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It turns out that the New York Police Department, "Ignored 93 percent of surveillance law rules."

This is not a surprise.  Police will evade and subvert any attempt to constrain their behavior, no matter how outlandish, so efforts must be taken to prevent their actions and to punish those who transgress these rules.

Back in July 2020, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act into law, which required the New York Police Department to reveal how it uses surveillance technology and to formulate surveillance policies.

The NYPD, however, has rejected 93 percent of the advice from an independent oversight body, the Department of Investigations' (DOI) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the force about how to comply with the law. According to OIG's Ninth Annual Report [PDF], the cop watchdog made 15 recommendations and the NYPD refused to implement 14 of them. 

These include recommendations like identifying the organizations with which NYPD shares surveillance data: "NYPD should identify in each IUP [Impact and Use Policy] each external agency, by name, with which the Department can share surveillance data.

………

Cahn from STOP took issue with that statement. "The NYPD continues to systematically hide the billions it spends on unproven and biased surveillance technology," he said in an email to The Register. "It's bad when the Department wastes money that puts New Yorkers in harm's way and shreds the Constitution, but it’s even worse when they lie about it.

"The City Council was clear in what they expected from the NYPD, and the Department simply isn't following the law. Now they just are flat out lying when they say they fully comply with the POST Act. The POST Act is one of the weakest surveillance oversight laws in the country, but the NYPD still refuses to meet even these minimal transparency requirements." 

Police should be held to a higher standard, not a lower one, and when they deliberately ignore the law, and the civil rights of the citizens that they are supposed to protect, there should be immediate and severe sanctions.