Was It Justice or Politics That Ended the Police Program to Spy on New York’s Muslim Community?
New York City is the country’s largest city and one of its most progressive but since 2001 it’s also been at the forefront of the some of the most aggressive and controversial anti-terrorism tactics. Yesterday, city officials announced the end of one of those major tactics: targeted spying on Muslim communities.
But there’s some strange timing going on here. For one thing New York’s liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in favor of the surveillance program before he was against. Then there’s the fact that the decision to end the spying program comes just days after the Justice Department ruled that it was a legal practice. More on that in a bit, first some background on the program itself.
Officially, the spying was done under the auspices of the NYPD’s “Zone Assessment Unit.” Muslims in New York City saw their mosques, restaurants and in some cases, student associations infiltrated by undercover NYPD officials and confidential informants who took notes on overheard conversations, television program that were playing, nationality of store owners and customers, and anything else that NYPD officials thought gave them a flavor for what was happening in the city’s cloistered immigrant communities that catered to Muslims from the Middle Eastern, north Africa and Eastern Europe.
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