Police departments claim that gang policing is a crucial and precise crime prevention strategy. In reality, gang policing is a racially discriminatory practice that targets thousands of young Black and Latino men and labels them as “gang members” without justification. The guests on this episode explain the truth behind gang policing and describe the real harm it inflicts on marginalized communities.
Senior Researcher and Statistician, Thurgood Marshall Institute
Deputy Director of Strategic Initiatives, LDF
Mother of Christopher Howard, a young man impacted by gang policing
Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
For years, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has been targeting over 15,000 Black and Latinx New Yorkers and placing them on a secret list called the Criminal Group Database, commonly known as the Gang Database. Police have added people to the Gang Database for actions as simple as wishing a happy birthday on Facebook to someone of interest to the police. The database can impact anyone, but it disproportionately includes Black and Latinx youth.
For this episode, Dr. Sandhya Kajeepeta spoke with Kimberly Halliday, who graciously shared how gang policing upended Halliday’s family. Her son, Christopher Howard, is currently incarcerated after a court convicted him in a federal gang case in March 2019. Christopher maintains his innocence: prosecutors provided no physical evidence connecting him to the shooting at the center of the case and based the charges on hearsay from other defendants.
In 2020, a federal District Court acquitted Christopher of two of the three counts against him, citing insufficient evidence. Christopher was released because he had already served his sentence. However, the decision was appealed, and a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (one of whom was the judge in the notorious Bronx 120 gang takedown cases) resentenced Christopher to a mandatory ten years in federal prison. Before this case, Christopher had never been arrested for or convicted of a violent offense, and he has cooperated with authorities at every step of his journey
On April 30, 2025, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the Legal Aid Society, the Bronx Defenders, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, and the law firm Ballard Spahr filed a lawsuit against the City of New York, challenging the NYPD’s racially disparate targeting, surveillance, and criminalization of tens of thousands of Black and Latinx New Yorkers through the Gang Database. The complaint asserted that the NYPD’s practices and policies related to the database are in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as state and local laws.
LDF has long challenged discriminatory policing in New York City. In Davis v. City of New York, filed in 2010, LDF successfully challenged the NYPD’s policies and practices of unlawfully stopping and arresting New York City Housing Authority residents and their visitors for criminal trespass without sufficient evidence and due to their race and/or ethnicity.
All New Yorkers are entitled to be free from police harassment in their homes, but the NYPD has repeatedly criminalized residents of public housing as they travel to and from work or visit a friend.
Read Dr. Kajeepeta’s analysis about what happened in Portland and Chicago after those two cities eliminated their gang databases. Eliminating the gang databases did not result in any meaningful changes in crime rates, refuting claims that gang databases reduce crime.
The G.A.N.G.S Coalition’s mission is “to end systems that target, surveil, harass, and criminalize the association of young Black and Latinx people, and advance harm-reducing investments and community-based programs that are proven to make neighborhoods safer”
