From The Nation
Report co-author Diala Shamas, an attorney with Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), said the research, which included 57 interviews with Muslims living in the New York City area, is a response to long held concerns that the NYPD is infringing on the constitutional freedoms of Muslims. “We wanted to show the community’s response to the NYPD’s claim that this surveillance is harmless,” said Shamas. (CLEAR is a project run out of the City University of New York’s School of Law.)
Among the report’s key findings: individuals reported heavy surveillance of the city’s mosques as places of suspected radicalization, which has made individuals wary when attending services; and the fear of being targeted by law enforcement has led to self-censorship and decreased involvement in community groups like Muslim Student Associations. A particular concern cited in the report is the department’s deployment of an unknown number of undercover informants throughout the city,. “You look at your closest friends and ask: are they informants?” said one respondent.
Shamas says CLEAR along with the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund were inspired to write the report after a 2011 Associated Press investigative series revealed that the NYPD’s counter-terrorism efforts in and around New York City post 9/11 were heavily focused on surveillance of Muslims. The series described a secret “Demographic Unit”—since renamed the “Zone Assessments Unit”—within the department’s Intelligence Division, which focuses on tracking individuals from predominantly Muslim “ancestries of interest.” The NYPD’s counterterrorism strategy, which was developed in part by former and current CIA officials, has focused on “intelligence collection” intended to thwart potential terrorist plots through the heavy scrutiny of so-called Muslim “hot spots” such as mosques.
