Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State

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

The NYPD’s turn toward mass surveillance was begun in earnest by Commissioner Raymond Kelly during the immediate aftermath of September 11, buoyed 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,” by implementing the CompStat data analysis system to map and electronically collate…