Zahran Mamdani has just inherited the NYPD’s surveillance state

The Mamdani campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The NYPD’s turn toward mass surveillance was initiated by Commissioner Raymond Kelly immediately after 9/11, aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal counterterrorism grants. However, Ferguson says Kelly’s rival, former Commissioner William Bratton, was a key architect behind the NYPD’s reliance on “big data” by implementing the CompStat data analysis system to map and electronically compile crime data in the mid-1990s and again when he returned to New York in 2014 under Mayor Bill DeBlau. Bratton also mentored Jessica Tisch and has spoken highly of her since leaving the NYPD.

Tisch was the principal architect of the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a massive $3 billion Microsoft-based surveillance network comprised of tens of thousands of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers, gunshot detectors, social media feeds, biometric data, cryptocurrency analysis, location data, live body technologies and other surveillance cameras. Area 468 square miles. The “Ring of Steel,” modeled after London’s CCTV surveillance network in the 1990s, was first developed under Kelly’s supervision as an anti-terrorism surveillance system for the Louvre and Midtown Manhattan before being renamed DAS and marketed to other police departments as a potential tool for profit. According to NY Focus, several dozen of the 17,000 cameras in New York City’s public housing buildings were also connected through backdoor methods by Gov. Eric Adams last summer, and thousands more are in the pipeline.

Although DAS has been operational for more than a decade and has survived previous challenges over data retention and privacy violations by civil society organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, it remains controversial. In late October, a Brooklyn couple, along with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a local privacy watchdog, filed a civil suit against DAS, alleging violations of New York State’s constitutional rights to privacy by ongoing mass surveillance and data retention by the NYPD. According to the lawsuit, NYPD officers can “automatically track a person across the city using computer vision software, which follows the person from camera to camera based on descriptions as simple as the color of an item of clothing.” The technology, they claim, “turns every patrol officer into a mobile intelligence unit that can conduct warrantless surveillance at will.”