From The Atlantic
America’s largest city, an ethnically diverse, politically liberal melting pot of more than 8 million people, routinely violates the civil liberties of its racial and ethnic minorities. New York City’s “Stop and Frisk” policy, the subject of class action lawsuit, annually ensnareshundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, a majority of them black and Latino. Complaints about searches sans probable cause are constant. Listen for yourself as a 17-year-old Harlem boy is stopped, called a “fucking mutt” and threatened with a broken arm. Read about the part of “Stop and Frisk” that was already declared unconstitutional in federal court. See the appalled street protesters. The visible activism and vocal dissent is as it should be. But the sustained public backlash against “Stop and Frisk” is also a reminder that Americans know comparatively little about the Muslim Americans whose communities haven’t just been disproportionately impacted by NYPD attention, but exclusively targeted in a deliberate, decade long policy of outright ethnic profiling.
As it turns out, many were too rattled to go on the record with complaints, and have spoken out for the first time only after being sought out by a coalition of civil liberties organizations, who’ve compiled testimony that shows the high cost these innocents have paid merely for being Muslim in New York City.
First, a bit of background:
The Associated Press brought the NYPD’s clandestine spying on Muslims to the public’s attention in a series of vital stories. Starting shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, officers infiltrated Muslim communities and spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and elsewhere. These officers “put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity,” the news agency reported, citing NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction, drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official chargedthat “the department’s surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created ‘additional risks’ in counterterrorism.”
