Friend,
All summer long, Mayor Adams and the NYPD have pushed new surveillance boondoggles that threaten New Yorkers’ privacy and civil rights, from faulty subway scanners to ever increasing drones. And this week, we learned of some new technosolutionist gadgets Adams had to throw in before the autumn equinox.
Yesterday, the NY Daily News broke that Adams and NYPD have spent $222K on 14 military-grade “throw-bots” typically used in war zones, including in Ukraine. It’s hard to imagine a city worse suited for this sort of tech than New York. These devices were developed to toss on the wide-open battlefield, not high-rise apartments in the cramped corridors of the country’s densest city.
Once again, the mayor is wasting money on flashy but ultimately useless tech that simply can’t help patrol the city. And that was just Thursday. On Tuesday, he also vaguely suggested there was a “new assignment” for the Times Square robocop, a statement contradicted by his own Deputy Press Secretary who said they still haven’t found another use for it.
As always, the mayor buys the bots first, then searches for far-fetched justifications for their purchase. We’re tired of our tax dollars going toward these silly experiments. No more surprise robocops, throw-bots, or any other creepy gadgets.
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