Mayor Adams Describes NYC’s Expanding Surveillance: “Big Brother Is Protecting You”
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December 29, 2022
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December 29, 2022Considering how impactful language is, I’m always baffled when people use certain words without realizing what they’re REALLY saying. And New York City Mayor Eric Adams is a prime example of this. He gave an interview to POLITICO and discussed his promise to expand New York City’s use of technology in policing to address the historically high crime. Mayor Adams is much more pro-police than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, and he actually allotted $5B to the NYPD, And yet crime increased 23.5% over Mayor Adams’ first year. He described the plight of NYC police officers, saying,
“We had just this state of lawlessness that was happening and so we had to stabilize that. Added to the lawlessness there was this large feeling [that] morale was gone. Cops said, ‘We don’t even know what to do, man. We do the right thing, someone takes a picture of us at the end of it, next thing you know, everyone was blasting us.’”
One of the ways Mayor Adams plans to address this lawlessness is what POLITICO describes as “an expansion of technology-assisted policing to detect weapons,” which would couple with the existing expansion of facial recognition software use. Adams said,
It blows my mind how much we have not embraced technology, and part of that is because many of our electeds are afraid. Anything technology they think, ‘Oh it’s a boogeyman. It’s Big Brother watching you. No, Big Brother is protecting you.”
Listen, we can debate facial recognition software and various policing techniques all day. But an elected politician should probably never admit that his program is basically Big Brother. And saying that it’s just Big Brother “protecting you” doesn’t make it any better. As we all know, Big Brother could very well “protect” us all right into a gulag for wrongspeak or wrongthink. Who’s to say who Big Brother is “protecting?” And from whom? That’s what the FBI claimed to be doing when they coordinated with Big Tech to censor half of America for wrongthink. They claimed they were “protecting.”
As a general rule, politicians should probably avoid use of Orwellian language in describing things that people already fear are too Orwellian. Please, make Orwell fiction again.
2 Comments
Never underestimate the power of stupid. Whether that be the one speaking, or those to which he is speaking.
Let’s see here. State and municipal policies such as no-cash-bail, reduced prosecutions, and restrictions and harassment of the police lead to a crime explosion. The public cries out for relief. But rather than reverse the insane policies, the mayor advocates instituting a total-surveillance regime that would completely eliminate civilian privacy outside the strict confines of one’s home. A government abdicates its delegated responsibility while awarding itself more power yet again!