Find Out If The NYPD Thinks You're A Gang Member

NEW YORK, NY — The NYPD might think you're in a gang even if you're not. The Legal Aid Society wants to help you find out with a website it launched Tuesday that makes it easier for New Yorkers ask whether they're in the Police Department's secret gang database.

"The NYPD’s gang database is black-box of secrecy in desperate need of sunlight," Anthony Posada, the supervising attorney of the Legal Aid Society's Community Justice Unit, said in a statement. "This website will complement our current efforts to help New Yorkers — especially those from communities of color — determine if they have been caught in the NYPD’s gang labeling dragnet."

Anyone can fill out a simple form on the website with their name, address and contact information. The form will generate a Freedom of Information request that Legal Aid will send to the NYPD asking whether the person is in the gang database and how their records were used, shared, stored or destroyed.

The project aims to shed light a police program that advocates say is opaque, overbroad and harmful to people of color. It also supports a campaign activists recently launched to encourage New Yorkers to ask the NYPD whether they're in the database.

The NYPD often adds people as young as 12 to its databases based on where they live, how they look or who they know, not past criminal activity, Legal Aid says. It's uncertain how many names are in the gang database, but records obtained by a CUNY law professor indicated there were more than 21,000 added by 2009, the New York Daily News reported in February.

The database has played a role in the NYPD's targeting of alleged gang members in recent years that led to a raid in the Bronx in which 120 people were indicted, reportedly the biggest bust ever, Legal Aid said.

An NYPD spokesman said "membership in known criminal groups" is just one field among many that its electronic case management system tracks.

"The NYPD maintains among the nation's most rigorous criteria for identifying an individual as being a member of a known criminal group," NYPD spokesman Lt. John Grimpel said in a statement.

Police include people in the database based on "self-admission or other identifying information," the department said. Someone can be removed if they meet certain criteria such as going three years without interacting with the police, the NYPD said.

(Lead image: Photo by pisaphotography/Shutterstock)