August, 2020, New York City. Black Lives Matter activist Derrick Ingram sees the red dot from a cop’s laser hovering in his bedroom. Soon the world comes crashing in—helicopters, two dozen police vehicles, dozens of cops and dogs, shut down his street and attempt to raid his apartment.

Why? NYPD surveillance cameras at a June protest against the murder of George Floyd captured someone using a bullhorn “too close” to the ear of a cop. NYPD then used facial recognition software to link that image to Ingram’s Instagram account. Pigs listened in on his phone calls, and used aerial drones to peer into his apartment, as preparation for this raid aimed at charging Ingram with second-degree assault on a cop—charges that were later dropped.

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As brought out in recent exposures in the New York Times and in The Intercept, pigs in the U.S. have “repurposed” incredibly invasive spy technology initially developed by the military—first to spy on Muslims within the U.S., and then to go after very broad sections of the population.

While this has been developing over many decades, since 2006, more than $3 billion have been spent on building up a truly Orwellian¹ surveillance system in New York City, often carried out in a cloud of secrecy as to what kind of weaponry and operations were being unleashed on the people.²

New Yorkers are under almost constant surveillance on the street (on foot or in cars); and often even online or in their own homes.

NYPD’s Domain Awareness System links over 18 thousand city-owned and private surveillance cameras, capturing millions of images. In addition, every day, “the NYPD collects roughly 3.6 million license plate numbers and their locations, using hundreds of scanning devices throughout the city.” (NY Daily News). An unknown number of military-grade mobile X-ray vans that use potentially dangerous rays that can see through the door of a car are in use, but NYPD refuses to say where, how or for what purpose. NYPD spyware scours social media profiles for information that has been deleted.

Political dissent is targeted. Drones fly over protests, filming everyone. An Amnesty International study shared with the Times showed that someone marching the typical route of a police brutality protest would be on camera 80 percent of the time!

Another aspect of this is that, in direct violation of a 1976 law, the NYPD systematically accesses the sealed arrest records of millions of people. Pigs in NYC, as throughout the U.S., routinely arrest millions, especially youth of color, on bogus charges which they later drop. Since those people are legally innocent, the law states that those records must be sealed, unless permitted by a court order. In defiance of this, NYPD pigs have an app on their phones to access this information, and use it as a basis to further target and harass people.

And all this information is woven together into data bases linked to individuals through use of facial recognition software and license plate data. Increasingly, the pigs can plug your name into their system and know what stores you went into on your last shopping trip, who you picked up in your car, what political groups you work with, your arrest record, what you said to your friends on Facebook, and so on.

As the August 2020 raid on Derrick Ingram cited above shows, there is not just “potential” for abuse—the police state is in effect now.

This surveillance system is being used to feed the ever-hungry beast of mass incarceration. The neighborhood with the most surveillance cameras is East New York—which is 84 percent Black and Latino! The director of science and surveillance at Brooklyn Defender Services told the Times that “My office defends tens of thousands of cases each year, and I would be shocked if we have a single case of any level of severity that did not include some form of surveillance technology.” [Emphasis added] In 2014, 40 people, mostly youth, in Harlem were arrested on major felonies on the basis of loose talk among teenagers on personal Facebook pages about what they bragged they would do to people they had beefs with.

Democratic politicians and liberal media figures like to cluck their tongues in “shock” and “horror” at invasive police states in other countries… especially if those countries are enemies of the U.S. But for nightmarish high-tech surveillance and control of its own population, the NYPD has no rival!

People sometimes say, “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, why should you worry about being spied on?” Ask Derrick Ingram that! Ask the families of Zemari Ahmadi and of the seven children slaughtered two weeks ago! [See box below.]

The police are institutions of organized and “legitimized” violence that “serve and protect” this system of capitalism-imperialism in oppressing and suppressing the people. The fact that they have developed the power to massively spy on whole populations, including seeing into their apartments and cars, and developing data banks on millions that are accessible to every pig-on-the-street is criminal—and extremely dangerous to humanity.