Roughly eight weeks into his administration, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is being pressed by privacy advocates to dismantle major components of the NYPD’s surveillance infrastructure — arguing that he can use his mayoral powers to do so.
A new report released Thursday by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) lays out eight steps the mayor, a longtime critic of police surveillance, could take without waiting for the City Council or state lawmakers.
The Brooklyn-based civil rights nonprofit, which has been fighting discriminatory surveillance and protecting the privacy and civil rights of New Yorkers through research, litigation, and policy advocacy since its launch in 2019, framed the report as a roadmap for carrying out Mamdani’s campaign promises.
Titled “Dear Mamdani: Dismantle NYC’s Surveillance State,” the report urges him to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from accessing city data, abolish police databases that disproportionately target Black and Latino New Yorkers, ground police drones, and ban facial recognition technology outright.
“It takes time to make change, to get settled into office,” Eleni Manis, S.T.O.P.’s research director, told amNewYork of the nascent administration. But with the Trump administration expanding deportation efforts in particular, she said, “there are steps he can take right now in virtue of the powers vested in his office to act, and so we wanted to put those on his desk.”
In a statement to amNY, City Hall spokesperson Sam Raskin said the Mamdani administration looks forward to reviewing S.T.O.P.’s report.
“This administration is committed to protecting civil liberties and creating a safer city for all New Yorkers,” said Raskin.
Likewise, the NYPD said it appreciates the group’s report, noting that the department has “already taken steps to improve our systems.”
“The NYPD is responsible for keeping New York City safe and the variety of tools we have are used to reduce shootings, reduce violence across the city, and prevent terrorist attacks,” a DCPI spokesperson said.
Advocates want Mamdani to direct Tisch to change surveillance
Under the City Charter, the mayor oversees the NYPD through the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a position the report and Manis argue is sufficient to make sweeping policy changes.
Tisch, a long-time City Hall technocrat and public servant, has risen through a series of high-profile government roles to become commissioner of the NYPD, where she oversaw a drop in crime rates during her first year. She initially joined the force in 2008 as a civilian analyst in the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau, eventually becoming deputy commissioner for information technology and later leading the city’s tech agency and the Department of Sanitation.
During her tenure in NYPD technology leadership, Tisch played a central role in building the Domain Awareness System, the vast surveillance network that collects data from tens of thousands of cameras, license plate readers, and other sensors — a tool praised for crime fighting by supporters and criticized as a mass surveillance apparatus by civil liberties advocates like S.T.O.P.
Having been appointed commissioner by Eric Adams, her retention by Mamdani has been a closely watched partnership, defined by contrasting views on policing, particularly when it comes to surveillance, but united by a shared focus on public safety.
Since Monday, however, an apparent rift between the two surfaced over whether a snowball fight in Washington Square Park, during which responding officers were pelted and some reportedly injured, should be investigated as a criminal matter. Tisch has called for an investigation; Mamdani has stated his belief that the incident was not criminal.
The mayor insisted Wednesday that their working relationship remains productive, despite the difference of opinion.
Blocking ICE access to city surveillance data, ending jail call monitoring
At the top of S.T.O.P.’s list is immigration enforcement.
Mamdani recently signed an executive order to strengthen sanctuary protections. But Manis said more is needed to ensure that the city’s vast surveillance systems cannot be used in civil immigration enforcement.
“It is not transparent what ICE could have access to, and I don’t want to speculate,” she said. “But we know that across the country, ICE has accessed license plate reader data. It has accessed other sources of location data for cities’ residents. It has accessed gang databases.”
The report calls on the mayor to: audit whether ICE has direct or indirect access to license plate reader data; review data-sharing through federal task forces; examine whether vendors serving both the city and ICE create backdoor access; and scrutinize the Department of Corrections’ collaboration with the agency.
The urgency, Manis argued, stems from the scale of the city’s surveillance infrastructure — tens of thousands of cameras and hundreds of license plate readers feeding into the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System.
A recent probe by the city’s Department of Investigation (DOI) found that a single NYPD officer violated city restrictions on assisting with federal civil immigration enforcement by placing automated alerts on individuals sought by immigration authorities back in 2014.
While the broader NYPD generally complies with local sanctuary laws, the DOI report found several gaps that leave the department vulnerable to improper information sharing. The DOI issued seven recommendations to improve documentation, strengthen training, consolidate overlapping policies, and ensure clearer procedures — all of which the NYPD accepted.
When incidents of improper data sharing surface, she said they should not be dismissed as isolated.
“These glitches and one-offs happen over and over and over again,” she said. “They’re completely predictable when you have unregulated or untransparent databases.”
Earlier this month, Mayor Mamdani signed an executive order aimed at strengthening the city’s limits on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The directive reaffirms the prohibition on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entering city property without a judicial warrant, orders agencies to audit their interactions with federal immigration authorities, and establishes a new interagency response committee for major enforcement actions.
Manis said that while these steps are welcome, the report published Thursday provides a way to enhance the city’s privacy protections to avoid New Yorkers’ private data from being unlawfully accessed.
“These are concrete steps the mayor can take to make good on the commitment in that executive order,” she said.
The report also urges the mayor to end what it describes as indiscriminate recording of jail phone calls.
The Department of Correction’s contract with Securus, valued at $12.39 million for two years of service, records and monitors virtually all calls from city jails. According to the report, which includes attorney-client communications and calls involving people representing themselves in court. The private company has, in the past, faced allegations in other jurisdictions of unlawful surveillance and data security failures.
S.T.O.P. argues the mayor could direct the corrections commissioner to limit monitoring to situations supported by individualized suspicion and strictly enforce do-not-record lists protecting legal privilege.
Police databases, facial recognition, and dragnet warrants
Several of the most sweeping recommendations in the report target NYPD databases.
The report calls for dismantling the Criminal Group Database (commonly known as the gang database), the Gun Recidivist Investigation Program (GRIP) list, and the NYPD’s Suspect Index, an internal DNA database.
According to the report, Black and Latino New Yorkers make up 98% of the gang database and 98.8% of the GRIP list. Just 258 crimes in 2025 were committed “on behalf of gangs,” the report states, while 8,563 New Yorkers were marked as gang members that year.
Manis said she does not question Mamdani’s previously stated opposition to the gang database. “The question is whether he will stick to his guns,” she said.
In January, at his first press conference with his police commissioner, the mayor remained silent while Tisch said the database was critical to fighting gun violence and credited it with helping law enforcement tackle numerous gangs. A federal lawsuit over its use is also ongoing.
The Suspect Index, meanwhile, stores DNA from tens of thousands of people — many never convicted of crimes — and operates separately from the state’s authorized DNA databank. The report describes it as illegal and unregulated and cites lawsuits seeking to shut it down.
“These aren’t glitches,” the report states of wrongful arrests tied to DNA errors. “They are predictable consequences of an unregulated database operating without oversight or accountability.”
S.T.O.P. also calls for prohibiting police use of facial recognition technology.
NYPD spent $2.28 million on its most recent DataWorks facial recognition contract, according to the report, along with other expenditures. The group argues the technology is biased and prone to error, pointing to documented wrongful arrests.
“I’d like to see the evidence that these tools do, in fact, improve public safety,” Manis said. “As we understand them, they endanger New Yorkers.”
The report further urges the mayor to bar the department from seeking so-called dragnet warrants — including geofence warrants and cell tower dumps — that compel tech companies to identify all devices or users within a specific time window near a location.
Grounding drones and restricting social media surveillance
Drones have become one of the most visible symbols of expanded surveillance. The NYPD’s Unmanned Aircraft System program started in 2018 and expanded rapidly under the prior Adams administration. During Adams era, the NYP increasingly relied upon drones for various purposes — from attempting to locate lost swimmers on the city’s beaches; to catching subway surfers; to monitoring protests; and to locating alleged criminals.
A 2024 DOI report focused on the NYPD’s compliance with the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which was enacted in 2020 to police the NYPD’s surveillance efforts in both patrolling NYC and responding to incidents, found that while the NYPD has stepped up its drone usage in recent years, it has done so without following proper supervision protocol or its outlined chain of command.
NYPD now deploys drones more than 1,000 times per month, according to the report. Additional drones cost $2.6 million in 2024 alone, and the department has reported more than 60 crashes.
Drones were pitched as emergency tools, Manis said, but are now routinely used at protests and community events.
“We just simply have no idea when and where we’re being filmed,” she said. “It’s not clear that drones are boosting public safety, but it is clear that they’re stripping away whatever privacy New Yorkers thought they had.”
The report calls for ending routine drone patrols, prohibiting deployment at protests and sensitive locations, shortening footage retention periods, and barring the sharing of drone footage with prosecutors.
On social media, S.T.O.P. urges stricter enforcement of the Handschu Guidelines — which limit police monitoring of lawful political activity — and calls for ending the use of fake police accounts and rejecting contracts for social media monitoring tools. NYPD has spent roughly $10.6 million on one such platform, Voyager, according to the report.
In 2023, as an Assembly Member, Mamdani coauthored an opinion piece for City & State advocating for state legislation to prevent police from using fake social media accounts.
Throughout the report, S.T.O.P. emphasizes that many of these steps require no new legislation.
“This is just our first foray into working with the administration to push them to do what Mamdani said he would do,” Manis said.
She framed the report as an invitation rather than a rebuke.
“He has told us that he rejects facial recognition, that he rejects the NYPD’s use of fake social media profiles to dupe kids,” she said. “He wants to do this. We want to work with him.”
For now, Manis said, the group is focused on pressing the mayor to use the authority he already holds. “Our report walks the mayor through the steps that are entirely in his power to take right now,” she said.
Manis previously worked on technology policies at the NYC Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer and the NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations says her previous work in city government has helped her appreciate that can be hard to make change but that the mayor is uniquely positioned to achieve his priorities, and if he prioritizes dismantling New York City’s surveillance apparatus, “he can get it done.”
