NYPD Using 'Nuisance Abatement' Law To Force Small Businesses To Install Cameras, Agree To Warrantless Searches
from the the-law-with-built-in-'speed-holes' dept
Sarah Ryley at ProPublica has a fascinating, depressing, and exhaustive report on the NYPD's apparent ongoing civil rights abuses. Under the guise of policing "nuisance businesses," certain precincts are targeting minority-owned businesses -- usually small bodegas, laundromats, etc. -- with abatement actions that force owners to either lose their source of income or capitulate to the NYPD's overreaching demands.
One business owner was hit with a "nuisance abatement" action -- one which could lead to his laundromat being closed for at least 30 days -- after undercover officers twice sold stolen goods to store customers. Sung Cho's laundromat had nothing to do with either sale, other than being open for business when the sales were made. Despite Cho's lack of culpability in the selling of stolen goods, the NYPD portrayed his business as a "facilitator" of illegal activity and hit his store with a restraining order.
As Ryley reports, the nuisance abatement program is prone to abuse, what with its one-sided court process (NYPD files complaint and asks for restraining orders without notifying the business owner or allowing them to challenge the orders) and very loose definition of "facilitation." While the statute does provide that business owners must be given a chance to challenge an order within three business days of being presented with it, the NYPD routinely serves orders on Thursday or Friday, forcing businesses to close over the weekend, normally their busiest sales days.
The article points out that most of these orders are served by officers in precincts where the minority population is the majority, suggesting once again that the NYPD regularly engages in biased policing. A judge who has presided over abatement cases lends some credence to this conclusion.
“You never see the white bar owner from the Meatpacking District in here; it’s always some bodega owner from Uptown,” said the judge, who asked not to be named. “It’s a complete double standard.”In terms more familiar to Techdirt's audience, nuisance abatement enforcement is nothing more than law enforcement trolling.
Once served with nuisance abatement actions, business owners are faced with a choice. They can fight the case and remain shut down until it’s resolved, earning no income. Or they can agree to the NYPD’s demands, sign a settlement, and reopen. As a result, cases tend to get resolved very quickly.When not using sales of stolen goods to customers to push nuisance abatement actions, the NYPD also likes to use sales of alcohol to minors as leverage -- despite the fact there's an entire arm of enforcement as well as a separate government agency in place to deal with liquor license violations. As Ryley points out, doubling up on enforcement allows the city to punish business owners twice for these violations. And some of the busts are highly questionable. The ProPublica piece contains footage of a contested sting "buy:" a two-second "interaction" in a busy convenience store where the undercover buyer obscured the beer can with his hand and tossed a dollar at a clerk who was in the middle of handling another customer's transaction.
The ends here appears to be the expansion of the NYPD's already-robust surveillance powers. The laundromat owner faced with losing his business agreed to the PD's "settlement offer" -- one that gave the NYPD uninterrupted, warrantless access to his place of business.
He agreed to pay a $2,000 fine, maintain cameras that the NYPD can access at any time, and to allow the police to conduct warrantless searches. If anyone is even accused of breaking the law at his business again — whether a store employee or not — he faces escalating penalties: closures that would increase from 30 days to 60 days to 90 days to a full year with each alleged offense; fines climbing as high as $15,000.This isn't an aberration. This is the standard operating procedure. Other businesses facing NYPD abatement orders have not only installed cameras and agreed to warrantless searches, but have also put $1000 credit card readers in place that store personally-identifiable info on every customer that uses them -- and which all can be accessed anytime by police officers without a warrant.
Perhaps most damaging of all, the terms continue in perpetuity, even if the business changes hands.
An NYPD official contacted by ProPublica isn't shy about the desire to expand the NYPD's surveillance dragnet.
Robert Messner, who heads the NYPD’s Civil Enforcement Unit, which handles the cases, said during an interview with the Daily News in December that his unit does not keep a database of the businesses required to maintain cameras. He said their purpose is to make neighborhoods safer and to help police solve crimes.He's also not afraid to say why he prefers nuisance abatement proceedings to other statutes the NYPD has at its disposal to handle these sorts of "problems."
“We want everybody to install cameras. We think that’s the greatest,” he said.
When asked about the Padlock Law in December, Messner said the last case filed under it was “15 years ago maybe.”Yes, there's nothing more "simple and elegant" than greasing your own wheels. The "Padlock Law" -- instituted during Bill Bratton's first run at the top of the NYPD -- allowed business owners to contest the orders and allegations in court before being threatened with a business closure. The new way -- now more than 15 years old -- deprives business owners of any meaningful form of due process, which makes it much easier to use the threat of a business shutdown to coerce owners into providing the NYPD with 24-hour warrantless access and a larger surveillance footprint.
He said the padlock law “was a creaky old law” that cost a lot of police resources and often resulted in protracted litigation.
“This thing,” Messner said, referring to the nuisance abatement law, “is simple and elegant.”
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Filed Under: nuisance abatement, nypd, small businesses, surveillance, warrantless searches
Reader Comments
The First Word
“*Every body except a police officer's body.
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and i bet dollars to donut holes...
'hey, this is a nice bodega here, be a shame if us donut eaters had to shut it down for being, well, a nice neighborhood bodega...'
and $50-100 changes hands and the bodega is not shut down...
...this week
bet that nebber, ebber happens...
at this point, i think us 99% would be better off with ZERO police...
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They want to the store owners to install cameras..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTKTfUHfeKM&feature=youtu.be
If you are force-armed to install some cameras, make sure you install a redundant system with some pinhole lenses in the walls. Feed the video and sound to a local amateurish-looking cache (a laptop running a VM?) and copy it to the cloud; if the cops find the local copy, they might stop looking.
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Nuisance abatement?
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Something is clearly wrong when they can spin around with a blindfold and just point to a random business and go "I want that next". Of course they can find something illegal when they are doing the illegalities.
This is like the "protection money" racket... Mafia boys in blue.
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The NYPD, degrading the motto "to serve and protect"
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/S
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Terminology
The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.
While most dictionaries list extortion as the taking of property, requiring a service also counts, especially if there is also a fine.
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was gonna say....
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Stop and Frisk was just the begining
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Map of warrantless surveillance stores?
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Is it naive...
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Re: Is it naive...
When a police force starts abusing its power have the upper hand.
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*Every body except a police officer's body.
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"Nice business you've got there, be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
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Alternate wording:
NYPD Using 'Nuisance Abatement' Law To Convince Citizens To Lose Last Remaining Shred of Respect for The Law, Give No More Fucks Whatsoever About Continued Life or Safety Of Even One Single Cop
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Most of the people involved stop giving fucks years ago. This isn't like some nice upstanding neighborhood with super low crime rates and sweet children who go to school, mow lawns for extra cash, and spend time with their family every evening playing board games.
This is a city with high crime rates, insane levels of drug activity, gang activity, underage drinking, and just endless amounts of criminal activities.
Is this the right answer> Nope. But the reasons they are doing it are real and the solutions hard to come by, unless you want to put a police officer in every licensed business in New York City.
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But the reasons they are doing it are real and the solutions hard to come by, unless you want to put a police officer in every licensed business in New York City.
We should also put a camera at every home to prevent further crime. Why stop there? MAke everybody wear always on body cameras. And arrest if battery dies.
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A Few Bad Apples
"A few bad apples" when some police activity is finally found "wrong".
More and more, it seems that the nations various police forces are actually more the case of "a few good apples" in an mostly spoiled batch. And the worst is that (a la Serpico) it must not be much fun to be a good apple in that batch, which would push them out of the force.
We know that the "thin blue line" means that they do the opposite of pushing out the spoiled apples, so if they are welcome to remain on the force, we should be concerned about (and measure) the exit rate for the good apples.
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Re: A Few Bad Apples
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Almost everyone, since it would be a terrible violation of privacy and just such a hassle to require police to wear them, and their job is hard enough already to have to deal with that as well. /poe
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Re: The NYPD, degrading the motto "to serve and protect"
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Every time LEAs and LEOs show themselves to think and behave with the same total disregard for the rights of everyone as the sociopaths they call 'real criminals' do, the less the rest of are going to bother differentiating between the groups. The cops are lumping all of us into the same group whether we're boy-scouts or serial-rapists; we need to return the favor.
Of course, none of this is relevant in a world where law, justice, ethics, and morality are all synonymous and defined as 'whatever the people with guns, badges, and matching outfits say they are, subject to change without notice'. I swear, some people would be as happy being governed by child-vivisectionists as they would any other group, as long as the paperwork was filled out right.
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To sacrifice the law and constitution because the alternative is challenging is leading to a major decline in relations between the government and the public because it isn't just the NYPD it's everybody. Finding a solution to life's most challenging problems have more enduring benefits compared to just copping out (no pun intended)
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Are you serious? That sounds like a FOIA request in the making. If they don't keep a database, then how do they know not to hit the business up again or which ones they have unwarranted access into?
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Why?
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