New York police have been interrogating Muslims who have been arrested for minor crimes in an attempt to continue to recruit informants in the midst of post-9/11 fears, according to The New York Times.http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/05/11/new-york-police-use-questionable-tactics-recruit-muslim-informants/
Over a decade has passed since attacks shook the nation back on Sept. 11, 2001, but the fear of more terrorists’ attacks still lives on.
The Muslim community in the United States bares much of the weight of post-9/11 fears as they are often stereotyped and discriminated against. But their problems in America have extended beyond religious profiling from everyday strangers.
Muslims in New York who had been arrested for small crimes say that police interrogated them after their arrests.
The citizens said they were not asked about the crimes they allegedly committed, but instead they were asked about their religious beliefs, what mosques they attend and what their prayer habits were like.
Eventually, they said the police would finally ask if they would be interested in becoming an informant for the New York Police Department.
While the New York police claim these questions were merely a part of casual conversations, the Muslim citizens who were being interrogated said they certainly did not feel as if they were merely having a conversation.
Moro Said, a 57-year-old limousine driver who had been arrested in Queens, recalled police telling him that if he was able to help them out then “everything will be OK.”
“He said, ‘You just go to mosque and the café and just say to us if somebody is talking about anything, anything suspicious,’ ” Said told The New York Times.
Said also said he found it coercive that the police would bring up the offer to be an informant when he was in custody.
NYPD Ends Controversial Surveillance of Muslim Communities
April 16, 2014
The new administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio is making its presence felt in New York City, as the New York Police Department announced that it was disbanding a controversial unit that monitored the actions of the city’s Muslims under the guise of fighting terrorism.
The existence of the unit—first revealed in stories by the Associated Press—had been the focus of lawsuits and angry protests by the Muslim community and civil libertarians.
In published reports, Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, indicated that she and a group of Muslim advocates met last week with police brass and were told by John Miller, the department’s new intelligence chief, that the Zone Assessment Unit was no longer viable.
While she was pleased by the news, Sarsour told the AP she was still concerned about the NYPD using informants to infiltrate mosques without specific evidence of crime.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/04/16/nypd-ends-controversial-surveillance-muslim-communities/
Federal Judge Rules Surveillance of Muslim Community by NYPD is Justified
February 21, 2014
In a decision that is sure to outrage many who value civil liberties, a federal judge yesterday dismissed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department over the surveillance of Muslim-Americans, claiming the monitoring was justified because police were trying to find terrorists hiding among law-abiding Muslims.
“The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself,” Judge William Martini, a President George W. Bush appointee, wrote in his controversial decision. “The motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.”
Martini went further by writing that any harm suffered by the Muslim community was not the fault of the police but of the Associated Press, which broke the story about the surveillance program, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for the series.
According to the AP stories, after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, the NYPD made maps of local Muslim communities, spied on Muslim student organizations, and monitored Muslim businesses, all without evidence of a specific crime or intent to commit one. After all that activity, an NYPD official admitted that the program never resulted in a single investigation.
The lawsuit was initiated by a Muslim civil rights group and the Center for Constitutional Rights. But Martini dismissed the suit, partly hinging his ruling on a 2009 Supreme Court decision dismissing a lawsuit against federal officials over the detention of Arab Muslim men after Sept. 11.
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/02/21/federal-judge-rules-surveillance-muslim-community-nypd-justified/
