NYPD must ditch discriminatory Muslim surveillance for its own good

Twice in the course of the last month, the New York City Police Department has been forced to defend its Muslim surveillance program in court. Police documents show that at least since 2003, the NYPD's Intelligence Division intensively monitored the daily lives of law-abiding American Muslims in the city and surrounding areas.

The department's argument that there is no such program -- it simply follow leads and goes where they take it -- flies in the face of this publicly available evidence. And its refusal to acknowledge that Muslims may have legitimate concerns about surveillance will likely take the NYPD down the same unproductive path it followed with its stop-and-frisk program.

New York's police force has long been criticized for its policy of stopping and searching people based on race rather than on suspicion of criminal activity. But instead of taking these complaints seriously, the police only ramped up the program. From 2002 to 2011, the number of stops by the NYPD increased some 600 percent; nearly nine of 10 people stopped were innocent of any wrongdoing. After a series of lawsuits, in August of this year a federal court found that the stop-and-frisk program amounted to an unconstitutional pattern and practice of racial profiling.

It is now well documented that the NYPD's Demographics Unit secretly mapped Muslim communities. It created lists of bookshops, kebab houses, hookah bars and food stores frequented by Muslims, and kept notes on the mundane conversations that officers overheard there. The NYPD also sent informants into mosques to eavesdrop on sermons and conversations among worshippers. It apparently wanted to gauge reactions to world and local events, such as the 2006 protests in parts of the Arab world about Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the small plane that accidentally crashed into a Manhattan building the same year. The result of this snooping: nothing. Yet all the chatter was dutifully logged.

So how does the NYPD defend these actions? (Read more)