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, called the Domain Awareness System, is used to track crime and help identify suspects by synthesizing 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 five boroughs that record New Yorkers as they shop, grab pizza or rush into subway stations.
Law enforcement officials say it is a key tool to help solve crimes and defuse terrorist threats. Civil libertarians see it as an unconstitutional panopticon.
Now it belongs to Mr. Mamdani.
The mayor-elect, whose views were shaped by the department’s heavy-handed spying on Muslim communities after the Sept. 11 attacks, has made it clear that he is generally wary of police surveillance. He will be the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history.
As a state assemblyman and during the Democratic mayoral primary, Mr. Mamdani sounded warnings, and in 2023 he co-wrote an opinion article for City & State promoting legislation 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. Mamdani may soon find himself defending a system that many of his supporters abhor or misunderstand, 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, tilting at windmills. Then you get inside and see that things aren’t quite what you thought that they were.”
Some who want to rein in the system are tentatively hopeful that they have an ally in Mr. Mamdani.
“As somebody who’s promised to work to make New York City a place for everybody, we hope he fulfills that promise by dismantling this massive surveillance infrastructure that monitors and tracks everyday New Yorkers,” said Michelle Dahl, executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights organization that scrutinizes police tactics.
In a response to questions about his plans for police surveillance, a spokeswoman for Mr. 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.”
Constant monitoring has become a fact of life. Doorbell cameras record life on the street. Our mobile phones track our movements. Social media companies use our every click to predict what we might purchase and what advertisements we should see. But it is practically impossible to opt out of the city’s broad system of cameras and drones.
Commissioner Tisch, who got her start in the department in 2008 as an intelligence analyst, led the development and deployment of the Domain Awareness System.
The police say it does not exist to spy on average New Yorkers, but to help solve crimes like the killing of a Queens couple in their 70s in September. The police said the suspect used their stolen credit cards, which enabled the department to monitor his movements and to alert officers through the Domain Awareness System. He was caught in Times Square.
After the fatal shooting of a health insurance executive last December, the police arrested a suspect, Luigi Mangione, after surveillance footage helped detectives trace his movements. They eventually found a clear image and distributed it to the public, leading to Mr. Mangione’s arrest in Altoona, Pa., where a restaurant employee and customer recognized him.
In less sensational cases, the police can get cellphone alerts about bank alarm activations, which have helped them collar robbers. Officers responding to 911 calls at homes use the Domain Awareness System to get automatic and instantaneous access on their phones to any domestic violence complaints or arrest reports at the house, said Brad Weekes, a spokesman for the Police Department.
“The Domain Awareness System has revolutionized public safety in New York City,” Mr. Weekes said. “It has become essential to virtually every facet of police work.”
Elizabeth Glazer, founder of the urban policy think tank Vital City and a former federal prosecutor, said that the daily challenges of keeping New Yorkers and the police safe may force Mr. 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,” Ms. Glazer said. “I think there will be some serious conversations between him and Tisch — that some of the rhetoric of the past will be moderated in the actual activity that the Police Department has to conduct.”
Much of Mr. Mamdani’s criticism has been directed at the surveillance tactics of a long-disbanded secret demographics unit composed of officers whose job was to create a map that showed where members of different ethnic groups lived in the city.
The goal was to learn where terrorism suspects could blend in, but the unit’s tactics, which were exposed in 2011 by The Associated Press, shifted into the blanket surveillance of Muslims and involved developing databases of where they shopped, worked and prayed.
“The same N.Y.P.D. that’s brutalizing Black and brown New Yorkers spied on Muslim communities like mine right here in Astoria,” Mr. Mamdani said in a 2020 campaign video as he ran for the Assembly.
The Associated Press’s reporting led to lawsuits by Muslim and civil liberties groups, which said the tactics violated the rules established as a result of a 1970s case in which the department spied on students, civil rights groups and suspected Communist sympathizers. Known as the Handschu case, the federal litigation prohibited the Police Department from collecting information about political speech unless it is related to potential terrorism.
One key reform was the creation of the so-called Handschu committee, which includes members of the Police Department who meet regularly with a civilian appointed by the mayor to review sensitive investigations.
Asad Dandia, 32, who was a litigant in the Muslim spying cases, is an informal adviser to Mr. Mamdani. One of the most important steps the mayor-elect can take is to make the system more transparent, Mr. Dandia said.
“We as New Yorkers need to know what exactly is going on in terms of the scale and scope of N.Y.P.D. surveillance,” he said. “Frankly, there is a huge climate of mistrust. Zohran knows all of this and he will go into this administration, recognizing this climate of mistrust and working to fix it.”
That mistrust surfaced Nov. 21, when The Guardian reported that an F.B.I. memo revealed that it and the Police Department had access to a private Signal chat among people who had been monitoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at courthouses. Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, demanded that the department “immediately explain its role.”
The police said that the surveillance was part of a “broader counterterrorism investigation into a range of possible criminal activities, including weapons training, violence against law enforcement, property damage and destruction, and discussions about bomb-making.”
The investigation was reviewed and cleared by Muhammad Faridi, a lawyer and the civilian appointee on the Handschu committee. The department was looking at the group’s chat after it learned that a person it had been investigating for potential violent crime had joined, Mr. Faridi said in an interview. The focus was not the courthouse monitoring, which is constitutionally protected, he said, but on that person’s movements.
“We need the N.Y.P.D. to look into these types of actors who are contemplating engaging in attacking law enforcement,” Mr. Faridi said. “Those activities are not constitutionally protected.”
Mr. Corey said he agrees that Mr. Mamdani can help demystify a system shrouded in secrecy, an area where he and Commissioner Tisch could find common ground.
“There are a lot of things in the vein of transparency that he can do,” Mr. Corey said. “And that, from what I know about her, Jessie would be on board with.”
Daniel Schwarz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the organization would closely watch how Mr. Mamdani approaches technology and the “digital rights” of New Yorkers.
“We can be cautiously optimistic,” he said. “But we also have to hold this administration accountable.”
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
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