One of the main complaints that vulnerable communities in the Big Apple have had against the New York City police and authorities for years is the lack of transparency with which law enforcement agencies have acted, largely promoting actions and programs based on in a racial profile.
And 10 months after the Legal Aid Society filed a class action lawsuit in New York’s Southern District Court against the City, the NYPD and the Office of the Medical Examiner (OCME), for obtaining and storing “illegal and secret ” of DNA material from New Yorkers, that same defense group called on the Adams Administration to act with transparency and publicly and immediately disclose the demographic data of those who have been the subject of the controversial practice.
Legal Aid denounces that for years city authorities have implemented tactics to collect DNA samples from New Yorkers they suspect of committing a crime, including children, without obtaining an arrest warrant or warrant, which has allowed them to create a database unauthorized DNA.
According to Legal Aid, this practice, which unlike federal and state DNA databases, has been maintained without legal authorization, puts New Yorkers in a situation of legal vulnerability on a day-to-day basis, since it empowers the City to treat thousands of people as “perpetual criminal suspects.”
The aforementioned organization criticized that the City has not fulfilled its promise, as it recalled that in a supervision hearing in the City Council, which took place three years ago, the NYPD promised to monitor and review the disparities between people arrested and those placed in custody. the database.
To do this, the NYPD gave its word to start tracking demographic information, which would be available to the public with the ages, gender and ethnic origin of those who were entered into the DNA sample database, as well as those who were they would eliminate, which until today remained a dead letter.
Phil Desgranges, supervising attorney for the Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Defense Practice Special Litigation Unit, urged the NYPD to stand by its promise and asked the Administration of Mayor Eric Adams to move to ensure that demographic information from the database of DNA data is available.
“The New York police have promised to be transparent about which groups have been targeted in their DNA collection program, but continue to keep the public in the dark,” said the Legal Aid advocate, warning that it is urgent to know if the same has happened. In other types of practices, black and Latino people have been the most persecuted.
“We can only wonder what the NYPD has to hide here, and whether, based on the Department’s past practices, Black and Latino New Yorkers make up the overwhelming number of people who have had their DNA collected and secretly stored in the City’s database,” added the lawyer.
Another of the complaints towards the City and the NYPD is that they have not removed people from that database, as they promised, because according to reports from the City, “the number of New Yorkers trapped in the database has remained relatively the same since 2020”.
The lawsuit filed by Legal Aid is still ongoing, and in it the two clients who filed the legal action denounced that without their consent and without a court order, NYPD officers collected their DNA samples, later placing them in the database illegal DNA testing, which violates the Fourth Amendment.
After consulting with the Adams Administration about Legal Aid’s claim and the demand that they release demographics from the DNA database, the City requested more information on the matter, but as of press time they had not provided any comment or reaction.