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The NGO said the scale and power of the police department's systems give it an "Orwellian" ability to track people across the city - with particularly severe implications for those already targeted by discriminatory policing practices.
At the start of May, Amnesty recruited thousands of volunteers to tag surveillance cameras at intersections across Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx using images from Google Street View. They have so far identified 15,280 cameras across the three boroughs, with certain neighbourhoods particularly heavily surveilled.
According to the project's lead researchers, poorer neighbourhoods of colour are host to some of the most heavily surveilled street intersections. East New York in Brooklyn, which the last census recorded as 54.4 per cent Black, 30 per cent Hispanic and 8.4 per cent white, was top of Amnesty's ranking of most heavily watched neighbourhoods, with 577 cameras found at street intersections across a relatively small area.
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