Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS) is a public defense office whose mission is to provide outstanding representation and advocacy free of cost to people facing loss of freedom, family separation and other serious legal harms by the government. BDS believes in a client-centered approach and work, in and out of court, to uphold the rights, freedom and dignity of people threatened by unjust, racist and harmful legal systems.
As public defenders, they see the harsh outcomes clients and their families face in the legal system. BDS believes it is their duty to work to dismantle laws and policies that threaten the civil and human rights of all members of society, especially those who are disproportionately harmed — people from low-income communities of color.
BDS's Science and Surveillance Project provides technical support to attorneys in criminal cases and engages in larger systemic advocacy. The team investigates government and private entity use of new science, surveillance, and data analysis techniques to educate our staff, communities, and representatives on those techniques as well as advocate against the weaponizing of junk science and biased algorithms. The Science and Surveillance Project is also focused on the civil rights implications of mass surveillance and unlawful practices by police.
The NYPD owns and operates a vast network of surveillance technology, but its scope and extent has been difficult to discern from what few public disclosures they have made about these technologies. As public defenders, BDS is interested in developing a methodology that can quantify and analyze the scope of surveillance a neighborhood is subjected to. The metric that describes this intensity can then be applied across neighborhoods, allowing researchers to understand patterns and discrepancies in which neighborhoods are most heavily surveilled. This capstone project will be a unique opportunity for students to use this analysis to provide policymakers, impacted communities, and the public at large with much-needed information about how surveillance technology impacts different communities across Brooklyn.
How do we quantify the intensity of surveillance that neighborhoods across Brooklyn are subjected to by the presence of surveillance cameras? Which communities are disproportionately impacted by this surveillance load? While the indicator variable is surveillance cameras for this research, we hope to develop a more general methodology that can be applied to other datasets describing other forms of surveillance technology – like facial recognition, geolocation tracking, or body-worn cameras – in the future.
Two public datasets speak to the locations of cameras in Brooklyn:
-
Amnesty International’s crowdsourced dataset of surveillance camera locations and the NYPD’s own disclosures about surveillance technologies, will provide additional context for our own observations.
-
The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s Hikvision Camera Census provides another dataset, while only covering a very small fraction of the private cameras in use, nevertheless shows approximate locations and distribution patterns for over 16,000 cameras identified.
Census data from the American Community will be used to identify key demographic information about the neighborhoods affected by video surveillance and building and land use data from the NYC Department of City Planning’s PLUTO database will provide further context to that census data.
In addition to the dataaset above, our team will leverage the following pulbic datasets throughout this project: