Robert Miller
Soft-on-crime City Council members want to delete the NYPD’s Gang Database, despite a surge in gang-affiliated migrants pouring into the Big Apple.
The database, which has been operational since 2013 and contains thousands of entries and intel — including distinctive tattoos — is considered a vital crime-fighting tool by the NYPD in the war against criminal groups and street gangs.
But left wing city pols contend the “secret” database demonizes minorities, and are trying a second time to push for legislation that scraps the NYPD’s Criminal Group Database database,
South Bronx Councilmember Althea Stevens re-introduced legislation originally pushed in 2022 by her East Village comrade Concilwoman Carlina Rivera, whose bill died in committe,
Stevens claimed the database subjects “black and brown” youth to “unclear criteria,” and sweeps up too many “innocent people. “I have seen the need to avoid labeling young people and the additional stigmas that come with these labels,” she said.
Law enforcement experts and the NYPD ripped the legislation as misguided.
“It’s more invaluable than before,” insisted John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Michael Alcazar, a retired NYPD detective. “Now we have all these migrants. … You don’t have birth certificates, passports, so now we have to really use the database to gather information: their photographs, tattoos, their scars, their gang affiliation.”
Castro Mata identifying him as a member of the Tren de Aragua
gang.
The legislation is “taking a page from the same book” that brought the city bail reform, he said. “They [City Council] believe that certain segments of the population are being targeted by these databases. It is targeting the criminal population.”
Alcazar’s John Jay colleague, retired NYPD sergeant Joseph Giacalone, agreed.
“As New York City police officers are targeted by the recently immigrated Venezuelan gang members, certain members of the City Council are still pushing to remove the gang database. Let that sink in folks,” he said. “They would rather see cops shot in the street and New Yorkers robbed at alarming rates than to use common sense.”
Giacalone was referring to a 19-year-old Venezuelan migrant accused of wounding two NYPD officers during a wild chase on a Queens street last month.
Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, who admitted to being a member of the notorious Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, fired into one cop’s chest at “point-blank range, ” prosecutors said.
“I don’t know what planet the New York City Council is on,” fumed retired NYPD Lt. John Macari. “We have gang members coming to the United States to commit crimes. You couldn’t have picked a worse time to continue to push through this anti-police, pro-criminal legislation.”
Calls to abolish the department’s Criminal Group Database are “misguided,” the NYPD told The Post.
The NYPD said the database is a vital tool to combat gang violence.
“Police need to understand the size of these criminal groups, their scope, who its members are, and the crimes they have committed. This is what the database provides and it would be irresponsible for the NYPD to not understand these groups,” the department said, noting “unfortunate pattern” between shootings and gang affiliations.
in New York City and that is that a significant portion of those shootings
have a nexus to gang activity.” NYPD
The database “has a strict and transparent set of rules and criteria, multiple levels of review, and is subject to audits to remove individuals no longer active in gang activity,” the NYPD added.
A five-year probe launched by the Department of Investigation in 2018 found no “evidence of harm” to those with suspected gang ties.
The NYPD would not say how many people and gangs are now catalogued in the database, or if any migrant gang members have been included.
There were 16,141 individuals catalogued in the database as of December 2022, according to the city Department of Investigation’s Inspector General for the NYPD, the latest stats available.
Stevens’ bill sits in the Council’s Public Safety Committee.