At a recent press conference announcing a sweeping takedown of rival gangs notorious for their wild shootouts across public housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch made the unsolicited point of praising the NYPD’s controversial gang database.
“Yes we certainly did use the criminal group database as part of this investigation,” Tisch said, using the department’s more ambiguous name for the gang list. Asserting that 60% of all shootings in the city have some nexus to gangs or crews, she said the database “remains a valuable tool in our efforts to keep New Yorkers safe.”
The police commissioner’s enthusiastic support stands in contrast to her boss’s feelings: as a candidate, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly called for terminating the database entirely, embracing the contention promoted by some criminal justice reform advocates that it targets Black and Hispanic teens and young men.
The mayor recently backed off from his call to pull the plug and now insists the database must be reformed.
While a blueprint for fixing the gang database has been around for years, an analysis by THE CITY found that the NYPD stiff-armed or slow-walked nearly a dozen reforms recommended by the city’s ethics watchdog to address allegations of racial bias.
The database is perhaps the most high profile of several areas where Mamdani and Tisch have dramatically different perspectives. In the past he’s vowed to end a crackdown on lower level quality of life crimes and to eliminate a unit known as the Strategic Response Group that’s been criticized for heavy-handed tactics during protests. Tisch supports both.
In two reports since 2023, the city Department of Investigation suggested 30 reforms aimed at ensuring that people aren’t placed in the gang database without sufficient reason and aren’t kept there when there’s no evidence of continuing gang affiliation.
First DOI recommended that cops provide a clearer explanation of the evidence they use to justify placing someone in the database, a process known as “activation.” And they suggested creating a system to continually review the police justifications and a process for individuals or their parents to appeal inclusion.
While the NYPD adopted some of DOI’s recommendations, with the implementation of several still pending, the department at one point rejected five outright, including the appeals protocol and changes to how often justifications are reviewed and who gets to review them.
NYPD spokesperson Erika Tannor said the department “continues to work on this and has made very meaningful progress, which DOI itself has unequivocally acknowledged.”
Meanwhile, Tisch has consistently championed the database, calling it a critical weapon to reduce gun crime.
“When we have a shooting in the city, we use the gang database to anticipate where we may see retaliatory violence, and that has helped drive our gun violence down,” she said at a Jan. 6 press conference with Mamdani standing next to her.
A key aspect of that effort is tracking the conversations taking place on social media that document gang beatings and sometimes describe in specific detail a gang’s plan to seek revenge when a member is beaten or shot by a rival.
That was the case with the takedown of two Brownsville gangs Tisch and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez announced April 15, when they unsealed indictments against 36 defendants ranging in age from 16 to 27 alleging felonies from murder to weapons possession.
The Brownsville investigation targeted a gang called WOOO and another called CHOO who for the last three years, prosecutors say, have engaged in a chaotic shooting war around several New York City Housing Authority developments. The grim score to date is 11 victims — including one homicide.
These battles created chaos.
The DA played security video showing a 69-year-old man taking out his trash who was wounded when gunfire erupted. Another video showed children ducking and running as gang members opened fire across a playground. A cell phone video posted on social media depicted gang members beating up a rival in a plaza near Metrotech Center in downtown Brooklyn.
“This is life,” the poster is heard saying as the video captures his rival beaten and prostrate on the sidewalk.
Tisch noted that, “Of the 36 defendants, every single one of them was entered into that database.”
How It Works
The database consists of people — nearly all of them Black or Hispanic teenagers or young men — identified by law enforcement as gang members. The criteria to justify “activation” includes a subject “self-admitting” gang membership on social media or openly to police. Or, during an investigation, the individual is identified by two independent and reliable sources as a gang member.
Until recently the department also factored in if the subject frequented “known gang locations,” flashed alleged gang hand signs or displayed gang-affiliated tattoos on social media.
David Sarni, a retired NYPD detective who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, described the database as a “tool that can help define motivations and relationships.”
The NYPD says monitoring social media chatter is particularly useful in identifying possible planned retaliation and ratcheting up police oversight of gang members making specific threats.
As Michael Gerber, the deputy commissioner for legal matters, put it during a City Council hearing last year, “If we know from the database that a shooting victim is a gang member, the identities of rival gang members, and where those gangs are based, we can immediately deploy officers in a way that will help prevent retaliatory shootings.”
Sarni noted “activation” required at least two independent sources, and said the activation was supposed to be reviewed regularly to ensure there is evidence of ongoing gang affiliation. Individuals can then either be “renewed” or “deactivated” — that is, taken off the list.
For several years, cops could also see the names of people who had been “de-activated” but, Sarni said, “They stopped that. We don’t keep a person in the system for 50 years.” That modification was in response to DOI’s critiques.
Commissioner Tisch has asserted that information about gang affiliation stored in the database is not used to determine whether there is probable cause to arrest a person. It mainly helps detectives “determine who is involved and where retaliation is most likely to occur,” she has said.
While campaigning last year Mamdani had a very different view, labeling it a “vast dragnet of New Yorkers on the basis of whether they go out late, the photos they put on social media, so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker.”
Tattoos and Parades
Last spring the Legal Aid Society and the NAACP filed suit in Brooklyn federal court calling the database racist and alleging it violates free speech, due process and equal protection sections of the Bill of Rights. In December a judge denied the city’s motion to toss the suit but also rejected the plaintiff’s move to declare it a class action on behalf of anyone placed in the database, limiting it to three men named as lead plaintiffs.
The suit alleges that 99% of those placed on the list are Black or Hispanic. And it says that mere placement in the database can be used as justification to stop and question people.
Reviewing internal documents that detectives must fill out when proposing an individual for inclusion, Legal Aid said that cops have cited everything from “Mexican tattoos” to what they described as “cultural touchstones such as common gestures used by Black athletes” or “being present at the Puerto Rican Day parade.”
In the past, the list has included children as young as 11, the lawsuit says.
“It’s basically youth behaviour,” said Legal Aid staff attorney Rigodis Appling. “Youth culture is youth culture. If this were a white suburb doing these things, they would not be put on a gang database.”
The Legal Aid Society, whose union urged Mamdani not to reappoint Tisch, says the database can’t be fixed and that reforms the NYPD has claimed to have adopted are incremental and meaningless.
The Department of Investigation’s April 2023 and October 2025 reports on the database make clear the NYPD has moved slowly to adopt proposed fixes, rejecting some recommendations outright.
The 2023 report submitted by NYPD Inspector General Jeanene Barrett to then-Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell examined what evidence the NYPD used to justify placing 493 people on the list and found the nature and documentation of individuals “self-admitting” to gang membership “varied widely.”
DOI noted that some social media postings cited to justify “activation” were “cursory, conclusory and failed to include sufficient detail to support” self-admission to a gang. Examples included cops relying on “certain emojis,” or “photos of individuals in the company of known gang members without more detail.” Some cops noted “social media content” with zero information on the nature of the content.
In 136 cases, cops “activated” individuals based on what they described as “two sources” but did not always “document the existence of two independent sources.” The report found cops in some cases simply designated entire Housing Authority developments as a “gang location.”
The NYPD under Commissioner Sewell agreed in principle to accept 11 recommendations, but rejected five outright, including drafting a written policy requiring all “activated” entries be reviewed every 12 months for teens under 18 and every 18 months for adults. The department said a review every two years for teens and every three years for adults was sufficient.
The NYPD also rejected DOI’s suggestion to create a panel to review all activations, and shot down a suggestion to create an appeals process for parents if their teens have no law enforcement contact for a year, contending it could compromise investigations and endanger informants.
The department at first rejected DOI’s request to let individuals file a public records request to see if they’re on the list, but relented after the Legal Aid Society threatened legal action.
In a second review in October the inspector general found the NYPD had not fully adopted five of its recommendations.
DOI noted, for example, that while the NYPD had initiated review of “activation,” there was still no supervisory oversight of renewals and deactivations. Last week the NYPD told THE CITY it is working on fixing this.
While DOI recommended cops provide a detailed narrative explaining the justification for putting someone in the database, DOI found police continued to use “boilerplate language” to describe the source’s “reasonable belief” that the subject was a gang member.
Now, NYPD spokesperson Tannor said, “Department policy has been updated to require that an individual’s reasonable belief must be supported by substantive explanations that the individual is a member of a criminal group.”
“We have previously acknowledged that our process for making juvenile notifications was deficient,” Tannor said. “We are working to fix that.”
DOI also noted that sealed arrests aren’t supposed to be used to justify placement in the database, but found NYPD was still listing the top charge of sealed arrests in complaints to justify “activation.” This policy “is being updated,” the department said.
In its October report, DOI made 13 new recommendations, and in January NYPD agreed to accept all “in principle.” The NYPD said they should be in place by July.
In February, nearly three years after DOI’s first report, the NYPD issued the biggest change to its gang database, embracing new protocols that eliminated many of the criteria cops had been using to justify “activation.”
The department says it no longer uses categories such as “frequent presence at a known criminal group location” or “association with known criminal group members.” Scars and tattoos “associated with a particular criminal group” are no longer enough, nor is “frequent wearing of the colors” and “frequent use of hand signs associated with particular criminal groups.”
And they note that the number of people in the database has dropped from 18,000 in 2019 to its current 7,700 — a 58% drop. The number of juveniles also fell from 440 to 209.
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