Your credit card company and those girls from Seacaucus might not be the only ones who know you blew $600 on two bottles of Absolut last month. According to the Times, the NYPD had an unusual agreement with the West Village club Greenhouse where the club would scan patrons' IDs and keep them in a database for at least 30 days, readily available to law enforcement when they wanted to see it. “I wonder how many people would be thrilled to learn that there is a permanent record of everything they do in this club, as well as a police file with their identifying information,” the NYCLU's executive director Donna Lieberman said.
But Greenhouse (which was shut down earlier this month along with its sister-club WiP after the Chris Brown/Drake debacle) wasn't the only club to feed information to the police. The head of the City Law Department's administrative law division explained that starting in 2007 "many nightclubs in the city had entered into agreements with the Police Department to scan the identification cards of patrons."
Why? The Law Department employee says that the NYPD only uses the information "as part of an active criminal investigation," but Greenhouse's agreement has no such stipulations. They agreed to give the information as a condition of staying open after multiple instances of violence that occurred in their club. “This is using police powers as a blunt instrument, instead of a targeted law enforcement tool," Lieberman argues. Pssh whatever, the only "blunt instrument" we're using is the ONE WE'RE SMOKIN IN THE CLUB, BABY!
