Zohran Mamdani, a sharp critic of police surveillance, will soon oversee it

Zohran Mamdani (File photo)

When Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect, announced that he would retain New York City’s police commissioner, Jessica S Tisch, it meant he would be holding onto one of the architects of the department’s pervasive surveillance network.The network developed by Tisch, called the Domain Awareness System, is used to track crime and help identify suspects by synthesising vast amounts of data from video, license plate readers, audio gunshot detectors, 911 call logs, criminal histories, summonses, arrests, warrants and more. It stores feeds from thousands of cameras across the city that record New Yorkers. Law enforcement officials say it is a tool to help solve crimes and defuse terrorist threats. Civil libertarians see it as an unconstitutional panopticon. Now it belongs to Mamdani.The mayor-elect, whose views were shaped by the department’s heavy-handed spying on Muslim communities after the 9/11 attacks, has made it clear that he is generally wary of police surveillance. During the Democratic mayoral primary, Mamdani sounded warnings, and in 2023 he co-wrote an opinion article for city & state promoting laws to prohibit the police from creating fake social media accounts. “With every ‘friend’ and ‘follow’ request you accept, you risk a covert cop invading your privacy,” it said.But surveillance is not mentioned in Mamdani’s 17-page public safety plan, which proposes a department of community safety that would have mental health teams respond to some 911 calls and would expand street-level programs to stop violence. The police department’s surveillance system presents him with fundamental questions about privacy and civil liberties.Mamdani may soon find himself defending a system that many of his supporters abhor, said Kenneth Corey, a former chief of department who worked in the intelligence unit. “Could you realistically expect to fight 21st-century crimes without using 21st-century tools?” he said. “It’s one thing when you’re standing on the outside. Then you get inside and see that things aren’t quite what you thought that they were.”In a response to questions about his plans for police surveillance, a spokeswoman for Mamdani, Dora Pekec, said only that he “looks forward to working closely with Commissioner Tisch to deliver both public safety and justice to New Yorkers and continue to ensure their constitutional rights are protected at every corner.”Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the urban policy think tank Vital City a former federal prosecutor, said that the daily challenges of keeping New Yorkers and the police safe may force Mamdani to reconsider his previous stances. “He has to address some of the realities that the police department face in how to democratically police the city,” Glazer said. “I think there will be some serious conversations between the mayor-elect and Tisch – that some of the rhetoric of the past will be moderated in the actual activity that the police department has to conduct.”