Three committee chairs of the New York City Council sent a letter to Mayor Eric Adams’s administration on Monday demanding that it immediately halt an ongoing expansion of police surveillance in public housing developments and requesting information that could enable a public hearing or investigation.

The letter followed a New York Focus investigation earlier this month that found that the New York City Police Department is using a free internet program to expand its real-time video surveillance capabilities at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments without notifying lawmakers or residents.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s administration is quietly using a flagship free internet program for public housing residents for another purpose: expanding NYPD surveillance.

The New York City Police Department is working to use network connections established under the three-year-old Big Apple Connect program to link cameras at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments directly to the NYPD’s central digital surveillance system, a police department spokesperson confirmed to New York Focus. Cameras at one development were linked last Wednesday, the spokesperson said, and 19 more are set to follow.

Enabled by new modems and routers installed in NYCHA common spaces, the network connections allow the NYPD to feed CCTV footage directly into its citywide surveillance software systems, stream it remotely in real time, and review footage beginning 30 days prior to an incident — all without having to ask NYCHA for permission. Previously, the police department could only access footage from cameras operated by NYCHA by physically visiting the housing authority’s CCTV control rooms, upon request, for the purpose of investigating incidents.

Since April, New York’s state-funded home care program has been in upheaval. That month, the $9 billion program was taken over by the company Public Partnerships, LLC (PPL), which became responsible for managing the care of the hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled New Yorkers who use it.

Home care workers and patients have consistently struggled to navigate PPL’s bureaucracy, reporting unreturned calls, missed paychecks, malfunctioning software, and other issues. Thousands of people have left the program entirely.

On Thursday, New York lawmakers held a hearing trying to get to the bottom of the chaos.

They did not get the answers they were looking for. Over the course of more than four hours, the main witnesses at the hearing spent most of their time dodging or declining to answer questions from the dozen assembled state senators.