Local
NYPD’s post-9/11 surveillance expansion drew little public scrutiny
After the Sept. 11 attacks, New York City police built an extensive surveillance system, with technology purchases made largely outside public view. For more than a decade, records of those acquisitions remained in paper files inaccessible to the public.
The New York Police Department built one of the country’s most extensive police surveillance systems in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, adopting technology with little input from City Council members or the public.
The decisions included which tools to acquire and how much to pay for them. For more than a decade, the only records of the purchases were kept offline in filing cabinets, leaving the public without accessible documentation of the department’s surveillance spending and choices.
The department’s expansion took place amid a broader increase in police spending on tools to monitor, track and record people. Police departments have spent billions of dollars on such systems, though the available figures do not specify how much of that total was spent by the NYPD.
The lack of public oversight in New York has become part of a wider effort to make police departments disclose what surveillance technologies they use and how they obtain them. The issue puts public accountability at the center of decisions about systems that can monitor people in their daily lives.