A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (15 page)

Black Hawk Helicopters Take to the Skies
(U.S. Department of Defense)

Throughout 2011 and into 2012, for example, cities such as Boston,
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Miami,
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Little Rock,
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and Los Angeles
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have all served as staging grounds for military training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers. These military training exercises occur in the middle of the night, with the full cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning the public. They involve helicopters buzzing buildings and performing landing and takeoff maneuvers.

Justified on the grounds that they prepare troops for urban warfare situations and future deployments, these training exercises also condition Americans to an environment in which the buzz of Black Hawk helicopters and the sight of armed forces rappelling onto buildings is commonplace.

CHAPTER 11

The New York Prototype

"I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom's annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have."
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–MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

NYPD Police Officers (Burger International Photography)

N
ew York City has long been celebrated as the cultural capital of the world, renowned for its art, music, and film. The "city that never sleeps," however, is serving as the staging ground for a fast-evolving police state through the use of cutting-edge technology, sophisticated surveillance, random crackdowns, and old-fashioned scare tactics, all of which keep New Yorkers in a state of compliance. A
60 Minutes
report describes the police state atmosphere: "At random, 100 police cars will swarm parts of the town just to make a scene. It happens with complete unpredictability. Cops signal subway trains to stop to be searched. And sometimes they hold the trains until they've eyeballed every passenger."
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A Dangerous Leviathan

Some New Yorkers can see the dangerous leviathan that is wrapping its tentacles around the Bill of Rights. Representative Yvette Clarke of Brooklyn notes, "We're quickly moving to an apartheid situation here in the city of New York where we don't recognize the civil liberties and the civil rights of all New Yorkers."
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Indeed, boasting a $4.5 billion budget,
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a counterterrorism unit that includes 35,000 uniformed police officers and 15,000 civilians,
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and a $3 billion joint operations center with representatives from the FBI, FEMA, and the military,
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the New York Police Department (NYPD) operates much like an autonomous Department of Homeland Security–only without the constraints of the Constitution. The capabilities of the department are astounding. The leviathan can even take down an aircraft should the need arise.
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The NYPD has radiation detectors on their boats, helicopters, and officers' belts that are so sensitive they even alert officers to citizens who have had radiation treatment for medical reasons. Moreover, the NYPD has a $150 million surveillance system comprised of a network of more than 2000 cameras, monitored by an advanced computer system that can detect suspicious packages.
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The NYPD also possesses portable scanners created in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense that can peer under people's clothing as they walk the streets.
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Minority Report?

In yet another partnership, this time with Microsoft, the NYPD is working to develop a Minority Report-type program that would allow law enforcement to collate various surveillance feeds in an effort to better target potential criminals. Dubbed the Domain Awareness System, the spy program "will allow police to quickly collate and visualise vast amounts of data from cameras, licence plate readers, 911 calls, police databases, and other sources."
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An NYPD Stop and Frisk (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

The system, which cost $30-40 million to develop, relies on 3,000 Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras positioned throughout the city, as well as a network of 2,600 radiation detectors.
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Watchful government eyes can track a suspicious package or person over a number of days throughout the city by cross-referencing video feeds, license plate identifications, and criminal records. The system can, for example, pull up all recorded images of someone wearing a red shirt, thus streamlining the process of tracking New Yorkers.
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And if a suspect's car is located via a license plate reader, the system will bring up not only its current location, but its past locations. The system will also consider "all other plates that have ever been scanned in the vicinity of the target vehicle within a 60-second window, allowing officers to determine if a culprit might be part of a larger, theretofore unknown caravan."
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With such an expansive amount of information being gathered under such dubious circumstances, this sophisticated surveillance program makes spying on civilians a routine part of the job for all law enforcement officials, not just the NYPD. (New York City and Microsoft intend to shop the jointly produced software to other cities, with New York City getting a 30% cut of the profits.
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) But it will be par for the course in the near future.

Profiling, NYPD Style

In addition to its overt surveillance programs, the NYPD has also gained notoriety in recent years for its overt racial profiling, a spying program which targets Muslim communities and political activists, and a stop-and-frisk program that has targeted more than 4 million New Yorkers–the majority of whom were black or Latino and had done nothing wrong–over the course of the past decade or so.
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Cracking Down on Protesters (Angel Chevrestt / New York Daily News)

In 2011 alone, 684,330 people were stopped and frisked by the police: 88% were totally innocent. Of those stopped, the majority were either black or Latino.
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Building on the NYPD's blatant practice of racial profiling, police officers in New York have also initiated a spying program which includes amassing data on New York Muslims, such as where they buy groceries and which cafes they visit.
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Among the tactics employed by the NYPD include the use of so-called "mosque crawlers," who document activities taking place at mosques; "rakers," who spy on Muslims in cafes and bookstores within the Muslim community
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(both involve clear violations of state laws against religious profiling); and the forcible detention and recruiting of informants, who are threatened with arrest unless they comply with police demands.
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Cracking Down on Protesters

The NYPD is also infamous for its historic crackdowns on protesters, dating back to the 2004 Republican National Convention when 1,806 protesters were arrested (most of the arrests were later thrown out at a cost of $8 million to the city).
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More recently, the NYPD flexed its substantial muscles to not only minimize the efforts of Occupy Wall Street protesters but also keep the media at a distance. One photographer who tried to take a picture of a bloodied protester being dragged away by police found himself slammed into a barricade and informed that he wasn't allowed to take photos.
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Loving Big Brother

What's happening in New York illustrates how easily people are led into the Orwellian illusion that security should trump freedom. However, as past regimes illustrate, such security measures eventually become tools of terror against the citizens themselves. "There are no safeguards to ensure that the NYPD doesn't break the law," warned author Leonard Levitt. "So far as I know, there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that the NYPD does not become a rogue organization."
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One thing is clear: if we as Americans continue to play into the desires of the government elite, if we continue to give credence to the political rat race, the foreign wars, the outrageous government spending, and the rigid conditioning of school children, we are simply digging our own graves. And on our tombstones it would be appropriate to have inscribed: "Here lie those who refused to listen to the warnings and speak up when freedom hung in the balance." And beneath that will be inscribed the last sentence in Orwell's
1984
, which describes Winston Smith following his re-education by the government. It reads simply: "He loved Big Brother."