New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani may have an ambitious policy agenda, but overhauling the self-governing and deeply dysfunctional behemoth that is the New York City Police Department is not on the list. Mamdani surprised supporters by asking current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to stay on after his inauguration early next year. Tisch, a technocrat heir to a vast real estate fortune, clashes with Mamdani on several fronts, including policy (she believes New York State’s bail reforms caused rising crime) and the geopolitics that inevitably make their way into New York City’s streets. (Tisch’s family are key figures in the Israel lobby; Mamdani is vociferously pro-Palestinian.)
One area where Mamdani is guaranteed to clash with Tisch is on the NYPD’s massive technical surveillance apparatus and intelligence-gathering methods, which have metastasized since 9/11 to levels that rival the capabilities of a midsize country. More than one observer has characterized the NYPD as operating more like a US intelligence agency—at one point, the department’s Intelligence Division was run by a CIA veteran, and at least one CIA analyst was embedded at NYPD—than a police department.
While Mamdani’s public safety proposals center on the creation of a $1 billion Department of Community Safety that will handle non-emergency 911 calls in place of armed cops, some of his other stated positions conflict directly with Tisch’s own positions and background with the NYPD, where she got her start in the department’s controversial intelligence division during the height of its “mosque-raking” mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers.
Experts say the stakes in the current moment are far higher with regard to surveillance, largely due to the federal government’s nationwide immigration blitz using surveillance data gathered by police departments to track down and arrest targeted people.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson of George Washington University Law School studies the use of high-tech surveillance by law enforcement and is the author of The Rise of Big Data Policing. He has studied the NYPD’s sweeping buildout of networked CCTV, gunshot detectors, license plate readers, and video analytics since 9/11. The current wave of federal immigration raids, he says, have made clear how local police data such as fingerprints and license plate scans can be weaponized by an authoritarian administration and makes the current moment ripe for a reckoning on police surveillance.
“In a horrible way, the sense of how technologies can be weaponized against people has expanded,” Ferguson tells WIRED. “When the government expanded its targeting, it also expands the conversation beyond the poor Black communities that were initially targeted by things like CCTV networks and predictive policing.”