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The New York Police Department has abandoned their secret program which dispatched plainclothes detectives to Muslim neighbourhoods to snoop in on conversations and build detailed files on where people prayed, shopped and ate, the department said. The decision from new NYPD Commissioner William J. Bratton comes as he tries to distance himself from the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering methods used by his predecessor. The move also comes in the wake of the federal government re-evaluating its stance on some post-9/11 policies, like the NSA data collection program.
The NYPD’s tactics were subject to two federal lawsuits and drew severe criticism from many civil rights groups and a senior official of the FBI, who said the tactics harmed national security by planting seeds of mistrust in Muslim communities regarding law enforcement. The squad, called the Demographics Unit, was a sign to many Muslims that the police observed every move they made with suspicion. The police had mapped members of the community both inside and outside New York, recording where people in traditional Islamic clothes had their meals.
The Arab American Association of New York’s Linda Sarsour said “The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community. Those documents, they showed where we live. That’s the cafe where I eat. That’s where I pray. That’s where I buy my groceries. They were able to see their entire lives on those maps. And it completely messed with the psyche of the community.”
Sarsour was one of many lawyers who met with Bratton and some senior members of the police force last Wednesday at Police Headquarters. She said that the NYPD’s new intelligence chief John Miller said the police didn’t work in secret to figure out where Muslims gathered, and had indicated that the NYPD was going to shut the unit down.
The Demographics Unit was started in 2003, and was renamed as the Zone Assessment Unit a few years ago. According to NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis, the unit has been inactive since Bratton became the new Commissioner in January; Davis added that the unit’s detectives were recently re-assigned.
“Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing the threat information that comes into New York City virtually on a daily basis. In the future, we will gather that information, if necessary, through direct contact between the police precincts and the representatives of the communities they serve”, Mr. Davis said.
The unit was the idea of CIA officer Lawrence Sanchez, who had helped establish it while still working for at the Police Department and the CIA in 2003. The goal of the unit was to identify mundane locations where any potential terrorist could easily blend into society. All plainclothes detectives in the unit were on the constant lookout for “hot spots” of radicalization which might have given the NYPD an early warning on terror plots. The squad typically had a dozen members and focused on 28 “ancestries of interest”.
The detectives were told to talk with employees at Muslim-owned businesses and “gauge sentiment” about USA and its foreign policy. Using photographs and maps, the police created detailed folders on where Egyptians watched soccer, South Asians played cricket and Albanian men played chess. After years of surveillance, the NYPD acknowledged that the unit never generated a lead. Ever since The Associated Press published documents in 2011 explaining what the program was about, Muslims and various civil rights groups had called on the NYPD to shut it down.
Only last month, a lawsuit on NYPD for their surveillance tactics in New Jersey was dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove how the tactics harmed them. The Demographics Unit was one facet of a larger intelligence gathering effort. Informants reportedly infiltrated Muslim student organizations on several college campuses and gathered data like names, addresses and phone numbers. Additionally, analysts had regularly kept tabs on college websites and emails of the Muslim scholars giving lectures on campuses. The NYPD also labelled entire mosques as suspected “terrorism enterprises”, a term which they claim helped them collect licence plate numbers of cars in parking lots, video footage of worshipers and audio of sermons using hidden microphones worn by informants. The program’s future remains unclear.
Former Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said his work was lawful and helped prevent terrorist attacks in the city. On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the unit’s closing was “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”. During his campaign for Mayor, de Blasio had said that he was “deeply troubled” by the surveillance tactics used in mosques.
Bratton has said that he aims to heal the rift between minority communities and the Police Department as a result of the policies pursued during former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration. Last week’s meeting saw Bratton sit with some of the department’s harshest critics, including Ahmad Jaber, who last year had resigned from the NYPD’s Muslim advisory board.“This is the first time we’ve felt that comfort sitting with them. It’s a new administration, and they are willing to sit with the community and listen to their concerns”, he said.
