TROY, NEW YORK – Since April 1, Troy, New York has been in a state of emergency declared by its mayor, Carmella Mantello. The emergency in question is not a natural disaster, nor is it a wave of violence, or a mass uprising: it is the City Council’s refusal to approve funds for the city’s Flock contract, which renewed automatically only days after the Council decided to table their vote on the renewal in the wake of public backlash. The mayor claimed that the loss of the cameras would create a public safety emergency and that failing to pay on the contract would risk a lawsuit. Now, over three months later, the city-wide surveillance system is being paid for with the city’s emergency fund, and city government’s war with itself continues in the form of battles over police department policy and emergency powers.
The city’s initial contract with Flock was signed by police department officials in 2021, without the approval of the City Council or any opportunity for public comment. In mid-March of this year, the contract was finally sent to the City Council only weeks before its automatic renewal, and as the public was just starting to learn about the system. In the one meeting that the city held to allow the public to comment, citizens of Troy echoed many of the concerns that people have been expressing across the nation.
Flock and other “automatic license plate reader”, or ALPR, systems have been facing ever-increasing public backlash over the warrantless tracking and surveillance of the entire population, the possibility of incorrect identification, and their potential for abuse, with cases of police using it to stalk critics and ex-partners. While many cities strictly limit data sharing, as Troy says it has recently done, there have been cases where Flock shared data out-of-state anyway, and cases where Flock employees accessed cameras themselves.
The City Council tabled the contract pending further investigation, which actually allowed the automatic renewal to proceed. They did, however, decide not to send the payments until their concerns had been addressed, a decision quickly followed by the mayor’s state of emergency declaration, which received vocal support from the police. On Facebook, she wrote that the pushback against the renewal was “an effort to begin defunding our Troy Police Department.”
Since then, there have been a series of conflicts within the city’s government, each drifting further from the immediate issue of surveillance. The City Council has been challenging the mayor’s ability to bypass them with a lawsuit in the county Supreme Court, as well as in a legislative process to change the executive emergency powers in the city charter. The Council has also been working on legislation that would add limitations and requirements to the city’s usage of these surveillance systems. The bill would provide much stricter limits than those of the city policy recently updated as an agreement between the mayor, City Council, and police department—an attempt at calming public backlash with rules that are only enforced internally and which could be much more easily revoked.
Though the Troy City Council responded to the public opposition against the renewal, they have also been responding to those who approve of it, the Council President repeatedly assuring that they are not anti-police and that such surveillance systems are important law enforcement tools. The Council’s demands are a 48-hour limit on the data gathered by this universal dragnet cast across the city, to use audits to catch abuses after the fact, to be able to enact such restrictions before the city pays for a new tool of repression, and other improvements that do not address the root of the issue.
The compromises of the City Council are not the compromises of the masses. Peoples Defense Troy, alongside many of the city’s working-class people and organizations, continues to demand the end of Troy’s Flock contract and the removal of every one of Flock’s cameras.
Troy’s story has more twists and turns than many, but it is a familiar pattern in the fight against state terror: auto-renew contracts signed without public review, legalistic efforts to undo them undermined by the staunch resistance of police departments, and all public resistance being characterized as anti-safety. The Flock struggle is larger than Troy, and the struggle against surveillance as a tool of fascistization, imperialism, and capitalist state terror is larger than Flock. While the local conditions may vary, all who take part in this struggle are connected by a common demand: nothing less than liberation.
