For more than a decade, the NYPD built out cellphone tracking, facial recognition and iris scanning capabilities using contracts that existed only on paper, tucked away in filing cabinets the public could not reach. That changed in November 2025, when the Legal Aid Society published an initial batch of 470 pages of surveillance-related contracts the department had fought to keep hidden.
The release is just the beginning. As reported by queenseagle.com, the NYPD must now review, redact and hand over 165,000 hard-copy pages in total, of which 470 have already been published, covering surveillance purchases made between 2008 and 2020, records that were recorded entirely on paper and stored in locations hidden from public view. The disclosure follows an appellate ruling that, according to The Legal Aid Society, requires the NYPD to turn over documents on novel and invasive electronic surveillance technology purchases dating back to March 27, 2007, through October 27, 2020.
A new NPR Planet Money episode, reported by NPR and produced by Amanda Aronczyk, Marianne McCune and Vito Emanuel, traces how the NYPD built one of the country's most sophisticated and omnipresent surveillance systems starting in 2001, consulting few people outside the department on technology choices and costs. Neither the City Council nor the public were consulted on the technology or what it cost, according to the episode, which examines the broader fight to get police departments to disclose how they conduct surveillance.
What the First Records Reveal
The newly public pages document specific NYPD purchases of devices and maintenance tied to cellphone tracking, facial recognition and iris-scanning technology, the same queenseagle.com report notes. Among the line items: the department spent $610,791 on cellular tracking technology and maintenance from Harris Corporation in 2009, an order later increased to $697,180 by 2011. In 2013, the NYPD spent more than $1.2 million more with the same vendor for additional cellular tracking systems, upgrades and maintenance.
Wired reports the NYPD spent at least $159 million since 2007 through a Special Expenses Fund, which Legal Aid describes as a program that ran from 2007 to 2020 and let the department shield certain transactions from public view entirely. Governing reports the NYPD spent nearly $3 billion on surveillance technology across that same 12-year stretch.
Facial Recognition, Predictive Policing and X-Ray Vans
Per Wired, the surveillance arsenal purchased during this period included facial-recognition software, predictive-policing software, mobile x-ray vans to detect weapons, and cell-site simulators known as Stingrays. In 2018, the NYPD awarded a $6.8 million contract to Idemia Solutions for biometric tools including facial recognition, Wired reported. By April 2020, the department had already spent more than $5 million on facial-recognition technology in just two years and was adding at least $100,000 annually, according to a review by Amnesty International.
The NYPD uses facial-recognition technology, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Notably, the department stopped tracking the system's accuracy in 2015 after finding its error rate too high, per Amnesty's review.
Flock Searches and a Growing License-Plate Network
The surveillance footprint keeps expanding even without new public contracts. At least two dozen NYPD officers ran 1,700 searches of Flock Safety's license-plate database between March 2023 and December 2025, despite the department having no contract with Flock, according to SILive.com. The department's own stationary and mobile automated license-plate readers have grown from about a dozen in 2006 to more than 500 today, the same report found.
The NYPD partnered with Microsoft on its Domain Awareness System, Governing reported. The New York Civil Liberties Union has said the records released so far still leave the public in the dark about how extensively New Yorkers' information is shared with third-party providers, since the disclosures do not explain how the various systems are coordinated.
A Law Meant to Force Disclosure
New York's Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act, enacted when the City Council voted 44-6 on June 18, 2020, was designed to prevent exactly this kind of opacity. The law requires the NYPD to publish impact-and-use policies for surveillance technology and provide a public comment period, according to the Brennan Center.
Compliance has been inconsistent. A review found that the NYPD largely complied with the act's impact-and-use policy issuance requirements, though the policies lacked detail needed for full audits and transparency, the Brennan Center noted. The City Council later passed three bills on April 10, 2025 that tightened the law's language and added new reporting requirements aimed at closing the gaps the Inspector General identified.
How Oakland Took a Different Path
New York's struggles stand in contrast to Oakland, which built oversight into its surveillance rollout from the start. The city established a permanent nine-member Privacy Advisory Commission in January 2016 to review proposed and existing surveillance technologies, according to The Oaklandside. The commission can only make recommendations; it is ultimately up to the City Council to decide, the outlet reported.
Oakland also adopted a policy requiring its police department to obtain warrants before deploying Stingray cell-site simulators and to compile yearly use reports, and in 2019 the city became the third in the country to ban facial-recognition software outright. But the oversight model has not been airtight: records provided to the commission showed Oakland police were allowing the FBI unfettered access to license-plate-reader scans beyond what the 2016 policy allowed, and the department separately acknowledged retaining scan data for two years even though its own policy called for deletion after six months, per the same Oaklandside account.
Back in New York, the fuller accounting of how the NYPD's surveillance apparatus was built and funded is only beginning to surface. With 165,000 hard-copy pages in total, including the 470 already published, the record so far represents a fraction of what Legal Aid and transparency advocates expect eventually to reach public view.
