When law enforcement stops and searches more than 1 million people per year, what do they do with the data?  According to the Associated Press, cities like Los Angeles and New York City keep and have been ordered to release records and data of the people they stop and search without probable cause, while others like Chicago, Boston, and New Orleans have not.  Chicago won’t release their stops data and Boston doesn’t keep records.  The New Orleans Police Department is not even mandated to keep records or statistics, which could be good given the possible usage of said data.  But what we are seeing is a scary trend.

According to research by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the records they keep are entered into a suspect database:

Over the past five-and-a-half years, New Yorkers have been subjected to the practice more than 2.5 million times—a rate of 1,260 every day. The [New York Police Department] is then recording the name and home address of every person stopped.

“The NYPD is, in effect, building a massive database of black and brown New Yorkers,” said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn. “Innocent New Yorkers who are the victims of unjustified police stops should not suffer the further harm of having their personal information kept in an NYPD database, which simply makes them targets for future investigations.”

For nearly seven years, the NYPD and the FBI did not get along in the domestic war on crime and terror.  In fact, the FBI has filed charges against the NYPD before.  Once for detaining and arresting protesters at the RNC protests of 2004.  But that was five years ago, and now it seems the data the NYPD is collecting is being used in conjunction with terrorism probes that the FBI conducts.

To what end is our privacy being invaded, if We the People are not only stopped and searched but also monitored in local and national law enforcement databases?  The questions must be asked. We must be heard.

Tags: FBI, surveillance

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 10:14 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.