We must fight NYC's digital cop city!

Welcome to Surveillance Resistance Monthly, the Lab’s monthly newsletter that focuses on challenging the technologies that fuel state and corporate power. Alongside others, we seek to strengthen our collective analysis of these technologies of violence and control. We also aim to build, nurture and accumulate the power of organizing and resistance—locally and transnationally— against these technologies and the powers behind them. Follow us on IG or head to our website to learn more.

INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE

Galvanized by the “Stop Cop City” movement, New Yorkers denounced the Mayor’s July 2024 announcement of the $225 million earmarked for construction of the “Unified Public Safety Training Facility”, NYC’s own “Cop City”.  Yet, this new training facility is where the NYPD will train and work with the enforcement staff of at least sixteen other agencies is just the tip of the iceberg.

In this issue, we look into the “Digital Cop City” that is below the surface of the training facility and expansion of policing across agencies beyond the NYPD. “Digital Cop City” is a digital data collection and sharing infrastructure that embeds technologies into public infrastructures in ways that increase bias and inequality, and entrench the surveillance of people relying on government services. It expands the reach of the NYPD into public service provision and expands corporate power in local governance.

Our recommended resources section places NYC’s cop city in conversation with the long standing grab for more police power in Atlanta, and resistance against it in the form of Stop Cop City and the Defend Atlanta-Weelaunee Forest movement. 

Whether it’s in Atlanta or NYC, digital technologies are not the center of the story, but enhance the speed, scale and scope of ongoing historical processes of dispossession, exploitation, extraction and criminalization of dissent. We conclude with resources that draw links between cop cities, the fight for a free Palestine, other international struggles against US militarism, and the proliferation of “smart cities” globally. 

Ultimately, NYC’s Digital Cop City is about who the city is for, and whose vision for the city will be realized. Will it be the police, corporate vendors, and the elite, or the people who are the heart of the city–New York’s communities of color, low-income, and working class communities?

In solidarity,

The Surveillance Resistance Lab team

WHAT’S ON AT THE LAB?

OUR PUBLICATIONS

Explainer on NYC’s Digital Cop City— We are calling on the City Council and other oversight officials to “Stop, Study and Assess” MyCity and digital wallets. In preparation for the New York City Council Tech Committee hearing on the MyCity portal and digital wallets, the Lab has created this overview of digital data collection and sharing infrastructure aspects of the Mayor’s July 2024 announcement. This is also summarized here on Instagram. See more below about how to testify or join the hearing.

MyCity, INC: A Case Against ‘CompStat Urbanism’ — Mayor Adams explained that MyCity will “[combine] all agency metrics onto a single platform similar to CompStat and [use] analytics to track performance in real time, we can go from a reactive management approach to being proactive and, eventually, predictive.” This report centers concerns about the potential for MyCity to expand policing and embed corporate entanglements into digital public infrastructure. It demonstrates that the use of predictive analytics in city governance can reinforce inequality and unequal power relations.

“Want the government to track your every move? Mobile ID may be for you” — this op-ed by Cynthia Conti-Cook from Surveillance Resistance Lab and Donna Liberman from the New York Civil Liberties Union outlines how New York State’s new digital driver’s license will be a tool for state and corporate surveillance, placing those already under watch by the state at further risk of criminalization. 

GET INVOLVED

Testify at the New York City Council Tech Committee hearing about MyCity on September 30, 2024 — You can register to testify here. It is also possible to submit a written testimony within 72 hours of the hearing as well. Please let us know if you are planning to testify. 

Host a briefing and join us in organizing against your state’s digital driver’s license - Digital driver’s licenses, a “smart city” technology, are quietly and rapidly remaking how identification functions in the United States. Already implemented in over 40 states, this technology gives the Department of Homeland Security deeper tentacles into our lives, especially those of us with tenuous legal statuses. The Lab is hosting briefings around the country in Chicago, San Diego, Atlanta and Durham, North Carolina. To host a briefing in your community get in touch with Ed Vogel.  

RECENT & UPCOMING EVENTS

Book Talk: Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence — In partnership with Migrants Organise (a UK-based platform for refugees and migrants to organise for power, dignity and justice) and Haymarket, we participated in another talk on this anthology. The essays in the book offer analyses on how carceral border regimes are increasing racialized surveillance, control, and violence at borders, cities, and beyond. It also includes case studies on how people are fighting back against “smart” borders, digital IDs, “smart city” technologies, and more. It was a powerful conversation with editors Mizue Aizeki [Founder and Executive Director of the Lab], Matt Mahmoudi, and Harsha Walia, as well as Mallika Balakrishnan, and Myles Howard. Listen to the recording and order a copy of the book.

Fighting Mass Ice Raids Operations: Lessons Across Administration — On September 24, 2024, the Surveillance Resistance Lab hosted a conversation between Jacinta Gonzalez, Policy Director at Mijente, and Paromita Shah, Executive Director of Just Futures Law on ICE mass raids in the face of extreme anti-immigrant measures threatened by the Trump campaign and Project 2025. The participants shared lessons from their decades-long fight against the ascendancy Department of Homeland Security and its interior police force, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A recording of the webinar (and Spanish interpretation) will be available soon! 

Mass Deportation Defense: Using Community Responsive Data Collection and Freedom of Information Act Tools — On October 16, the Surveillance Resistance Lab will participate in an accompanying webinar with the Immigrant Defense Project and Center for Constitutional Rights: Register here.

‘DIGITAL COP CITIES’ INSPIRED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

Organizers explain how the “Olympification” of Atlanta lay the groundwork for the crafting of a particular image of the city as friendly to major events, tech and real estate capital, and middle and upper-class, white newcomers. And then, how land originally stolen from Muscogee-Creek people, and later used to incarcerate Black people made to labor for the city became the site of cop city in the aftermath of the global 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings against police brutality. 

STOP COP CITY AND DEFEND ATLANTA-WEELAUNEE FOREST MOVEMENT

• The Land at The Center of Cop City and Why We Must Defend It — This Indigenous People Power Project article by Nic Sanford Belgard outlines the long and troubling history of this stolen land.
• Eviction Notice from the Mvskoke People to Mayor Andre Dickens and Cop City — This statement from the Mvskoke people situates the struggle for the land in the Weelaunee forest as part of the ongoing struggle against settler colonialism. 
• A Primer on Cop City — On a podcast called This is Hell, Micah Herskind, Atlanta based organizer and writer, provides a timeline of the Stop Cop City movement, as well as the historical factors that led to the proposal.
• An Annotated Version of the Indictment Filed Against #StopCopCity Organizers — With the State of Georgia escalating repressive tactics against Cop City organizers, Interrupting Criminalization published this tool to help those involved in the movement understand the specific charges against the organizers to illuminate Georgia's strategies and tactics.
• Missing Voices — This recent report by Global Witness that seeks to combat the erasure of land and environmental defenders tells the story of Tortuguita Terán, a 26-year-old queer, Indigenous-Venezuelan forest defender. Tortuguita was killed on January 18th, 2023 by Georgia State Patrol, during a violent police raid of the Stop Cop City public park encampment in the Weelaunee Forest.

UNDERSTANDING CITIES AND INEQUALITY

• Twilight City — An essay-film by Black Audio Film Collective, Directed by Reece Auguiste, in which a woman's letter to her mother in Dominica, and interviews with historians and journalists reveal London as a gentrified city where people live in worlds separated by race and class.

THE GLOBAL SIGNIFICANCE OF STOP COP CITY:

• STOP COP CITY from Atlanta to Palestine: A Syllabus — The anti-colonial struggles from Atlanta to Palestine are deeply related and this syllabus provides numerous resources for study and political education.
• Cop Cities in a Militarized World — Azadeh Shahshahani details how the tactics used by the United States government to suppress and repress land defenders throughout Central America are being deployed in Atlanta against the Stop Cop City forest defenders, activists, and organizers. 

COP CITIES AND THEIR CONNECTION TO SMART CITIES:

• h/t Logic(s) Remapping Songdo: A genealogy of a smart city in South Korea | IDEALS  – This article examines “the significance of the smart city with respect to the earlier models of national and urban governance in South Korea and discuss how the complex history embodied and congealed in today’s smart city, as a discourse and a material reality, guides how a desirable future is envisioned and imagined in South Korea.”
• Building Blocks of a Digital Caste Panopticon: Everyday Brahminical Policing in India —  This article in Logic(s) by Nikita Sonavane, Mrinalini R, Aditya Rawat, Ramani Mohanakrishnan and Vikas Yadav gives an insight into Hyderabad as the model for “smart policing”. Much like its idolized counterpart, the New York City Police Department, the Hyderabad police has used technological prowess to intensify its relentless gaze upon the lives and bodies of oppressed communities in the city. Casteist digital datafication of marginalized bodies has been a crucial part of the creation and entrenchment of this surveillance project.