Blue Light
A Disobedient Electronic for the MTA
October 25th, 2019:
A group of NYPD officers reported that witnesses saw 19-year-old Adrien Napier carrying a gun near the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. Following a brief chase, the officers found Napier sitting on a subway train at Jay Street Metrotech, closest to ITP's campus. The arrest turned hostile, with over ten police officers pointing guns at the teenager, but no weapon was recovered. Despite this, Napier was arrested for fare evasion. This incident sparked months of protests and demonstrations against the MTA and NYPD, fueled by anger over the targeting and mass incarceration of minority youths.
Julian Tiso Mathews and I, born and raised in New York City, sought a way to use technology and data to assist those subject to the NYPD's discrimination. We developed a community participation tool designed to alert individuals when police officers were present in subway stations. We also planned to repurpose the iconic lamp posts outside subway stations so that when the lights were illuminated in NYPD blue, they would signal people of the police presence.
Read more about Disobedient Objects: the Exhibition at The Victoria and Albert Museum.
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Tracking police officers and their locations is a contentious topic that is debatably legal. GPS application Waze does it but there are very few APIs that do it. Also, repurposing city property.
Prototyping & DEMO
The globes leverage Twitter’s API to allow users to control the color using hashtags dependent upon location, i.e. #NYPDmetrotech or #NYPDcanalstreet.
