The New York Police Department is forbidden by city law from using facial recognition technology.
Their solution when they wanted to go after student protesters was to have a member of the New York Fire Department to do the search for them.
A city fire marshal used FDNY’s access to a facial recognition software to help NYPD detectives identify a pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia University, circumventing policies that tightly restrict the Police Department’s use of the technology.
Details of the arrangement emerged in a recent decision by a Manhattan criminal court judge and in a lawsuit seeking information from the FDNY filed this month by the Legal Aid Society, which represented the protester, Zuhdi Ahmed, now a 21-year-old pre-med CUNY student going into his senior year of college.
Police identified Ahmed after searching for a young man accused of hurling what they said was a rock at a pro-Israeli protester during an April 2024 skirmish at Columbia. Thanks to the FDNY’s assistance and its use of Clearview AI software, the police were able to identify Ahmed.
The FDNY began using Clearview AI in December 2022 and has an annual contract with the company, according to a spokesperson.
The fire marshal also accessed documents from the Department of Motor Vehicles that are typically unavailable to the police, court records show.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Ahmed with a felony, assault in the third degree as a hate crime, which was later reduced to a misdemeanor of second degree aggravated harassment. A criminal court judge in June dismissed the case against Ahmed and in a lengthy ruling raised red flags about government surveillance and practices that ran afoul of law enforcement’s own policies.
Cops gotta cop, I guess.
ACAB.
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