Milwaukee Law Enforcement Wants to Hunt Us with Robots
A year ago the title of this article would have seemed hyperbolic and alarmist, but this has been an extraordinarily bad year. Also, it’s just true. The Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) launched a drone team to expand their robotic surveillance of the city. The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has been using drones for a few years. Both agencies are pursuing facial recognition technology (FRT) so that their drones, red-light cameras, and other surveillance equipment can rapidly and automatically identify people. Earlier this summer a Shepherd Express article by Emilio De Torre of the Milwaukee Turners described these efforts to make Milwaukee “a dystopian surveillance city” in grave detail.
We must understand the political context for these developments. The United States is being taken over by a widely recognized authoritarian demagogue who embraces and empowers literal mad scientists. Trump’s big budget bill expands ICE into an army targeting the domestic population. Their main focus is immigrants and the Latino community, but they have started targeting homeless, neurodivergent people, low income people in Black led cities, and are ready to pivot to everyone. Republican governors are incredibly eager to assist these efforts. All of these moves were predictable, either part of Project 2025, or Curtis Yarvin’s stupid plans for a centralized national police force and a CEO monarch.
These techno nightmares consume massive amounts of energy and water. If the cop robots don’t kill us, the pollution and climate disasters needed to operate them will (including recent flooding here in Milwaukee). Or, maybe they’ll make the switch to nuclear power so we can die from radiation after a meltdown.
The ideology behind this power grab is overtly dystopian. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s excellent The Rise of End Times Fascism digs into the thought leaders guiding MAGA Republicans, and concludes that “we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants.”
Who Loves Cop Robots?
Well, the cops, obviously, but also: capitalists. From Umberto Eco and Robert Paxton to Mussolini and Hitler themselves, most experts on fascism recognize the partnership between authoritarian traditionalists and wealthy elites at its core. Those wealthy elites are backing Trump, and are recklessly enamored with artificial intelligence and FRT. They incorporate FRT into routine transactions to normalize it. The US chamber of commerce has issued a letter, bemoaning municipalities that issue moratoriums on FRT, and begging congress to defend their cop robots.
The chamber of commerce letter, and all the weaselly statements by Chief Norman and Mayor Cavalier Johnson (who might as well be a cop, he loves them so much) emphasize that FRT and drones should be used with “caution” and “guardrails”. They also insist that the technology is only for hunting the very worst criminals.
This ripe line of bullshit can only be believed by people ignorant or naive enough to not understand the nature of policing. First, it is a job for lazy cowards. Law enforcement do not spend their time solving serious crimes or going after dangerous hardened criminals. Most cops make one serious felony arrest a year. The bulk of their time is spent on broken windows, community “outreach” (which means racial targeting and copaganda), or routine stops and paperwork.
We could imagine that new tools could shift the priorities of law enforcement, but the technology on the table is not suited for that. The whole function of information technology is about massive amounts of information: building databases, recognizing patterns, and revealing networks. Mass surveillance is what this stuff is built for.
Despite what the TV and the bootlickers say, there simply are not very many dangerous, violent criminals in the world. We have seen Trump’s promise to deport all the “violent criminal aliens” quickly run out and shift to include student activists, everyday workers, and even people with documents. Now, they are going after Afghan refugees, despite objections from veterans who consider the refugees heroes for helping the US military fight the Taliban.
FRT and drones will similarly shift from targeting the scariest people to the most ordinary. It is utterly naive to believe that the police, capitalists, and mad scientists are developing and deploying all this expensive mass surveillance technology to only go after a tiny, specific, fraction of dangerous people they tell us they need it for.
Do not trust the police.
They lie. They do organized crime stuff. MPD have been caught lying about internal investigations. They continue to fuck around with the list of their most vile officers. They fund political campaigns attacking their critics and installing politicians who pass laws to guarantee all these expansions of their funding, and to dismantle what little oversight there is.
Keep these lies in mind when cops tell us that they will not combine FRT with other technologies, like their drones, and our electeds believe them. MPD and MCSO already intentionally hid previous use of FRT from both the public and the Fire and Police Commission for years! Without restrictions and oversight, cops can run footage they collect from drones, red light cameras, ring doorbells, or any other surveillance through FRT anytime they want. Law enforcement always partners with private tech companies on these projects, and one recently got caught secretly using the data they collected to do widespread surveillance and tracking.
If the supporters of FRT actually wanted the guardrails and oversight they talk about, they would take action to restrain it, and support the call for Community Control of Police Surveillance. Unfortunately, they won’t. Even people who speak against FRT, or the out of control police budgets, or just generally oppose the looming robo-fascist dystopia, are failing to take action. For more on that, see our article: Who Will Rein in Milwaukee’s cops?
