Organizers against the NYPD’s Criminal Group Database fear Mayor Zohran Mamdani may soften his stance on abolishing the policing tool which almost exclusively surveils Black and Brown young men after comments made during a press conference on April 6. This “gang database” can label individuals as gang members without an arrest or conviction.
“So, I’ve made my critiques of the database clear, and the NYPD has also implemented a number of reforms as per the recommendation that came through,” said Mamdani during the press conference. “And the implementation of those reforms and the results of that are part of the active discussion that we’re having.”
Those reforms stem from findings by the Office of the Inspector General-NYPD (OIG-NYPD) published over the past year. In 2023, the police oversight agency provided 17 recommendations on how the department should reform the database. Since then, the number of names registered fell by nearly half.
Former Department of Investigation Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber, who oversaw the OIG-NYPD last year, told the AmNews that the police department cooperated thoroughly with the probe back in October. But even with the reforms, the racial makeup remains ostensibly the same: overwhelmingly Black and Brown.
The G.A.N.G.S. Coalition, which is composed of several civil rights law firms and pro-privacy groups like the Legal Aid Society and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), maintains that the database cannot be reformed. While the NYPD efforts seem to address the most flagrant concerns, which often involve monitoring minors, the racial disparities seem immutable. And during past hearings, police officials could not provide exact numbers on how many shootings the database prevented during a 2024 city council hearing, while claiming the tool was key for gun violence prevention efforts.
“How do you reform a database that is 99% Black and Hispanic targeted?” said NAACP LDF community organizer Obi Afriyie. “What does reform look like? Taking away one aspect of the many harmful aspects of the database will never do anything to stop those racial disparities. The database policing will always disproportionately affect Black and Brown bodies. The idea of reforming this is nonsensical to me [and] a non-starter for the coalition.”
Currently, a city council bill sponsored by Councilmember Althea Stevens would abolish the gang database and prevent the NYPD from refashioning it under any other name. Last September, Mamdani openly backed the legislation abolishing the database during a sit-down with Errol Louis at Columbia University.
“I have supported that proposal,” he said during the talk. “It’s one that I’ve supported because of the vast dragnet has meant the inclusion of New Yorkers on the basis of whether they go out late, photos they put on social media, so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker. And yet it then becomes a mark of suspicion.”
Critics of the gang database largely see the city’s Crisis Management System, which deploys credible messengers to leverage their trust and ties to squash feuds and prevent retaliatory shootings, as the alternative solution. Mamdani pledged to bolster the network through his Department of Community Safety proposal, which recently got off the ground after an executive order, drawing praise from groups like the NAACP LDF.
But Afriyie says the gang database contradicts these efforts and worries that Mamdani’s potential support of the NYPD practice may erode the trust for his administration in the neighborhoods where credible messengers, many with former gang ties themselves, operate.
“You’re telling people that you want to invest in them, that their lived experiences are not their faults,” said Afriyie. “That we need to have all these things and this is what true safety looks like and then you’re still surveilling and criminalizing them…part of the importance [and success] of having CMS workers and credible messengers is that they are very connected to these communities. Sometimes they are formally gang-impacted themselves. It’s those key members that are the ones criminalized by the NYPD in those ways.”