By Austen Fisher
New Yorkers just can’t stop talking about the rats.
From Mayor Adams’ appointment of a new City Hall “rat czar” to last week’s launch of a color-coded “rat information portal,” mapping building inspection histories, these unwelcome neighbors are getting nearly everyone’s attention except those who need to pay the most attention: the Department of Sanitation. Instead of focusing on the core work of keeping the rats at bay and the streets safer (from a health perspective), NYC Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch has picked a surprising alternative priority: surveillance.
Garbage piling up on sidewalks and streets has been an issue for New York City, leading to an influx of rats and bad press. Tisch, the former NYPD surveillance czar, seems to want to playact like she still works at 1 Police Plaza, as her response has been trying to surveil trash off the street, rather than actually collecting and disposing of it.
Last year, New York City implemented a pilot program in the Bronx that uses surveillance cameras to watch for “illegal dumping.” Despite this program, the city’s sidewalks are reportedly 1.6% dirtier than last year. Undeterred, Albany has decided to double down with a new bill that would encourage municipal sanitation departments throughout the state to install more cameras in a futile attempt to combat “dumping.”
Two more local New York City bills have similar provisions. One would install cameras on all street sweepers to report parking, stopping, or standing violations. The other would install surveillance cameras to identify anyone throwing household trash in a public litter basket.
The proposed legislation may seem innocuous, but consider that when Tisch was head of NYPD’s department of information technology, it was notorious for secretly using surveillance technology on New Yorkers. Yet, for all that surveillance tech, New Yorkers didn’t feel any safer. In fact, crime was reported up 4.1% this year, with a 14.9% increase in felony assault . . . despite this uptick in police technology.
“Illegal dumping” is just a drop in the bucket of New York’s sanitation issues; legally tossed trash makes up the majority of garbage on NYC’s curbs. This year, the Department of Sanitation allocated $1.4 million of this year’s budget, and nearly $400,000 annually thereafter, to expanded camera enforcement in sanitation. Additional funding has been allocated for sanitation surveillance via discretionary funding, which allocates money to non-profits to provide social services. What community is served by watching waste? Surveilling public trash-tossing in order to nail errant scofflaws (of whom there aren’t a lot) will do nothing to reduce the amount of garbage on city streets.
Instead of fixing legitimate sanitation issues or even ensuring new pick-up initiatives are effective, the Adams administration seems bent on wasting taxpayers’ money on the techno-solutionist boondoggles of expensive cameras on the City’s streets and the Rat Information Portal.
The directive from the mayor’s office to Tisch is clear: criminalize and punish. In fact, she’s on record saying, “The Sanitation Department is going to catch you and . . . you can be locked up . . . get a $4,000 summons, and your vehicle will be impounded. It’s not a question of if, [but] when.” This attempt of the mayor’s office to spend millions surveilling and criminalizing New Yorkers seems to take a page out of the NYPD playbook (and that of police departments around the country): criminalizing poverty and continuing cycles of systemic inequity.
The street sweeper bill mandates reporting “to the commissioner of finance and the police commissioner” for enforcement. This would result in more parking tickets and fines as police supplement the city budget. The public litter basket bill explicitly states that law enforcement could use footage collected by the Department of Sanitation. The New York Senate legislation doesn’t even define “illegal dumping,” making the law ripe for selective enforcement by the NYPD.
Austen Fisher is a legal intern at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Program, entering his third year at Brooklyn Law School.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misreported the Department of Sanitation’s budget figures.