliability of the database and how many people are in the database for walking through a public housing development, hanging out with the wrong people or wearing the wrong color,” Lancman said. “You can’t talk about sharing information in the gang database without confronting the unreliability of the database itself.”
However in a June 13 hearing, Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said the NYPD doesn’t turn over the names in the database to ICE.
“The department does not share that an individual is included in the database with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be used to initiate deportation proceedings, or affect these applications or citizenship applications,” Shea said.
Lancman asked if there were guidelines in place for sharing names from the database with other law enforcement, like district attorney’s offices and federal prosecutors.
“I think that is — and the answer is no,” Shea said. “The mere fact that an individual is listed in the Criminal Group Database does not add or subtract any evidence to whether a district attorney is going to go forward with a case or what charges he’s going to (file).”
During the hearing, Councilman Donovan Richards noted, “Being labeled a gang member can have serious consequences. Immigration authorities use the label to justify deportation.”
An NYPD spokeswoman said the department is reviewing the bills. “The NYPD does not share information with entities engaged in civil immigration enforcement, and doing so is already prohibited by law,” she said.
Councilman Jumaane Williams’ bill, if passed, would require the NYPD to turn over monthly data on the number of officers wearing body cameras by precinct, the percentage of times video was recorded by cops and the amount of use of force incidents of which video exists.
The bill would also force the NYPD to provide the percentage of encounters which end up in Internal Affairs Bureau investigation.
Finally, the bill would require the NYPD to provide an individual breakdown of a range of information on each time a body camera was used, including an explanation for why a camera failed to record a given incident, whether the police officer turned off the camera and whether the incident was investigated.