Some people wondered what police were up to when an officer was spotted videotaping out of a van on Second Ave. at Sixth St. a few months ago. Were they clandestinely filming passersby, and, if so, didn’t that violate rules restricting police filming of civilians? After being shown this June 6 photo, Deputy Inspector Dennis De Quatro, the Ninth Precinct’s commanding officer, checked it out, then responded: “The officers were executing a graffiti survey. One of my special-ops lieutenants came up with the idea of trying to survey the command to make correlations between graffiti artists and where they are tagging, rather than going around and doing the visual [by eye] and trying to compare one block to the next.” DeQuatro said he was aware the officers were doing the survey, but hadn’t known they had chosen to do it by video.
