Jessica Tisch, NYPD Intelligence Division, and the Handschu Agreement

I'm going to take a slightly different tack with this article and explore the long-term state of play with the New York City Police Department's intelligence division and the oversight of its political surveillance operations under the landmark Handschu Agreement.

New York City's (indicted) cop mayor chose what presumes is his fourth and final police commissioner this week, selecting local billionaire scion and current Department of Sanitation head Jessica Tisch to run the NYPD. For those not familiar with the New York City upper crust families that control Gotham's largest real estate firms and wield tremendous influence in city and state governance - her ascent to the head of the country's largest police department as a civilian with zero experience and some as a sworn officer is both eyebrow-raising and a signal that Tisch is running headlong into ambitions for higher office.

The sprawling Tisch clan are well-established amongst New York City's oligarchy: they own the Loews Corporation (movie theaters, yes, but also tons of real estate that they also developed into lucrative for-profit housing), part of the (failing) New York Giants NFL franchise, donate lavishly to Israel Lobby components as well as Joe Manchin-style Dems and Republican congressional candidates, are deeply enmeshed in New York City's cultural institutions (board seats on WNET, the New York Public Library, buildings named for them at NYU, The Met Museum, Lincoln Center and elswheres) and political world (Jessica's mother, Meryl, served on the New York Board of Regents for twenty years, including as chancellor).

Understandably, the Israeli press is salivating over the news of Tisch's appointment.

Jessica's background at NYPD is in the Intelligence Division, where she got her start as an analyst after her relatives on the board of the New York City Police Foundation (a notorious slush fund for the NYPD) begged then-Commissioner Ray Kelly to give her a job, per longtime police reporter Len Levitt (RIP).

By 2012, she was serving as the NYPD's "counterterrorism director of planning and policy" - which, it's worthwhile pointing out, was smack in the middle of the NYPD's notorious post-9/11 'mosque-raking' program where the city's entire Muslim and Middle Eastern population was placed under blanket surveillance until exposed by the Associated Press in 2011.

Reams have been written about this, but suspiciously, since Tisch's appointed there's been no exploration of her past work in Intel and involvement in the mosque-raking program, aside from passing mentions that she worked on reports about 'The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' despite speaking no Arabic or having any background in the region. What's clear is that Commissioner Kelly, the architect of not only the mosque-raking program but Mike Bloomberg's stop and frisk regime, quickly gave Tisch a forward-facing role ahead of far more experienced NYPD brass, sparking speculation that he sought to curry political favor with her influential family.

Under Kelly's successor Bill Bratton, Tisch was promoted to deputy commissioner for Information Technology, where she oversaw the rollout of NYPD's Domain Awareness System panopticon that connects CCTV, gunshot detection sensors, license plate readers and other surveillance technology to a central command hub at One Police Plaza. Technological sophistication and prowess is supposedly one of Tisch's fields of expertise, which allowed her to later become the head of the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications under Mayor Warren Wilhelm Jr. (Bill DeBlasio for those of you who wanna buy whatever story he's selling this week). However, this level of savvy appeared to be completely missing when Tisch made the baffling decision to equip all 36,000 uniformed officers on the job with Windows Phones to the tune of $160 million. For those of you who don't recall, that particular smartphone was an absolute lemon and beat cops had their new devices bricked after just a few months to be replaced wholesale with iPhones. At cost to the taxpayer, of course.

Why delve so far into Tisch's political connections, past work in the NYPD and penchant for surveillance tech? Because the NYPD has a very, very long history of political surveillance and repression that long predates its still-emerging complicity, along with the feds, in the February 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. The department's Bureau of Special Special Services and Investigations got its start as the 'Italian Squad' at the turn of the century, monitoring, assaulting, arresting and deporting migrants involved with Communist, Socialist and Anarchist movement as part of the infamous Palmer Raids. BOSSI was integral to McCarthy-era NYPD's red hunting, and served as the tip of the spear in it war against the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Weathermen and other components of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s - along, of course, with surveilling and framing up above ground, nonviolent activists.

The scope of BOSSI's surveillance methods surfaced during the Panther 21 trial, the longest in New York City history. A Manhattan jury took less than two hours in 1971 to acquit almost two dozen Black Panthers (including Afeni Shakur, Kuwasi Balagoon, Baba Odinga, Sundiata Acoli and Dhoruba bin Wahad, amongst others) accused of planning coordinated attacks on NYPD precincts in 1969. Paul Chevigny's excellent Cops and Rebels is the authoritative account of the trial and BOSSI's provocateurs in setting up the Panther 21 for those interested.

Following the trial, New York City's radical attorneys were determined to bring the NYPD's intelligence operations to heel, and after years of shopping around for a client, decided to take on anti-Vietnam War activist Barbara Handschu as lead plaintiff in a class action with 15 other people spyed on by the NYPD. The original claim against NYPD was filed in 1971, and after fourteen years of legal wrangling, in 1985, Handschu's attorneys and the NYPD reached a binding agreement in 1985 to establish a set of guidelines and regulations for the NYPD's political surveillance known as the Handschu Agreement. In short, the Intelligence Division was restricted to conducting investigations only within the scope of the agreement's guidelines, was required to document the legal basis for each investigation in writing, and most importantly, barred Intel from opening an investigation into political, religious, or ideological activities of a person or group "specific information has been received by the Police Department that a person or group engaged in political activity is engaged in, about to engage in or has threatened to engage in conduct which constitutes a crime…."

As expected, these guidelines were blown out of the water by 9/11, and the NYPD convinced U.S. District Judge Charles Haight to seriously roll back the limitations on what the newly-expanded Intelligence Division, under the aggressive leadership of former Central Intelligence Agency veteran David Cohen, could do regarding political surveillance.

The mosque-raking program and the NYPD's widespread intelligence gathering on left-wing social movements in the city, including the anti-war movement of the 2000s, opposition to the 2004 Republican National Convention, victims of police violence and the city's then-burgeoning Anarchist movement, were the end result.

Amusingly enough, I'm definitely in the Bloomberg-era Intel Division files related to their surveillance of the Friends of Brad Will, a group set up to press for justice for veteran Indymedia journalist and squatter Brad Will. Brad was shot and killed by off-duty policemen involved in repressing a Fall 2006 uprising in Oaxaca Mexico. He ended up recording his own death on video.

I'd worked with Brad as a teenager while volunteering at the Indypendent newspaper very early in its existence, and went to pay my respects at a number of the events held for him in the city. One of them was a memorial at Saint Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, and on my way out I spotted two undercover cops in a Crown Victoria with a video camera pointed at the entry to the grounds to capture people coming and going from the gathering. Paperwork detailing the surveillance of Friends of Brad Will at that location and on that date were unearthed years later by Matt Appuzzo and Adam Goldman of the Associated Press.

Once the extent of the Bloomberg/Kelly/Cohen-era surveillance operation became clear, it generated broad grassroots pushback from NYC's Middle Eastern and activist communities, with consequent legal efforts leading to a re-imposition of the pre-9/11 guidelines on the NYPD and the creation of a 10-person committee, including a civilian representative, to oversee NYPD's compliance with the Handschu consent decree - which was nonexistent, per a 2016 NYC Department of Investigation audit that also revealed a full 95 percent of Intel's investigations targeted Muslim or Middle Eastern New Yorkers.

The domestic terrorism landscape of today is far different than it was in the 2010s, thanks to the Neo-Fascist revival I'm so fucking tired of writing about and the rise in lone-wolf 1488 terrorists like the Baltimore Nazi who took the bus up to New York City to stab a middle-aged black man to death in 2017. And while NYPD intel does dip its toes into the white boy end of the pool, they're very much weighed towards jihadi terrorism on analysis and investigative focus. That is all the much more true in the context of more than a year of sustained protests against Israel's genocidal military campaign in Gaza, which engaged the NYPD in dozens of violent encounters (mostly on behalf of the cops) with pro-Palestine demonstrators and included militarized dismantlings of student occupations at Columbia University and City College of New York last Spring.

Combine the renewed focus on pro-Palestinian activism (remember, Palestine solidarity protests were the initial focus of 'anti-terrorism' measures and policing operations in the United States and Western Europe in the 1970s) with the wide-scale adoption of new surveillance technologies like gunshot detectors, drones, robot dogs, subway scanners and artificial intelligence by Eric Adams' NYPD, and you've got a very different landscape for overseeing NYPD's political surveillance operations. Some of these tools were already used against protesters during prior administrations, particularly the activist subjected to a drone outside his window, a six hour standoff, and (since dropped) felony charges) for yelling through a bullhorn too loudly at a 2020 George Floyd demonstration.

The Handschu Agreement has no scope for monitoring how such technology is used to monitor overt political activity, and the loophole of a 'criminal investigation' is often used by the NYPD to not report investigations of political groups or activists to its oversight body. That's leaving aside the department's blanket refusal to comply with a weak city law requiring a full inventory of its surveillance tools.

Attorneys involved in the Handschu Agreement oversight have long said they believe they don't have a full scope of the NYPD's political surveillance. Indeed, there are criminal cases - particularly the case of an activist who worked with an NYPD informant to cut the brake lines of a police van during a summer 2020 protest in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn - which offer glimpses of the sort of case that NYPD Intel is working on and not reporting to its purported oversight agency.

Now, with the NYPD run by a self-professed technology expert who came straight from the tainted waters of the Cohen/Kelly era Intelligence Division and the city riven not only by rampant tensions over Israel and Palestine, but also Trump's re-election and the almost certain return of the Proud Boys and their ilk to city streets, Intel Division must be an area of focus for activists, watchdogs and the city's atrophied press corps. The Handschu Agreement is forty years old this week, and as I've pointed out above, has major blind spots given the NYPD's success in evading the rules and the vast advancements in technology since the oversight guidelines were drawn up. Given the aversion to oversight and the marked rightward ideological drift exhibited by NYPD's brass in recent years, it might well be worth going back to the drawing board and overhauling the whole thing. But barring any new revelations of systemic abuse or transgression, that is...not likely.