a white flag on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. Tower dumps give lists of all phone numbers which were near a cell tower at a given time. According to the NYCLU, the NYPD "disclosed the use of Stingrays more than 1,000 times between 2008 and May of 2015 without a written policy and following a practice of obtaining only lower-level court orders rather than warrants" without revealing "what models of Stingrays [are used] or how much taxpayer money is used to purchase and maintain them." In January 2019, a judge ordered that the NYPD must officially disclose if a Stingray phone tracker was used by the NYPD to monitor activists cellphone communications. Gang databases The NYPD operates a computer database of suspected gang members called the "criminal group database”, which in February 2019 contained over 42,000 individuals before shrinking to 18,000 in June 2019 where it now fluctuates due to thousands of names being added and removed. 1.1% of the individuals in the database are white, 66% are Black, and 31.7% are Latino. The Legal Aid Society created a website for individuals to conduct a FOIL request to see if they are in the database, the NYPD has rejected all FOIL requests on this subject. Being in this database affects treatment within the court system including the severity of charges leveled against a defendant. Many criteria can lead to an individual being identified as a gang member, including admitting to being in a gang; being identified by two reliable sources within a gang; being seen in a "known gang location" wearing either black, gold, yellow, red, purple, green, blue, white, brown, khaki, gray, orange, or lime green; or doing other unspecified activities identified by the NYPD as being gang-affiliated. The NYPD also monitors social media activity, and may add individuals to the database if they engage with social media posts connected to people who are already in the gang database. Facial recognition In 2012, then Mayor-Michael Bloomberg claimed facial recognition "is something that's very close to being developed". Since 2011, the NYPD has a dedicated unit of officers known as the facial identification section (or FIS) using facial recognition technology to compare images taken from DAS with photos like mug shots, juvenile arrest photos, and pistol permits. In the first five and half years of using the software, the NYPD arrested 2,878 individuals based on facial recognition matches. Police officials