After officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested protesters who blocked ICE Gestapo forces from leaving a garage in New York City’s Chinatown late last month, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor-elect, took to social media (with a week’s delay) to comment on the incident. He advised immigrant workers of their rights—the need for a judicial warrant for ICE to enter private dwellings (that ICE routinely violates), the right to film ICE, etc.
But before the video clip is two-thirds done, Mamdani tells viewers not to “impede their investigation, resist arrest or run” and follows up with political pablum directed to his supporters, that he will as mayor “protect, support and celebrate our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
The essential political content of the video is, however, that the NYPD will arrest anyone who interferes with ICE operations. The intended audience of the video is the NYPD brass and the Trump administration. The video seeks to reassure them that a Mamdani government will uphold ICE operations in the city. It is worth noting that since Mamdani met with Trump in November, he has not posted a single item on social media criticizing Trump.
The pact between Trump and Mamdani has a concrete—and chilling—meaning: Mamdani will allow the work of the repressive apparatus of the state in the city, in this case primarily the NYPD, to continue its operations unimpeded.
This is the significance of his reappointment of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the pioneer of one of the most sinister mechanisms of repression aimed at the working class, the NYPD’s mass surveillance tools.
Tisch is not only a scion of an ultra-wealthy family that has played a prominent though largely behind-the-scenes role in New York City politics for the last 50 years. She has also devoted her career to designing and implementing a pervasive spying infrastructure known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS).
According to the watchdog group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), thanks to DAS, “formed through a public-private partnership with Microsoft, what was once the subject of dystopian imagination is now an everyday reality for New Yorkers. DAS uses cameras, license plate readers, and radiological sensors to create a real-time surveillance map of New York City. This system partners with privately-owned CCTV cameras throughout New York City and instantly compares data with multiple non-NYPD intelligence databases. DAS video files are stored for at least one month, and metadata and license plate data are stored for at least five years—possibly indefinitely.”
STOP has also noted that data from credit cards and their place and time of use on the OMNY system (the MTA’s fare payment system) in New York subways and buses could be harvested by the NYPD. The state agency that manages the subway system, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), allows the NYPD to collect this data without a warrant.
The New York Times in a recent article adds to these data sources feeding DAS “audio gunshot detectors, 911 call logs, criminal histories, summonses, arrests, warrants and more. It stores feeds from thousands of cameras across the five boroughs that record New Yorkers as they shop, grab pizza or rush into subway stations.”
STOP writes that DAS staffs its “headquarters in lower Manhattan with both police and employees of what it refers to as ‘private stakeholders’; Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, and Citigroup representatives all frequent the command center as part of their business continuity planning.”
DAS is constantly being expanded and modified. In August, an investigation by New York Focus uncovered a little-known NYPD program to expand CCTV (closed-circuit television) surveillance at New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings and use the free internet service that the Adams administration had set up, Big Apple Connect, to link the cameras.
At City Council hearings in October prompted by New York Focus’s exposure, Anthony Mascia, the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Information Technology Bureau, testified that the NYPD plans to link 1,900 cameras across 19 more NYCHA properties and eventually 17,897 CCTV cameras across 119 NYCHA developments.
NYCHA houses almost exclusively the poorest sections of the working class in New York City. If not for cheaper city housing, below the current $4,000 monthly average rent for a one-bedroom apartment on the open market, hundreds of thousands of its residents would be homeless. This is the section of the working class most vulnerable to cuts in SNAP benefits and inflation.
As New York Focus noted about the city council hearings, “Michal Gross, a public defender at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, told the committee that police already use NYCHA CCTV footage for reasons other than responding to crimes. The police department, she said, has admitted in court to ‘surveilling youth via NYCHA video, watching who they spend time with, who their friends are, and even documenting how they spend time with their own family members.”
DAS is also believed by civil liberties organizations and surveillance experts to be used by the NYPD to feed its Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) software. Although the NYPD officially denies that FRT software is embedded in DAS, it does admit in departmental documents that “still images within DAS may be used as a probe image for facial recognition analysis.”
Last month, STOP and Amnesty published thousands of documents obtained from the NYPD under New York state’s Freedom of Information Law that demonstrate the police have used facial recognition technology broadly since 2017. It is well known by pro-Palestine protesters, for example, that they may be identified by FRT, and many cover their faces accordingly.
The implementation of this mass spying technology has been the central focus of Jessica Tisch.
With undergraduate, law and business degrees from Harvard, Tisch has served on some of the most reactionary institutions in the city, including the firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one of the most elite law firms in the world, in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the Domestic Policy Council of the White House and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
She began her career with the NYPD in its Counterterrorism Bureau (which currently numbers about 1,000 officers in various units) as an intelligence research specialist in 2008, the year in which DAS began its initial development phase.
She became the Counsel to the NYPD Commissioner and then the Counterterrorism Bureau’s Director of Policy and Planning and was appointed in 2014 by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio as the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Information and Technology. There she oversaw the rollout of DAS; the upgrade of CompStat, the NYPD’s computer-aided dispatch system; the implementation of department-wide body-worn cameras; and the distribution of smartphones to every officer and tablets for every police vehicle, which would help, as STOP has noted turn “every patrol officer into a mobile intelligence unit, capable of conducting warrantless surveillance at will.”
In 2019 de Blasio promoted Tisch as the Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and the City’s new Chief Information Officer, which gave her oversight of the city’s entire electronic infrastructure, including its COVID-19 response. Eric Adams appointed her to Commissioner of the Sanitation Department in 2022 and then as Police Commissioner in 2024.
If any ruling class politician were looking for someone with deep connections to the ruling elite of New York City and to its worldwide financial operations, who has been embedded in the capitalist state apparatus for years and is now implementing the state’s “bodies of armed men” with technologies that scrape mass information about ordinary working people from multiple sources, Jessica Tisch would be that person.
It is significant that Mamdani’s public safety plan, released in March, does not even mention the NYPD’s pervasive spying on New York’s population. The Democratic Party has been involved with the deployment of this apparatus for decades, as the promotion of Tisch by de Blasio and Adams testifies. The close integration of the DSA with rest of the Democratic Party in New York indicates that it never had any intention of fighting it or any other tool of repression.
St. Louis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Detroit operate or have funded Real-Time Crime Centers. These centers function as surveillance hubs that achieve the same kind of data aggregation as the DAS. Invariably, the ruling class is seeking to ensure that the technology and techniques will come to every part of the United States, rural and urban. The National Security Agency (NSA), as Edward Snowden exposed in 2011, is already harvesting the metadata of millions of private calls, including all international calls whether they are made from New York or Little Rock. There can be no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is now being applied to the aggregation of data by DAS.
The essential political lesson of Mamdani’s reappointment of Jessica Tisch as New York City’s Police Commissioner is that the DSA, like all other sections of the Democratic Party, is actively facilitating a principal technology of dictatorship.