Planet Money
00:16:56 · Michael Bloomberg, Amanda Aronczyk, Jessica Tisch
[00:16:56] S7: We're not your mom and pops police department anymore. We are in the next century. We are leading the pack. That's exactly what you would expect us to do. [00:17:07] S2: He wrapped up in Bloomberg Spanish. Anyway, the domain awareness system is a big part of why I had the experience I had on grand jury duty. Why grand juries today can watch videos from all over the city, from all kinds of cameras all edited together, and why the police can connect videos to people using license plate readers and geolocation. All that red string tying the story together, leading to names and ultimately arrests. Four years later, in 2016, the NYPD was a finalist for an international award for the domain awareness system. And at the award ceremony, a deputy commissioner, now commissioner, Jessica Tisch, she reveals the scale of what the domain awareness system can do and the extent of its reach. [00:18:02] S8: We currently have 2,000,000,000 license plate reads, a 100,000,000 summonses, fifty four million nine one one calls, 15,000,000 complaints, 12,000,000 detective reports, 11,000,000 arrest records, 2,000,000 warrants, and thirty days of video from 9,000 cameras. [00:18:21] S2: And this is just in New York. But she makes it clear that hundreds of other law enforcement agencies from dozens of other countries have come to tour the Batcave to learn from it. Police all over the country and the world are incorporating similar systems into their police departments.
00:18:21 · Amanda Aronczyk, Jessica Tisch
[00:18:21] S2: And this is just in New York. But she makes it clear that hundreds of other law enforcement agencies from dozens of other countries have come to tour the Batcave to learn from it. Police all over the country and the world are incorporating similar systems into their police departments. [00:18:39] S8: Let me emphasize. Every day, we have more than 10,000 cops using the analytics in DAS to inform their decision making. And this was a decade ago. [00:18:50] S2: Now way more cops use [00:18:51] S8: it. Using analytics, we can have a safer city and a fairer city too.
00:18:51 · Jessica Tisch, Amanda Aronczyk, Michelle Dahl
[00:18:51] S8: it. Using analytics, we can have a safer city and a fairer city too. [00:18:56] S2: Tisch said at the time that the domain awareness system was helping police reduce crime and prevent terrorist attacks. We reached out to the NYPD to see if commissioner Tisch or another rep from the NYPD would speak with us, and they declined to be recorded. But I did talk to a spokesperson, Bradley Weeks, about the details in this story. And he said that the domain awareness system has made New Yorkers safer. In a statement, they said, quote, anyone who has ever called 911 for help, been the victim of a crime, or who cares about their safety has benefited from this system, unquote. Today, New York is considered one of the safest cities in the country. Although sorting out whether that's because of population growth or economics or policing policy is kinda hard to do. When it comes to security cameras more broadly, a meta analysis of forty years worth of studies found that cameras do reduce car theft. But overall, it's not clear that more cameras equal less crime. Do you do... When you walk around, do you just see cameras? [00:20:05] S1: I do. I kind of can't help but spot them. [00:20:09] S2: Recently, I went on a sort of surveillance tech tour with Michelle Dahl, my fellow grand juror. [00:20:14] S1: Right here. There's another one there.
00:20:14 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:20:14] S1: Right here. There's another one there. [00:20:15] S2: Her group is very opposed to the NYPD's use of the domain awareness system. That's our third camera. Stop, her group, has recently sued a Yeah. City Go to seven there. Saying the system violates our constitutional rights to privacy and free speech. [00:20:28] S1: Yeah. Fourteen fifteen here. [00:20:30] S2: So they have done a lot of research on what the NYPD is using. [00:20:34] S1: If we wanna pause here, there's a really good view of the camera right up there. [00:20:40] S2: Michelle points upwards at a large tan box attached to a streetlight with an NYPD sticker. [00:20:45] S1: And it's got a little dome, so it's also likely a three sixty camera. We know that they can do a three sixty pan tilt zoom and basically one camera could cover an entire block and get good enough resolution to identify somebody's face on the entire city block. [00:21:02] S2: We then continue a couple of blocks and we stop in a park. A cop walks by. [00:21:07] S1: So this police officer is on his phone. Every police officer in the city can access the domain awareness system on their police issued phones. [00:21:15] S2: The NYPD said that not all officers can access video from their phones, but there's lots of other data. [00:21:21] S1: So if he came over here and stopped us, he could look us up and take our IDs and look up our profiles in the domain awareness system, which would show all the information they have about us, things like three one one calls, any past criminal records.
00:21:21 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:21:21] S1: So if he came over here and stopped us, he could look us up and take our IDs and look up our profiles in the domain awareness system, which would show all the information they have about us, things like three one one calls, any past criminal records. [00:21:36] S2: What are the odds that they have me in there? [00:21:38] S1: I mean, have you lived here for any period of time?
00:21:38 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk, Scott Stringer
[00:21:38] S1: I mean, have you lived here for any period of time? [00:21:41] S2: I asked the NYPD this question if I'm in the domain awareness system or not. And they said that if I had a driver's license or car registered in New York, then, yeah, I'm in there. But they said they would not look me up for, like, no reason. It can only be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes, like criminal investigations or civil litigation. Over the past thirty five years, we have gone from practically no cameras in the streets to practically no streets without cameras. And since 09/11, those cameras have been integrated into this web of tech, tracking our movements and our faces and tying them to our names, birth dates, addresses, phone numbers, and more. So I've told you the story of the rise of this incredibly thorough surveillance system in New York. Now for the story of how a lot of it happened behind our backs, and that is because there has been a kind of technological creep, and a lot of that creep happened in secret. In New York, there was an actual secret agreement to keep this hidden. The NYPD went to the mayor and a handful of city agencies and was like, what if we wanted to buy a lot of new police stuff, but we wanted to keep it on the down low? After the break, the secret agreement that kept thousands of police purchases and tech contracts out [00:23:07] S9: of the [00:23:08] S2: public eye and the fight to expose it all.