The New Homeland Security State

Prior to the Republican National Convention, I thought I knew all about the militarization of Manhattan – the transformation of the island into a "homeland security state" – and about New York City as the paradigm for the security culture that increasingly grips American society. After all, I wrote about it in "Fortress Big Apple." It turns out I didn't know the half of it. Only after writing that piece did I discover that the New York Police Department (NYPD) had purchased two experimental sound weapons known as Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) which I had once described in writing about U.S. experimental weapons research in Iraq. I had then termed the deployment of an LRAD here during the convention "improbable" – yet there it was out on the very same streets I was walking. I also looked out my window and caught sight of the ultimate blending of corporatism and the police-state – the Fuji blimp – now emblazoned with a second logo: "NYPD." This spy-in-the-sky, outfitted with the latest in video-surveillance equipment, had been loaned free of charge to the police all week long.

But even finding out about these new high-tech tools of the homeland security-state didn't make things clear to me; nor did the ever-present roar of helicopter rotors as those of us in the streets during the RNC were surveilled from above; or even when Brendan Galligan of the NYPD Aviation Unit bluntly told a reporter from the local ABC television affiliate: "I'm looking for any kind of crime on the grou[nd]. In this case, we're looking for roving mobs of people traveling in unison, that might indicate some sort of problem for the ground troops." "People traveling in unison" a crime? "Ground troops"? I should have fully understood then, but I didn't.

I didn't quite get it when I saw the stone-faced feds out on the streets with those ever-present earpieces piping in commands from who knows where; nor as I scuttled between concrete barricades and metal fences in the area around Madison Square Garden while remote cameras tracked my every move; nor when a march I was in was flanked by a phalanx of bicycle-riding police; nor when a corps of plainclothes cops on scooters trolled the streets near Times Square. You would think that I would have understood it when the peaceful group of activists I was with were pushed off the sidewalk by police in front of us, while the cops in back ordered us onto the sidewalk; or when, left with no options, we tried to escape by crossing Broadway only to have some of our number caught in the NYPD's literal dragnet – rolls of orange plastic netting which were repeatedly unfurled all across the city, snagging protesters, press, legal observers, pedestrians, and bystanders alike. I can't understand why I didn't get it when I looked up from watching some cops press a man's head to the pavement to see a hoard of police on horseback heading down the street towards me; or when officers from the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) filmed me, apparently for walking in a park or perhaps for what I might do, prompting a young woman to sidle up next to me and whisper "they're tailing you" – making me wonder, was the warning sincere or could she be with them too?

I witnessed the fleets of black SUVs with police escorts roar down virtually empty city streets near the Madison Square Garden bubble. On numerous occasions, I saw flatbed police trucks filled with the very interlocking metal barriers that a judge had ruled could no longer be used to pen in protesters (as the NYPD had been doing for about a decade) – and I saw those metal barricades pressed back into action on multiple occasions. I witnessed a black van door slide open, revealing tactical-gear clad troops of some sort, brandishing automatic rifles. I witnessed cops and feds on rooftops with binoculars and cameras trained on me or my compatriots. I saw cops peering through the near-blacked out windows of unmarked cars and noticed the NYPD's "radio emergency patrol vehicles" wherever protesters seemed to gather.