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New York’s Big Apple Connect program offers free Wi-Fi in public housing—and new pathways for police access to NYCHA cameras. In Harlem, youth advocates say real safety for young people starts with trust, not surveillance.
Over a dozen teenagers gathered in the fenced-off courtyard of Harlem’s Peace Cafe on a Thursday evening after school. As the young men warmed up with jumping jacks and sit-ups, Josh Marte, their youth mentor, hung up the punching bag and laid out Everlast boxing gloves over a banner that read, “I AM PEACE.”
The lesson wasn’t only about self-defense: Marte talked to the group about regulating emotions, building a brotherhood, and de-escalating violence in their neighborhood. Although he is the champion of the 2012 Golden Gloves tournament, this wasn’t meant to be a professional boxing training, but rather a therapeutic outlet to release pent up energy. The founder of Street Corner Resources, Dr. Iesha Sekou, calls this practice “creative aggression.”
The community-based organization works with kids navigating gang violence, school expulsion, and encounters with law enforcement. Arrested and jailed as a teenager himself, Marte has spent the past decade as a violence interrupter helping young people find their second chance. “Some of these young men’s parents talked about them like they were going to be nobody,” he said.
Many of the teenagers that Street Corner Resources works with live at nearby NYCHA developments—the St. Nicholas, Manhattanville, Lincoln, Grant and Rangel Houses, among others, are all within walking distance—where rows of security cameras overlook the public housing campuses.
Those cameras may soon feed directly into NYPD systems through Big Apple Connect, a city program that offers free Wi-Fi to NYCHA residents.
Big Apple Connect was launched by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration as a program to bridge the digital divide and set up free high speed internet at over 200 public housing developments in the city.
But reporting by New York Focus in August revealed previously undisclosed plans to use the infrastructure to grant NYPD direct access to live security camera footage. Cameras were already being used for the initiative at one NYCHA campus as of October, with plans to expand to 19 additional developments by the end of this year and more later on, the news site reported.
The material is to be fed into the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System (DAS), a crime-fighting and counter-terrorism tool developed with Microsoft that integrates facial-recognition technology, license-plate readers, 911 calls, and footage from thousands of security cameras citywide.
In Harlem, where concentration of public housing is some of the highest in Manhattan, the news has raised concerns about how this technology will be used, and who it will impact most.
East Harlem has a strong presence of community-based violence prevention programs, such as Street Corner Resources and SAVE East Harlem, which focus on mediation, mentorship, and youth engagement.
For those on the front lines of that work, the city’s definition of safety feels increasingly out of step with the one they’re fighting for. Lawyers and youth advocates also worry that expanded surveillance of everyday life could deepen the scrutiny already imposed upon young residents of color, who are disproportionately targeted through the NYPD’s gang database.
At a City Council oversight hearing in September, Michal Gross, a supervising attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, testified that there have already been signs of surveillance around NYCHA neighborhoods through existing CCTV infrastructure. She pointed to a particular case in which one of her young clients was identified as a gang member because of who he spent time with, including members of his own family.
“NYPD admitted to watching him over 50 times with the same individuals,” Gross said, adding that her defense team has noticed this pattern in their cases with young people in Harlem. “[The NYPD] had built up a full dossier on 15, 16, 17 year olds—with months, if not years, of surveillance prior to any arrest.”
She has seen the material used against teenagers in court, resulting in higher bail and more serious sentencing, Gross added. She was joined by four other attorneys on the panel that testified before the Council, each of whom voiced concern about a likely connection between Big Apple Connect and the city’s gang database, which is embedded within the DAS.
This database has faced years of criticism for lacking oversight or due process. The NYPD shrunk it by almost 40 percent in October—down to 8,563 people—largely in response to this pushback. But critics say it still operates as a broad dragnet, enabling racial profiling and misidentification without clear standards.
As of Oct. 15, 98 percent of the individuals listed are Black or Latino residents, the vast majority of them without any felony convictions or involvement in gun violence.
Alissa Johnson, a legal fellow at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), pointed to how loosely defined the criteria for someone’s inclusion in the NYPD’s gang database can be, often relying on “reasons as innocuous as wearing the wrong clothes, staying out late, attending the Puerto Rican Day parade, or posting a social media message like, ‘happy birthday, gang.'”
Expanding live police access to public housing cameras could extend that same pattern of suspicion into residents’ daily lives, advocates testified to lawmakers.
But the NYPD said the camera access is a valuable tool for preventing and solving crime. Earlier this year, prosecutors indicted 16 alleged members of rival gangs in East Harlem for a spree of 21 shootings in 2024. Jessica Tisch, the police commissioner, credited the database for the success of the investigation.
Federal authorities announced new charges last week against 12 people tied to an East Harlem narcotics crew operating out of NYCHA’s Johnson Houses. The case brought heavy law-enforcement presence to the development as part of a coordinated investigation between the FBI and the NYPD. Prosecutors said the group sold fentanyl and crack cocaine out of building lobbies and courtyards over the past three years, while storing firearms and drug supplies in empty apartment units.
While East Harlem has seen a significant drop in serious gun-violence incidents since last year, the rate of shootings in the area remains among some of the highest in the city. Beyond major cases, drug use and low-level dealing remain persistent issues in parts of Harlem, particularly in and around NYCHA complexes. Together these conditions only reinforce both residents’ safety concerns and the push to expand surveillance.
Against this backdrop, mentors and youth advocates say early intervention and community support become most critical for teens navigating adolescence amid constant police presence.
“My whole life, I’ve seen a lot of stuff I wish I didn’t see,” said 19-year-old Alassane, who grew up in Harlem. He is one of the participants in the after-school boxing program.
“It makes me nervous … just having to watch my back all the time and look over myself,” he said. “But now with the camera system, I’m basically doing the same thing too, because I’m being watched by basically everyone.”
Community mentors have seen first hand that police presence doesn’t always equal safety. They say constant surveillance can lead to profiling and early police contact over minor behavior—encounters that can pull young people into the criminal justice system long before they face any serious charges.
“I feel like they try to take control of us,” said D’Angelo Clay, a violence interrupter with Street Corner Resources. Clay, now 26, became involved with the organization at the age of 13, after founder Dr. Iesha Sekou helped him get out of jail.
“I got locked up one time. I don’t know how she found out, but she came for me,” Clay said.
Sekou and the organization stayed by his side through the years that followed, offering mentorship and, eventually, a full-time job. Now Clay serves as a mentor himself to kids growing up in the same system. “This changed me a lot,” he said. “The young kids changed me too.”
He regularly visits public housing developments to help mediate conflicts as a credible messenger. Through outreach by people like him, more local kids join Street Corner Resources’ programs, which also include music and video production workshops held in the same Peace Cafe space.
“We’re making sure they’re safe, not just running the street,” Clay said. “While I’m here I could save somebody. Because I got saved.”
As the sun set over the Peace Cafe courtyard, coach Josh Marte gathered the teens after boxing practice for their evening routine of pep talks and affirmations. “We build a place amongst each other where we don’t feel challenged,” he told them. “This here is building a community.”
He’s worked with each participant to understand their backgrounds and help them find a path into adulthood. Although they might not show it, “they want people to believe in them,” Marte said. “They’re like my little brothers.”
Many of the teenagers who stay involved with the organization become violence interrupters like Clay, operating mostly out of NYCHA complexes. Dr. Sekou says that kind of intervention can stop violence long before police, or camera feeds, need to get involved.
“We know that the first few minutes of an argument are crucial,” she said, describing their de-escalation work. “You can either stop it, or you let it go, and it becomes big and the guns come. But if we can stop it as soon as we hear it or know about it, it’s so much better.”
In the 20 years since the founding of Street Corner Resources, Sekou’s team has had more success stories than she could count. “There’s people who stop us now and say, ‘Thank you, because I was getting ready [to do something that would’ve gotten me] locked up.'”
For her and many residents of Harlem, both young and old, safety isn’t about who’s watching, but about who’s willing to stand beside you.
“Our young people are growing up in an environment where it’s like you got to be afraid of the police,” Sekou said. “This life is not normal.”
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