Controversial past practices by the NYPD have also raised suspicions about the use of game trucks. In 2018, when police were questioning a 12-year-old boy suspected of committing a felony, they gave him a soda purchased from McDonald’s. When the interview was finished and the boy was allowed to go, police recovered the straw he had been using and, without his knowledge or consent, used it to enter his DNA into a database, the New York Times reported. The boy’s DNA did not link him to evidence recovered at a crime scene, and his family had to petition a court to get it removed from the police database.

Because of incidents like this, public defenders in particular have been some of the staunchest critics of the game truck program.

“My initial reaction was a reflexive ‘Do not go in there!’ and I stand by it,” MaryAnne Kaishian, senior policy counsel with Brooklyn Defender Services, a public defender organization, told Yahoo News. “For decades, the NYPD has aggressively sought to target and surveil New Yorkers, particularly young Black and brown people, and to harvest and catalog their data in secretive internal archives such as the Gang Database and rogue DNA database.”

See the full Yahoo News article, here.