More than 34,000 New Yorkers are at the center of a renewed court battle over a little-known NYPD DNA database that can keep searching their genetic profiles long after an arrest ends. Civil-liberties lawyers say the system includes people never convicted of crimes, along with hundreds of children, and operates without the safeguards attached to New York’s official DNA databank. The stakes now sit with the federal appeals court in Manhattan.
On Wednesday, the ACLU, New York Civil Liberties Union and libertarian Cato Institute joined forces in an unusual cross-ideological challenge to the NYPD’s Suspect Index. Their amicus filing backs The Legal Aid Society’s lawsuit, which argues that detectives secretly collect DNA from people in custody and send it to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner for long-term indexing.
The appeal follows a March ruling in which U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald granted the city’s summary-judgment motion and denied the plaintiffs’ request for judgment. The federal appeals docket shows that Shakira Leslie appealed the judgment in April, putting the database’s legality before the Second Circuit as the groups press for a broader ruling.
How The NYPD’s Suspect Index Works
According to The Legal Aid Society, NYPD detectives have collected cups, bottles, cigarette butts and other items left behind during interrogations, sometimes after offering them to people being questioned. The samples are sent to OCME, where technicians extract DNA and create a numeric profile using short tandem repeat analysis.
The profile can then be added to the city’s Local DNA Index System and compared with crime-scene evidence from other investigations. The plaintiffs say the searches continue automatically as new evidence enters the system, even when the person was never charged, was acquitted or was cleared in the original case.
The system is separate from New York’s state DNA Identification Index and the national CODIS database. A New York City Bar Association report said state law generally limits permanent indexing to people convicted of designated offenses, while the city system has included juveniles and people who were never charged or convicted.
Why Plaintiffs Say The Database Creates New Risks
A 2025 court filing from The Legal Aid Society said the Suspect Index contained 34,183 searchable profiles as of August 1, 2025, alongside nearly 65,000 forensic crime-scene profiles. The filing also described NYPD’s collection practices as disproportionately affecting Black and Latino New Yorkers and said the database included children as young as 11.
The lawsuit’s named plaintiff, Shakira Leslie, says police collected her DNA from a water cup during a 2019 interrogation after she had been arrested in connection with a gun found in a car. Her charges were later dropped, but her profile remained in the database for years, according to the case filings.
The Legal Fight Over Shed DNA And Privacy
The civil-liberties groups argue that DNA left on a cup or cigarette should not automatically be treated like abandoned trash, especially when police allegedly create the conditions for collecting it. Their constitutional argument asks whether the Supreme Court’s privacy reasoning in Carpenter v. United States should apply to genetic profiles that can reveal far more than a single piece of physical evidence.
A ruling for Leslie could require the city to delete thousands of profiles and stop the covert collection practice, while also setting a precedent for how police departments across the Second Circuit handle shed DNA. For now, the NYPD’s system remains in place while the appeal moves forward, with the city having won the first round and the plaintiffs asking the appeals court to reverse it, as Tech Times reported.
