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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Crime & Police : Government Secrecy : Protest Activity |
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New York City Challenged on Fingerprinting Protesters |
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by Diane Cardwell
(No verified email address) |
04 Oct 2004
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At a hearing in September over the city's treatment of arrested protesters, Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan noted that the city could have dispensed with the fingerprinting entirely as most of the offenses were so minor that state law did not require it. |
Since coming under fire for their handling of protesters arrested during the Republican convention, Bloomberg administration officials have said that sluggish fingerprint processing in Albany was a major cause of the long delays in releasing detainees, although state officials have denied any tardiness.
Now it looks as if much of the fingerprinting may not have been legal in the first place. According to lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, the city may have violated state law by routinely fingerprinting arrested protesters.
In a letter sent yesterday to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, officials of the organization wrote that although the law allowed the police to fingerprint people charged with minor offenses in certain circumstances, "this could not justify the routine fingerprinting of the nearly 1,500 people reportedly arrested during the convention for minor offenses."
The officials, Donna Lieberman and Christopher Dunn, the group's executive director and associate legal director respectively, wrote that state criminal-procedure law defined narrow circumstances for fingerprinting when the offenses are minor. Those circumstances are when the police cannot establish the person's identity, when they suspect that the identification supplied is not accurate, or when they suspect that there is an outstanding warrant.
Legal questions about the fingerprinting policy have come up before. At a hearing in September over the city's treatment of arrested protesters, Justice John Cataldo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan noted that the city could have dispensed with the fingerprinting entirely as most of the offenses were so minor that state law did not require it.
Ms. Lieberman and Mr. Dunn also wrote that they found the "blanket fingerprinting" of people arrested at demonstrations troubling because "the entry of fingerprints into law enforcement databases can have lifelong consequences."
Normally, when a person is arrested and fingerprinted in New York, the State Division of Criminal Justice Services checks the prints in its system and sends them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well, state officials said. Information about arrest records and outstanding warrants is then sent back to the city's Police Department.
As a result, the lawyers wrote, they are "deeply troubled by the notion that the N.Y.P.D. may have forced hundreds of political activists," as well as "a number of innocent bystanders arrested during the convention, to surrender their fingerprints for entry into state and federal databases."
Saying that they were prepared to sue the city if necessary, the lawyers asked that any illegally obtained fingerprints held by the police, the state or the F.B.I. be destroyed.
John Feinblatt, criminal justice coordinator for the Bloomberg administration, defended the city's actions, saying the fingerprints were automatically destroyed and therefore could not pose a threat to those arrested in the future.
"The normal procedure for violation arrests is to take fingerprints for one purpose and one purpose only: to definitively establish who the person is and whether he has a warrant or other law-enforcement hold," he said. "After that the prints are destroyed and not made part of any permanent record. That's exactly what was done with every violation during the R.N.C., no more, no less."
Without commenting on whether the city had broken the law, he added, "In an age of identity theft and high-quality fake ID's, fingerprints are the only surefire way to establish who's in front of you." State and federal officials said they did keep fingerprints from violation arrests.
In the view of Mr. Dunn of the civil liberties union, though, destroying the fingerprints would not remedy the fact that they were illegally taken.
"The practice has to stop," he said. "It's an unlawful practice. And more importantly, we're skeptical that fingerprints that were sent to New York State or the F.B.I. have been destroyed."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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