New York police end Muslim surveillance program
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| FILE - In this Aug. 16, 2013, file photo, visitors socialize after a Jumu'ah prayer service outside the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge and mosque in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The New York Police Department targeted the mosque as a part of a terrorism enterprise investigation beginning in 2003, spying on it for years. On Tuesday, April 15, 2014, the NYPD confirmed that it has disbanded the special unit that operated that surveillance program |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- A special New York Police Department unit that sparked controversy
by tracking the daily lives of Muslims in an effort to detect terror
threats has been disbanded, police officials said Tuesday.
NYPD
spokesman Stephen Davis confirmed that detectives assigned to the unit
had been transferred to other duties within the department's
Intelligence Division.
An ongoing review of
the division by new Police Commissioner William Bratton found that the
same information collected by the unit could be better collected through
direct contact with community groups, officials said.
In
a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, called the move "a
critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the
communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one
another go after the real bad guys."
The
Demographics Unit, conceived with the help of a CIA agent working with
the NYPD, assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked
and prayed. Plainclothes officers infiltrated Muslim student groups, put
informants in mosques, monitored sermons and cataloged Muslims in New
York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
After
a series of stories by The Associated Press detailing the extent of the
NYPD's surveillance of Muslims, two civil rights lawsuits were filed
challenging the activities as unconstitutional because they focused on
people's religion, national origin and race.
Former
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly had defended the surveillance tactics,
saying officers observed legal guidelines while attempting to create an
early warning system for terrorism. But in a deposition made public in
2012, an NYPD chief testified that the unit's work had never generated a
lead or triggered a terrorism investigation in the previous six years.
Linda
Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New
York, said she was among a group of advocates at a private meeting last
week with police brass at which the department's new intelligence
chief, John Miller, first indicated the unit - renamed the Zone
Assessment Unit - wasn't viable. She applauded the decision but said
there's still concern about the police use of informants to infiltrate
mosques without specific evidence of crime.
"This
was definitely a part of the big puzzle that we're trying to get
dismantled," Sarsour said. But, she added, "This doesn't necessarily
prove to us yet that these very problematic practices are going to end."
Another
person at the meeting, Fahd Ahmed, legal and policy director of Desis
Rising Up and Moving, called the decision "a small step." He questioned
what had happened to the information gathered by the unit.
"The
concern wasn't just about the fact that this data was being collected
secretly - it was about the fact that this data was being collected at
all," he said.
New York Civil Liberties Union
Executive Director Donna Lieberman hailed the decision, saying
police-community relations took a blow from the unit's broad
surveillance of all Muslims, not just people suspected
of wrongdoing.
"We
hope this means an end to the dragnet approach to policing that has
been so harmful to police-community relations and a commitment to going
after criminal suspicion, rather than innocent New Yorkers," said
Lieberman, whose organization is involved in lawsuits over the practice.
In
Washington, 34 members of Congress had demanded a federal investigation
into the NYPD's actions. Attorney General Eric Holder said he was
disturbed by reports about the operations, and the Department of Justice
said it was reviewing complaints received from Muslims and their
supporters.
The AP's reporting also prompted
an investigation by the CIA's inspector general. That internal inquiry
concluded that the CIA, which is prohibited from domestic spying, hadn't
broken any laws, but it criticized the agency for allowing an officer
assigned to the NYPD to operate without sufficient supervision.
The NYPD's decision to disband the unit was first reported in The New York Times.
