NYC Unapologetically Disbands Muslim Spying Unit

There is good news and bad news stemming from New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton's decision to shut down the department's division that was responsible for tracking and cataloguing the actions of the city's Muslim population. From the NY Times:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped (Writer note: plus logged conversations), the department said.The police also designated entire mosques as suspected “terrorism enterprises,” a label that the police claimed allowed them to collect the license plate numbers of every car in mosque parking lots, videotape worshipers coming and going, and record sermons using informants wearing hidden microphones.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The move comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its post-9/11 policies, including the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection.

This division was a despicable abuse of the power by law enforcement and a direct violation of the 4th Amendment rights of the targeted individuals. Based on transgressions alone the program should have never been enacted. The unapologetic nature and mindset of the NYPD regarding exactly why this program was abandoned reinforces why we must always keep a watchful eye trained upon the coercive State. Spoiler: the program was not terminated due to rights violations or the Constitution.

The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

That's the FBI's worry - that the "Demographics Unit" (more recently called the "Zone Assessment Unit") had harmed national security by "sowing mistrust for law enforcement." How exactly does that harm national security? It's a phenomenon that parallels the unintended consequences of covert operations abroad, which the CIA refers to as blowback. Due to the covert spying Muslims could now be worried about police presence, and be wary of any future government spooks that may seek to spy on them. So really, the FBI is mad that potential blowback caused by NYC Police Dept. spying on Muslims has made it harder for the FBI to infiltrate Muslim cultures here in the US. And considering the NSA and Police Department actions in regards to warrantless GPS tracking, wifi spying by local law enforcement, and of course PRISM, it would seem to be in the best security interests of the people (Muslim or not) to be as mistrusting of the intentions of law enforcement as possible.

But wait...there is one more thing!

“The Demographics Unit created psychological warfare in our community,” said Linda Sarsour, of the Arab American Association of New York. “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.”

Ms. Sarsour was one of several advocates who met last Wednesday with Mr. Bratton and some of his senior staff members at Police Headquarters. She and others in attendance said the department’s new intelligence chief, John Miller, told them that the police did not need to work covertly to find out where Muslims gather and indicated the department was shutting the unit down.

You see, it wasn't that this was a violation of the rights of these people that caused the shutdown. It's just that they found out that they don't need to specifically assign detectives to monitor them 24/7, since they "don't need to work covertly to find out where Muslims gather."

And what did this all lead to? What did obliterating the rights of a segment of the populace and turning a people against those in place to (theoretically) protect them garner?

After years of collecting information, however, the police acknowledged that it never generated a lead. Since The Associated Press published documents describing the program in 2011, Muslims and civil rights groups have called for its closing.

Just like the NSA's spying, which has resulted in nothing. Money, time, and resources well spent.

One has to wonder how many police departments across the country are covertly spying on Muslims that have yet to be discovered. Tuesday was the anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing, enacted by two Muslim men. Is there a unit in place cataloguing the actions of Muslims in that city, just as in New York? Was that hypothetical unit already in place and failed to stop one of the more harrowing acts of terrorism in the past 10 years? It seems that most of these terror net programs rarely net anything other than infringements upon our liberty, so it wouldn't be surprising in the least.

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