NYPD pressured to eliminate all traces of Muslim surveillance practice

Police department closing the hub of controversial programme but Muslim leaders want to know if similar units still exist

Ed Pilkington in New York

Civil rights groups are calling on the New York police department to eliminate all traces of indiscriminate mass surveillance of Muslims from its operations, following the closure of the unit that spearheaded the controversial techniques.

The NYPD announced on Tuesday night that it was closing the hub of its Muslim surveillance programme, the Demographics Unit (also known as the Zone Assessment Unit) following widespread criticism. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the reform 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.”

But Muslim leaders and civil rights lawyers are now demanding to know whether similar programmes to monitor communities without suspicion are still active in other parts of the NYPD, and called for an overt change in policy to eradicate any remaining vestiges. The police department is currently facing three lawsuits relating to the surveillance in the New York and New Jersey courts, and activists are vowing to maintain pressure on police commissioner William Bratton until a change of policy is achieved.

“The closure of the Demographics Unit is definitely a positive sign, but we are concerned that this work will carry on within different units of the NYPD. We want the police to establish a new policy that will eliminate mass surveillance of Muslims and other communities for good,” said Ryan Mahoney, head of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The existence of the secretive Demographics Unit was revealed by the Associated Press in a Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in 2011. The unit ran undercover police officers, which it called “rakers”, scouring places where Muslims were assumed to be prevalent such as Islamic bookstores and cafes, and taxi companies with Pakistani drivers.

The surveillance programme has been shrouded in such deep secrecy that details are sketchy as to whether the activities extended beyond the Demographics Unit, and if so how widely. The AP investigation uncovered at least one other outfit within the NYPD, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, that acted as an entire squad of officers handling informants in mosques and other Muslim locations, though it is not clear to what extent the programmes are still active.

“We have no information – that’s what’s concerning,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, CCR. “We now need to know whether the closure of the Demographics Unit, positive as it is, is a symbolic and bureaucratic manoeuvre or whether it will ultimately end mass surveillance.”

The anxiety of civil rights groups over the extent of the NYPD’s reforms has been heightened by the absence so far of any comment from Bratton himself. The commissioner, who took up the position in January under the new De Blasio administration, developed similar plans to map Muslim communities when he was head of the Los Angeles police department, but dropped them in the face of widespread opposition.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/16/nypd-pressured-to-eliminate-all-traces-of-muslim-surveillance-practice