from the red squad were required to be open to the public, allowing individuals to request copies of files written on them. However many requests for such files have been rejected, and the files themselves shuffled such that indexing of the documents is not possible. Civil rights attorneys and critics of the NYPD such as Jethro Eisenstein have argued that this difficulty in obtaining documents is the result of a concerted effort by the department to restrict public access to policing data. Prior to the discovery of the notecards, history professor Johanna Fernandez sued to have surveillance information on the Young Lords released and was told by the NYPD that no such documents existed, and that officials searched for over 100 hours for any pertinent files without success. In 1969, twenty one members of the Black Panthers were indicted on charges of planning bombings on police and civilian targets. The police were found to have been conducting comprehensive surveillance of the group, and after only ninety minutes all defendants were acquitted. The Handschu agreement was made following a class action lawsuit on the behalf of the defendants, which regulates the capacity for police surveillance. in 1971 a lawsuit was opened against the NYPD arguing that the surveillance data such as those collected by the red squad violated the Handschu agreements and the constitution, the lawsuit remains open to this day and police officials claim it will last forever. CompStat and the Dropping Crime Rate In the early 1990s, then-deputy police commissioner Jack Maple designed and implemented the CompStat crime statistics system. According to an interview Jack Maple gave to Chris Mitchell, the system was designed to bring greater equity to policing in the city by attending to crimes which affected people of all socioeconomic backgrounds including previously ignored poor New Yorkers. Also at this time, the Dirty thirty (NYPD) police scandal was unfolding in Harlem, which involved illegal search and seizures of suspected and known drug dealers and their homes. Methods Domain awareness system and cameras The NYPD uses the Domain Awareness System (DAS) to perform surveillance across New York City - the system being composed of numerous physical and software components, including over 18,000 CCTV cameras around New York City. This surveillance is conducted on all people within range of sensors including people walking past security cameras or driving past license plate readers, it is not restricted to suspected