New York County Defender Services

Testimony of

Sergio De La Pava

Legal Director

New York County Defender Services

Before the

Committee on Children and Youth

Int 0660-2026 (Williams)

April 21, 2026

Thank you to the Committee on Children and Youth for holding this hearing jointly with the

Committee on Mental Health and Substance Use and the Committee on Oversight &

Investigations. My name is Sergio De La Pava and I am the Legal Director of New York County

Defender Services (NYCDS).

NYCDS is a public defense office that every year represents indigent New Yorkers in thousands

of cases in Manhattan’s Criminal Court, Supreme Court, and Family Courts. Since opening our

doors in 1997, we have represented more than a half million clients in their criminal matters and

witnessed firsthand the myriad ways the criminal legal system abuses and harms our clients. Our

Youth Advocacy Unit represents some of the most vulnerable people in our city, children and

young people charged with crimes. We aim to bring a perspective shaped by our work

representing young people directly impacted by surveillance and criminalization.

We, therefore, thank you, Chair Stevens, for holding today’s hearing and all of the Council

Members who seek to oversee the effects of social media on our youth.

I. Background:New York County Defender Services (NYCDS) strongly opposes Intro. No. 660-2026. The

proposed legislation raises serious concerns about the expansion of surveillance of young people

and the concomitant erosion of trust between youth and the very systems meant to support them.

Although framed as a study, the proposed legislation directs agencies to identify, track, and

analyze young people’s activity on online platforms that relates to in-person altercations. It also

calls for the development of strategies to monitor and identify such activity to prevent future

incidents. This is not a neutral exercise. It creates a framework for monitoring speech, mapping

relationships, and generating records about young people that can follow them far beyond the

context in which they were created.

The proposed legislation directs the Department of Youth and Community Development

(DYCD) to conduct a study in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office for Neighborhood Safety

and the Prevention of Gun Violence (ONS). This raises significant concerns about how

prevention efforts may be reshaped and harmed under this framework. ONS was created to

support community-based approaches to safety, including violence interruption programs,

credible messenger initiatives, and other strategies that deeply rely on trust, relationship building,

and voluntary engagement by young people. These programs are effective precisely because they

are not seen as extensions of law enforcement or state surveillance. Young people need to feel

safe enough to be vulnerable and truthful while in these programs. Introducing a mandate that

identifies or monitors youth online activity risks altering that dynamic in a fundamental and

deleterious way.

It is also imperative to situate this proposed legislation within the broader landscape of existing

surveillance that already exists over young people. Law enforcement agencies, including the

New York City Police Department (NYPD), monitor social media activity, track associations

between young people, and analyze their online interactions. These surveillance systems are

actively perpetuating harm in our communities. We have raised serious concerns about how and

why information is collected, interpreted, and used by the NYPD. Similarly, here, any fragments

of data collected under the proposed legislation would be out of context and incomplete, making

them easily misconstrued.

The proposed legislation’s study can then contribute to the NYPD’s notorious gang database1

, or

worse, make a parallel database that works alongside the gang database. The gang database is a

system that labels and tracks individuals based on perceived gang affiliation, frequently using

1 The NYPD Gang Database, Explained, Legal Defense Fund (last accessed April 23, 2026) at

https://naacpldf.org/case-issue/nypd-gang-database-policing-tactics/.associations and online activity as indicators. We, alongside other organizations, have frequently

criticized its lack of transparency and the inability to meaningfully challenge an individual’s

placement on it. People are placed on it arbitrarily, and a mere communication with someone

believed to be in a gang can land you in the gang database. It also has a significant

discriminatory impact, as it disproportionately includes Black and Latino youth, often reflecting

patterns of overpolicing instead of actual criminal involvement. The gang database serves as a

warning. The proposed legislation will reproduce the same bias and create another

discriminatory database.

As public defenders, we see how these systems operate in practice. Online speech is easily taken

out of context: sarcasm, conflict, and everyday communication can be wrongly interpreted as

indicators of risk or violence. Associations are mapped and treated as evidence of wrongdoing.

What may begin as an effort to understand behavior can quickly become a mechanism for

labeling and tracking young people, especially Black and Latino youth.

Equally troubling is how the proposed legislation would transform the role of trusted adults in

young people’s lives. Staff in youth programs, after-school settings, and community-based

organizations are not meant to be investigators. They are mentors, counselors, and sources of

support. Their effectiveness depends on trust and confidentiality. They have to be able to engage

with young people without judgment and without even the perception of ulterior motives. By

requiring agencies to monitor and analyze online activity, the proposed legislation risks turning

trusted community members into watchers of youth behavior.

This shift fundamentally changes the relationship between young people and the very adults

meant to support them. Young people are not ignorant of how adults watch them. News will

spread quickly that they are being reported on. If young people believe that what they say, share,

or post may be tracked or reported, they will disengage. The proposed legislation would erode

their trust in rehabilitative and pro-social programming and the adults in their community who

provide it.

The likely result is that young people will attend these critical programs at lower rates. They may

even avoid these programs altogether, which will go directly against the goals of violence

prevention. Even if they participate in programming, they may specifically avoid discussing

conflicts, relationships, or challenges out of concern that their words could be documented or

misunderstood. So that even while attending programming, the substance and goals of these

programs would be gutted. This would particularly undermine early-intervention programming,

which depends on openness and trust.The sheer breadth and vagueness of the proposed legislation amplifies these concerns. The

definition of youth includes individuals under 24 who attend programs funded by DYCD. This

could encompass a wide range of settings, including after-school programs, workforce

development programs, and services connected to housing. This means the bill could extend into

spaces that serve some of the most vulnerable young people in the City. Additionally, the

involvement of ONS creates a toxic pathway for sensitive information to move beyond its

original context and purpose.

The proposed legislation captures everyday interactions and invites agencies to scrutinize online

activity in connection with those interactions. Without clear limits, it leaves open how far this

monitoring could extend and how the information collected could ultimately be used. It is even

unclear if this information could be obtained or used by prosecutors. As Council Member Cabán

shared during the hearing, prosecutors frequently will informally use information gathered online

to pressure other youth to testify against one another. The proposed legislation does not have any

meaningful privacy guardrails put in place. Even when it references privacy protections, it does

not meaningfully constrain downstream use or prevent the sharing of this information across

agencies.

We know that information collected by City agencies does not remain siloed. It is often shared,

combined with other datasets, and in some cases accessed by federal authorities, including

federal immigration enforcement. Without explicit and enforceable safeguards, the proposed

legislation would create a database on young people that could be used for purposes far beyond

prevention. And even with safeguards, history shows that once data is collected, it is difficult to

control how it is ultimately used.

The proposed legislation does not protect youth. It instead turns providers into extensions of law

enforcement and breaks the trust of young people.

II. Conclusion

NYCDS strongly opposes Intro. No. 660-2026 (Williams).

If you have any questions about my testimony, please email policy@nycds.org.