Amnesty International: NYPD operates 15,280 facial-recognition cameras

The New York Police Department has the ability to track people and recognise their faces in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx using 15,280 surveillance cameras. This is according to a new Amnesty International investigation.

“This sprawling network of cameras could be used by the police for invasive facial recognition and turn New York into an Orwellian City of Surveillance,” said Matt Mahmudi, AI and human rights researcher at Amnesty International.

Rights advocates compiled an interactive map of all known camera locations. Thousands of volunteers contributed to its development, marking tracking devices at intersections across the three largest boroughs.

Mahmudi added that such a number of surveillance cameras erodes anonymity.

“Whether you are at a protest, walking in a certain neighbourhood, or simply shopping — you can be tracked with facial-recognition technology using images from thousands of cameras across New York,” added the researcher.

Using the collected information, rights groups attempted to model the field of view of New York’s surveillance network. For example, at the intersection of two streets in Manhattan’s Chinatown, researchers found three police Argus devices, four publicly available cameras and more than 170 private cameras. Together they can track faces up to 200 metres away or within two blocks, the researchers said.

Rights advocates also said they have submitted numerous Freedom of Information requests to the New York Police Department seeking additional information on the scale of facial-recognition use, but all were rejected.

Earlier in May, the company Amazon extended the moratorium on the use of facial-recognition technology by police for an indefinite period.

In early April, a group of 56 European organisations urged the European Commission to ban biometric-identification technologies from facial images without any exemptions.

In January Amnesty International called for an end to the use of facial-recognition technology in public places. The organisation argues that biometric identification through street cameras is a gross intrusion into citizens’ privacy.

In the same period, the organisation launched the global Ban the Scan campaign, to push for a worldwide ban on facial-recognition technologies.

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