Last Wednesday, Oct. 15, the Office of the Inspector General-NYPD (OIG-NYPD), the city’s independent watchdog for police policy and practices, published findings from a follow-up investigation on how the city tracks alleged gang affiliation, which long faced heat for racial profiling.

The NYPD’s Criminal Group Database, best known as the gang database, is the policing tool facing sharp criticism for surveilling almost exclusively Black and Brown New Yorkers, sometimes through shoddy justifications of “self-admission” like social media photos and the use of emojis.

Back in December 2022, 16,141 people were logged as active gang members, despite a sizable reduction from when advocates publicly exposed the database issues in 2017; 98% of them were identified as Black or Hispanic males under

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