Tag Archives: surveillance

Killing American Citizens Without Trial: The NYPD Way

The New York City Police Department is always ahead of the curve. They have aspirations to be a domestic surveillance service–after all, why should the FBI have all the fun?–and to secure all the budget increases and prestige that goes with it. Besides, don’t the movies tell us that ‘secret agents’ always get all the chicks? It also has international aspirations, which will suitably ratchet up its glamour quotient. Thus we heard last year about the NYPD’s collaboration with Israeli police, and the opening of a branch in Israel. This would considerably enhance the NYPD’s grab-bag of tricks pertaining to searching and frisking, especially when dealing with a hostile, recalcitrant subject population. Not that they don’t already have considerable experience with the good ‘ol up-against-the-wall-spread-your-legs move.

There is another area in which the NYPD have long been known as trailblazers. While the nation is agog with frenetic debate about the use of drones to kill American citizens without trial or due process on American soil, and law professors, bloggers, and sometimes Republican lawmakers, talk themselves hoarse about its ramifications, the NYPD with little fanfare, and plenty of ammunition, has been doing the same for many years: offing American citizens with nary the hint of either. Suspect identified; suspect shot. Cap in the ass, cap in the back, cap in the head. One more down, several–not yet identified but surely out there–to go.

This remarkably efficient procedure, directed primarily against American citizens of skin hues that approximate those that have met such a fate thus far–one of whom, it must be said, shares my first name–has not been conducted on distant, sandy, parched lands littered with shimmering mirages. Rather, these dispatches have been carried out in the midst of American cities, in urban landscapes.

To that list of urban spots, soon to be marked with flowers, candles, wreaths, and photographs of teenaged boys, we can now add East Flatbush, where, on the night of March 9th, Kimani Gray, all of sixteen years old, went down after being shot at eleven times. Seven bullets found their mark; four from the back. He seems to have made a threatening move; perhaps he had a gun. But he does not seem to have used it, if he had one. He’s dead though. Just another casualty in the ‘jungle out there.’ The officers who shot him are on ‘administrative duty.’ Perhaps this is NYPD code for all the paperwork they will now have to do in detailing the expenditure of ammunition and the cleaning charges incurred on their firearms.

There will be demonstrations; the mayor and the police commissioner will call for calm; there will be calls to not rush to judgment (although no calls to not shoot so damn fast); the slow–very slow!–wheels of police procedure and perhaps state justice will grind. At the end of it all, there will still be grieving parents. And one more photo added to the placards that will be observed the next time a march is held to protest the NYPD’s killing of yet another brown or black man in New York City.

Glenn Greenwald on Civil Liberties and Their Willing Surrender

Today, at Brooklyn College, Glenn Greenwald delivered the 39th Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture. I was lucky enough to be in attendance and thoroughly enjoyed watching this top-notch muckraker and gadfly in action. I have often seen Greenwald speak on video but this was the first live presentation I have witnessed. It was everything it was promised to be: Greenwald was passionate, precise and polemical. The title of his talk was ‘Civil Liberties and Endless War in the Age of Obama’ and so, appropriately, Greenwald began by offering a definition of ‘civil liberties‘: a set of absolute, unconditional constraints on governmental and state power, ones defined and defended by the people. These should be so stark and clear that no abridgments should be possible or tolerated; those who suggest or support these show themselves to not possess a true understanding of the concept.

With this uncompromising bottom line clearly articulated, Greenwald then presented a tripartite analysis of why, despite the presence of the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the state of civil liberties in the US today appears to be quite as problematic as it is and why the US populace has so easily acquiesced to this denial of their constitutional privileges.

First, the US has been since 2001, in a state of ‘perpetual war’, against poorly defined enemies, with no geographic or temporal limitation. This war ensures the endless invocation of natural security as a reason for the attenuation and abuse of civil liberties, whether it be surveillance, indefinite detention without trial, or the assassination of American citizens without trial. The lessons of history have been learned well by the administrations that have held power in the US over the past dozen years: war provides refuge for roguish government behavior of all kinds, and nothing quite prepares a populace for the surrender of civil liberties like the threat of an enemy, one whose threat can only be repelled by increasing the powers a state commands.

Second, the surrender of civil liberties is made more palatable when their abuse by the state appears to be directed against a demonized minority. The gullible majority, convinced that these systematic corruptions of the Bill of Rights remain confined to just this hapless lot, and convinced that their liberties are being protected as a consequence, gladly sign on and form cheering squads, unaware that soon the baleful eye of the powers-that-be will be turned upon them. In the American context  Muslim-Americans have borne the brunt of the the post-911 ravishing of the Bill of Rights. There is little sympathy for them in most parts of the American polity, but the damage done to what is considered ‘normal’ is real enough. Our civil liberties were, and are, next.

Third, yesterday’s ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ is today’s normal. When the Patriot Act was first passed, it provoked vigorous debate and contestation even in a country still traumatized by 9/11. Its renewals have provoked little debate and attention. We live in a post-Patriot Act US. Its draconian provisions are now the new normal. In this context, I’d like to note once again, the seemingly-useless but very-effective-in-getting-citizens-used-to-the-idea-of-random-searches subway searches in New York City.

Greenwald spoke on a great deal more, including, most importantly, how concerted, determined, political activism by the citizenry still remains, the only and best way to safeguard and preserve the Bill of Rights.

My brief notes above are merely a sampler; catch him at a speaking venue near you if you can.

The NYPD as Domestic Intelligence Force: Kelly and Browne Need To Go

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) has a vexed relationship with civil liberties. The department’s long and troubled history with minority populations is perhaps the best indicator of a kind of systematic confusion in its training institutions, its rank-and-file, its leadership, and thus, in its deeply-ingrained institutional culture, about the very notion: “Civil liberties? You talkin’ to me?” Its current whole-hearted embrace of a new role as member of the domestic intelligence apparatus, dedicated to aggressively conducting surveillance on NYC and NJ’s Muslim population, add to the list of its previous achievements such as coerced confessions, stop-and-frisk, over-enthusiastic deployment and use of deadly weapons, corruption, and sometimes even rape. The NYPD is also the police department that shows racist films in its academy and publishes creepy maps showing the locations of Muslim businesses and houses of worship. A rap-sheet this long would condemn most to life without parole; in New York City’s case, we seem to be the ones destined to never receive relief from the NYPD’s policing.

Yesterday, a petition signed by four hundred fifteen faculty members–”the first nationwide faculty response to the AP’s revelations of widespread NYPD surveillance on college campuses”–was sent to Mayor Bloomberg, calling for the resignation of Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, in whose reign rights-abusing practices appear to have bloomed. The petition and the list of signatories is available online. Yesterday too, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an Op-Ed by Saskia Sassen and Jeanne Theoharis, which explains why this petition was necessary. Kelly’s response, thus far, to the furore over the NYPD’s malfeasance, has revealed deep ambivalence and confusion and, of course, Mayor Bloomberg’s defense of the surveillance program has been disappointing, especially for a man ostensibly committed to civil rights in other domains.

(On a side note: AP’s ‘revelations’ such as they are, only came about once it became clear that surveillance of Muslim students was not restricted to say, grubby public institutions like the City University of New York, but also extended to ‘prestigious’ Ivy-League campuses such as Penn and Yale. One reaction among CUNY faculty was, “Well if it takes surveillance of the Ivy League to get this to be noticed, then so be it.” But another reaction is a little less sanguine: Had this remained confined to the nation’s less-privileged pockets would it ever have been noticed or cared about?)

The NYPD, perhaps more than any other police force in the nation, does not so much see itself as a part of the community that it polices, as much as it sees itself set over, above, and against it. This aggressively, offensively, and destructively adversarial posture is what contributes to its continued abuses of city resident’s civil rights. Unless its leadership changes, unless it changes its training practices, indeed, unless it engages in a fundamental ‘overcoming’ of itself, it remains destined to be locked into a pattern of behavior that will continue to do damage, sometimes deadly, to the citizens that are controlled and regulated by it.

The first step in this institutional reform should be the resignations of Kelly and Browne.

Update: Alex Vitale, in comments, clarifies that AP’s response came earlier, and that it was the nation-wide faculty response that came later, in response to news of the surveillance taking place all over the North-East. Still, civil liberties violations get noticed more when they take place in pockets of privilege.