City Council members and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams are calling the NYPD’s gang database a civil rights abomination that must be obliterated. They’re wrong, wrong, wrong. The police department has a right, indeed an obligation, to track organizations that engage in criminal activity, who is part of them and what they’re up to.
The bill in question would abolish “the criminal group database” and prohibit “the establishment of a successor database with the same or substantially similar features.”
But what the police department does is collect the names of individuals — now more than 13,000 — who it has good reason to believe are affiliated with various enterprises, including the group names, incidents, locations and rivalries. So when one crew has a beef with a rival crew, the cops are positioned to know what it’s about, how it’s flared up, and where and when it might result in a violence outburst next. All very sane, all very basic police work.
Not to some in the Council, who call it racial profiling because the vast majority of those in the database are Black and Latino teenagers and young men. That, as the cops pointed out to the Council, is because the vast majority of gang activity in New York is presently comprised of those same young men. And that the vast majority of both victims and perpetrators of gun violence are Black and Latino New Yorkers.
The NYPD has to follow the crime stats and data and it needs to collect information in order to focus its enforcement.
Otherwise it’s just putting cops on street corners waiting for bad things to happen — not proactively going where problems might be and engaging with angry and disgruntled and potentially violent people to try to head off assaults, shootings and murders.
If a person is in the database, he’s in the database — which is to say, the cops are likelier to keep tabs on him in this context. He is not prevented from renting an apartment or getting a job. But the existence of the database gives the cops a head start for when they do realize serious criminal activity is afoot, such as when, earlier this month, they arrested 14 gang members for a slew of shootings.
Indeed, it’s ironic that some of the same people who don’t even want the NYPD to collect the names of gang members are staunch advocates for community violence interruption, whereby trusted intermediaries work with gangs to try to defuse volatile disputes. How exactly is community violence interruption supposed to work if the interrupters don’t know who’s wrapped up in gang activity in the first place?
While New York City as a whole is safer than most other metropolises, pockets of especially rough neighborhoods are unsafe, particularly for young men. Those young men deserve as much protection as everyone else — and smart use of the gang database is one of the ways they can get it.