What concerns have activists raised about racial profiling and police surveillance?

Three years ago, Vice news spent two months tracking the content of the app within a five-mile area covering Lower Manhattan, most of Brooklyn, and parts of Queens and Hoboken, N.J., and found that people of color made up the majority of posts tagged as “suspicious activity.”

It echoed a pattern of concerning behavior that had plagued other neighborhood watch platforms, like Nextdoor and Citizen, which civil liberty groups had warned could give a false impression of rising crime and lead to racial profiling and wrongful arrests.

“The N.Y.P.D. is effectively deputizing app users,” Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said about Neighbors. “Crowdsourced surveillance and suspicion, like the kind that takes place on Ring’s Neighbors app, is influenced by users’ racial biases and other prejudices.”

The city Police Department, which developed one of the country’s most sophisticated surveillance apparatuses after 9/11, has a well-documented history of surveilling minority communities. .

In 2018, the Police Department settled a lawsuit over the surveillance of Muslims in New Jersey through a decade-long spying program in which officers eavesdropped on conversations in cafes and designated mosques as potential terrorist organizations. According to the suit, police officers collected license plates and took video and photographs at mosques as part of their covert surveillance.

And in a 2021 report, Amnesty International detailed the police’s capacity to view footage from over 15,000 CCTV cameras installed across Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with a disproportionate number of those cameras located in communities of color.

The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group based in New York, has condemned the police’s partnership with Neighbors.

“This sort of crowdsourced surveillance will only lead to more wrongful arrests, racial profiling and police violence,” Albert Fox Cahn, the organization’s executive director, said in a press statement. “Most New Yorkers would second guess installing these home surveillance tools if they understood how easily these systems could be used against them and their families by police.”