One strawberry sundae with sprinkles, a chocolate swirl, and a side order of police surveillance, please! In a development that feels like it might be a scene from a cartoon rather than real life, the NYPD has apparently been caught red-handed (well, raspberry-syrup-handed) operating a fake ice cream truck to spy on citizens.
That would already be ridiculous, but it turns out they might not even be competent at staying undercover, as someone peeked through the passenger window and spotted a telltale sign:
Suspicious Ice Cream Truck Seen near Pro-Palestine Rally at Brooklyn College
— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) May 12, 2025
They made it too Obvious pic.twitter.com/alNUAaH2i4
Yup, the NYPD’s ice-cream dispensing undercover supercops seem to use truck keys with a very obvious NYPD fob attached, which they left dangling in full view of everyone. Great work guys, way to blow the operation! In an amusing twist, the NYPD appears to have even set up a website for their covert ice-cream operation which, in a passive-aggressive twist, now features a photo of the van with a sign saying “key chain still inside, take a pic”.
On this occasion, the suspicious van was secretly surveilling a rally in support of Palestinians at Brooklyn College, prompting users to quite rightly point out that the cops should have better things to do than “spy on Americans protesting against genocide“. It’s also ironic (in the most miserable way possible) that cops are using an ice-cream van to snoop on people taking action against a famine.
Others point out that if you’re going to spend public money on a super-secret fake ice cream van, set up a fictitious company, and use it to monitor people, you should at least try to do it competently, or you’re simply wasting money.
That said, this ice cream van fiasco is simply a drop in the bucket when it comes to the NYPD’s surveillance budget. For example, the NYPD is known to have a squad of military-grade X-ray fans costing between $729,000 and $825,000 each, which scan passing cars with X-rays and have been criticized for exposing bystanders to radiation.
In 2022, the campaign group S.T.O.P. (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) revealed that the NYPD’s secret surveillance contracts total up to almost $3 billion and claim they’re of questionable effectiveness. Their executive director Albert Fox Cahn bluntly says: “The money that goes towards these policing boondoggles could be going towards schools, trash pickup, or almost any other aspect of city life.
So, next time you’re out on the streets protesting, maybe skip the refreshingly chilled dairy snack at the end of the day. Who knows, when you reach for your ice-cream, you may hear the snap of handcuffs clicking closed around your wrist.
