Weekly Member Update - July 27, 2026
Image Courtesy of the Facebook Page of Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello
The Week in Flock
The big Flocking local news this week was the felling of three Flock cameras on the streets of Troy overnight Thursday. In her trademark hyperbolic style, Troy Mayor Carmella Mantello called the vandalism “violent and unhinged,” but it’s hard to not lay some of the blame for this circumstance at the feet of Mantello and her administration. Remember, these cameras were installed — as they often are — without the knowledge and input of the Collar City community and, when Mantello’s constituents started voicing their vociferous objections earlier this year, Mantello dismissed them out of hand. And then, when the Troy City Council tried to shut the cameras down, Mantello took the extraordinary and ridiculous step of declaring a citywide state of emergency to keep the Flock funds flowing. So, for months now, the will of the Trojan People has been stymied; is it any wonder that someone got sick of looking at these tools of mass surveillance and resorted to self help? As our friends with DeFlock Troy plainly stated, “Some people feel like they need to take matters into their own hands when their government is not . . . it’s unfortunate.” Perhaps there’s light on the horizon, however; the Troy City Council took steps toward limiting Mantello’s emergency powers last week and, this coming week, Mantello’s response is due to the City Council’s lawsuit seeking to vacate the still-in-effect, now-118-day state of emergency. Meanwhile, the felled cameras will invariably be replaced; while the cameras remain Flock’s property, thanks to the language of Flock’s Terms and Conditions, the taxpayers of the City of Troy will unfortunately be responsible for the cost of replacement.
For what it’s worth, it isn’t just the citizens of Troy that are taking the scourge of Flock surveillance into their own frustrated hands. Similar incidents have been reported in Ashland, Ohio, Houston, Texas, Athens, Georgia, New Bern, North Carolina and in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where the rascals replaced the cameras with American flags. Nice touch.
And the stories of police misuse of Flock surveillance continue to roll in. This week, it was a detective in Orlando, Florida who used Flock to track her husband’s ex-wife.
Even when citizens are successful in getting rid of Flock, local electeds will often miss the point and just swap out Flock for another surveillance company. So goes the story for our friends in Syracuse; out with Flock, in with Axon…
One assurance you will always hear from your beneficent local law enforcement agency is that they do not share their Flock data with ICE. That’s nice, but it doesn’t matter. Because of the interconnected nature of Flock’s vast network, you only need one collaborative police agency somewhere to open the door to ICE, and then ICE can see everywhere. The Minnesota Star Tribune is the latest to prove this point; during ICE’s murderous Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis last winter, ICE didn't need cooperation from the Minneapolis Police Department, they could get access to Flock data in Minneapolis from their friends in Indiana, North Carolina or the US Postal Service. The problem is the cameras, pure and simple, and that problem can’t be cured by your well-meaning local cops. Remember this when the Troy PD speaks in platitudes and agrees to “common-sense guidelines” over the use of Flock cameras; so long as the Rensselaer County Sheriff keeps cooperating with ICE, any restrictions on the Troy PD aren’t worth the Local Law #3 that they will be printed on. And, even if AG Tish James gets her way and forces Sheriff Bourgault to stop working with ICE, so long as Troy — and Albany, and Green Island, and East Greenbush, and so on — has Flock surveillance cameras on its streets, ICE is looking in through a back door afforded to them by some other cops states away.
August 16 - 22 is the National Week of Action Against ALPRs; here’s the local agenda.
Odds & Ends:
We got another local glimpse at ICE depravity this week. You probably heard the story of Johan Sandoval, the Savannah State college baseball player who was abducted by ICE in Clifton Park on Fourth of July weekend. After 13 days of detention, Johan has since been released, with an ankle monitor and scheduled check-ins, but that hasn’t stopping ICE from harassing him. This week had reporting that ICE still frequents the apartment complex where Johan is staying with his fiancé and her family, just driving around, waving at Johan mockingly and heckling his future mother-in-law. You know, typical law enforcement activity…
Meanwhile, ICE is abducting more of our neighbors than ever. All eyes this week should be on Springfield, Ohio and other Haitian enclaves across the Country, as Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians ends today. And, this so-called “immigration enforcement” operation not only has social, psychological and cultural costs, it also is bad for business. By way of example, ICE enforcement operations cost Los Angeles businesses more than $3 million in June alone.
ICE is ramping up its abduction activity in airports; if you are undocumented and must travel, even domestically, Immigrants Rising has published guidance.
A federal judge in Texas has prohibited ICE from deporting one of the witnesses to the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. But Kash Patel’s FBI is no longer going to investigate future ICE murders and assaults, since ICE clearly is capable of policing itself.
The State Department issued a 100-page report this past week entitled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The report recounts what its authors describe as a seven-decade “campaign of subversion against the United States . . . that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.” The whole report — which tries to breath new life into a ton of red-scare era documentation and reports from the 1950s and 60s — would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous; not only does it lay the predicate for future military action in Cuba, it also has an entire section dedicated to identifying Cuba’s current “front groups and fellow travelers” (we shit you not, they really use the phrase “fellow travelers”). Among the groups identified as instrumentalities of Cuba’s ongoing and insidious influence operation here in the United States are the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, Black Lives Matter and, wait for it, the Democratic Socialists of America. The report also name checks a host of politicians and other public figures, like Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Maxine Waters, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani (of course), Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s fame and Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler.
As the right bemoans the rise of “communism” and the ascendancy of the Democratic Socialist movement, the avatar of its agita, Mayor Mamdani, is dismantling burdensome overregulation to unleash small businesses and free enterprise. Zohran really is an existential threat to the American way of life, isn’t he?
How about some good news? On the schadenfreude front, Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck is well on its way to being the biggest automotive flop in human history, surpassing the legendary apex loser, the Ford Edsel. On the reason for optimism front, Emerson College has Democrats as a +11 in generic Congressional polling; when Democrats retook the house in 2018, polling had them as +7 to +9 in generic polling. If only the Dems had more fresh and inspirational candidates, they’d be up 20.
Here in New York, the Regime is renewing its efforts to have Penn Station renamed in tribute to our corrupt Orange King.
The founder and longtime leader of the nonpartisan voting reform organization FairVote has endorsed RCV Albany’s Ranked Choice Voting/Unified Election proposal. At the July 20 meeting of the City of Albany Common Council, ranked-choice voting was a hot topic, with 8th Ward Representative Jack Flynn introducing proposed Local Law O, which would bring ranked-choice voting to Albany, albeit without the single unified election supported by Indivisible Albany and RCV Albany. Local Law O now heads to the Common Council’s Law Committee for further deliberation and will be back on the Council’s agenda for consideration at the Council’s August 3 meeting.
As we mentioned last week, the Town of Guilderland is contemplating its own local moratorium on data center construction, looking to join the growing nationwide movement against unbridled data center construction. The same Emerson poll discussed above that has Dems + 11 in the race for control of Congress also has polling showing data center approval underwater by 37 points among poll respondents, and the percentage of people who oppose data center construction in their home communities has increased by 21 points just since December. There is no polling showing whether Capital Region residents are for or against the proposed Kenwood Data Center, but we’d wager that our community actually exceeds the national polling averages in terms of data center opposition. So, with it abundantly clear that Governor Hochul’s half-loaf data center moratorium poses no bar to Kenwood going forward, it is imperative that the City of Albany join the party and pass its own Citywide data center moratorium. At the Common Council meeting this past week, we gave the members a head start and distributed a draft zoning ordinance for the City legislators to consider (and improve upon, if they see fit). The Common Council doesn’t even need to give us credit; all the thanks we need is getting the moratorium done, and soon.
Indivisible has launched its Hands Off Our Vote campaign. Enlist and you’ll get notified of key voting deadlines, get updates on any threats to your voting rights and learn how to counter them, and be ready to mobilize in defense of your vote.
Finally, as we collectively pine for Medicare for All and endure the repercussions of last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — including increased work requirements for Medicaid eligibility and increased health insurance costs for more than 450,000 New Yorkers — we’re reminded that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation which brought Medicaid and Medicare into existence 61 years ago this week. Citizen Action is marking the occasion with rallies across the state on Thursday, and we’re happy to help sponsor the Albany rally in West Capitol Park starting at noon. Hope to see you there!