The Legal Aid Society filed this class action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Criminal Group Database (the Database), which the NYPD uses to label New Yorkers arbitrarily as “criminal group members,” or so-called “gang” or “crew” members, and disseminates this label widely through the NYPD, leading officers to surveil, detain, and interrogate those individuals in the Database. The lawsuit argues that the NYPD’s Database policies and practices are unconstitutional under the First, Fourth, Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the New York Constitution, and violate the New York City Administrative Code.  

NYPD’s Database policies and practices encourage racially disparate enforcement. As of 2025, of the over 13,000 New Yorkers listed as “active” in the Database, 99% were Black and Latino individuals. This Database is essentially Stop and Frisk 2.0 and it operates as a means to detain, harass, surveil, and label young Black and Latino men as gang members for otherwise innocuous behaviors, such as social media posts using a certain emoji, sending a Happy Birthday message, or liking a photo.  

In 2018, Legal Aid Society launched the FOIL Yourself”  website to streamline the process for New Yorkers to submit a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to determine if they have been labeled by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) as a gang affiliate.