Zahran Mamdani has just inherited his probation status at the NYPD

Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The NYPD’s shift toward mass surveillance was begun in earnest by Commissioner Raymond Kelly in the immediate aftermath of September 11, supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal anti-terrorism grants. However, Ferguson says Kelly’s rival, former Commissioner William Bratton, was a key architect behind the NYPD’s reliance on “big data,” implementing the CompStat data analysis system to electronically map and collate crime data during the mid-1990s, and again during his return to New York City in 2014 under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Bratton has also been a mentor to Jessica Tisch and has spoken fondly of her since leaving the NYPD.

Tisch was the lead architect of the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, a massive $3 billion Microsoft-based surveillance network made up 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 feeds of body cameras and dash cams, and other technology covering the five boroughs’ 468-square-mile territory. Modeled on London’s CCTV surveillance network in the 1990s, the “Ring of Steel” was initially developed under Kelly as a counter-terrorism surveillance system in lower Manhattan and downtown before being renamed DAS and marketed to other police departments as a potential profit-making tool. Dozens of the 17,000 cameras in New York City public housing projects were also linked through backdoor methods by the Eric Adams administration last summer along with thousands of cameras. More in the pipelineAccording to New York Focus.

Although DAS has been operating for more than a decade and has successfully overcome previous challenges regarding data retention and privacy violations by civil society organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union, it remains controversial. In late October, a couple from Brooklyn A civil suit was filed along with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a local privacy watchdog, v. DAS, alleging violations of New York State’s constitutional right to privacy through the NYPD’s ongoing mass surveillance and data retention. The lawsuit claims that NYPD officers can “automatically track an individual throughout the city using computer vision software, which tracks the person from camera to camera based on descriptions as simple as the color of an item of clothing.” They claim the technology “turns every patrol officer into a mobile intelligence unit, capable of conducting warrantless surveillance at will.”