Abolitionists have long warned that "surveillance oversight" laws will expand policing, and here's a report promoting these laws as "NEW CCOPS ON THE BEAT" (yikes af) https://twitter.com/STOPSpyingNY/status/1359585447127748610

Also, that tweet says these laws are "working" but look at the report's final paragraph: it acknowledges they have no clue if these laws are eliminating surveillance

Last summer @stoplapdspying put out a critical analysis of surveillance bureaucracy laws, warning they will expand surveillance https://stoplapdspying.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/TRUST-THE-PPL-not-the-POLICE.pdf

We predicted the exact problem this NEW CCOPS report grapples with, but we named it as a reason to fundamentally reject this approach: police will use these laws to frame surveillance on their terms and then claim public approval of their violence https://twitter.com/sh4keer/status/1273846677472858112

The day after the POST Act passed, the @STOPSpyingNY lawyer who wrote this NEW CCOPS ON THE BEAT report mocked critics of the law and posted clips from the West Wing to declare “Victory is mine, victory is mine.” https://twitter.com/FoxCahn/status/1273932832168124421

What we warned about is now playing out in NY, where last summer @STOPSpyingNY joined pro-police politicians in celebrating the POST Act (a surveillance bureaucracy law) as a "vital victory" but are now complaining that NYPD is cooking the process https://www.stopspying.org/post-act-comment

Abolitionists always warn that we shouldn't build things we will have to organize against later, which appears to be what @STOPSpyingNY did here. This is called organizing against yourself and also playing yourself.

NYPD recently published its first POST Act reports. Sure enough they say all forms of NYPD surveillance are very harmless and very useful. What else would you expect from empowering cops to self-audit their surveillance and write self-governance policies? https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/about/about-nypd/public-comment.page

POST Act proponents said the law was necessary because we can't dismantle what we don't know. That's bullshit. For example, NYPD's POST Act report on the gang database reveals virtually nothing we didn't know three years ago: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/post-act/criminal-group-database_nypd-impact-and-use-policy_draft-for-public-comment_01.11.2021.pdf

We could have used this summer's mass hostility toward NYPD to ban gang databases and other harmful tools. But a rich nonprofit was focused on transparency and oversight laws. So now we have to organize against NYPD spinning the gang database's use and harms on their terms.

Laws like this are counterinsurgency. No one was facing down riot police and tear gas for surveillance bureaucracy, but legal nonprofits were eager to handed politicians an easy victory. Laws like the POST ACt are how reformers try to pacify and subvert radical movements.

Also it's kind of hard to ignore @STOPSpyingNY so closely resembling the name and design of @stoplapdspying, which was founded a decade ago. There's of course a long history of white-led nonprofits coopting and gentrifying grassroots work, but it's rarely so stark.