Spying on Muslims: A Q&A on the lasting damage of NYPD's surveillance
ByJim Namiotka/The Star-Ledger
on March 25, 2013 at 5:41 AM, updatedMarch 25, 2013 at 5:42 AM
Across the Hudson, the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics are on trial, accused of systematically violating the rights of young men — mostly minorities — who were detained and searched with little or no cause.
Meanwhile, the NYPD’s insidious surveillance of Muslim communities — in New York, but also in Newark, Paterson and on college campuses — continues as it has since shortly after 9/11.
The mapping, photographing and infiltration of Muslims in New York and New Jersey was a secret program untilthe Associated Press unearthed documents proving its existence. In all that time, it has never produced a single terror-related lead.
Earlier this month, a coalition of Muslim watchdog groups released“Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims,”a 56-page report that catalogs the damage caused by the department’s spy ops.
Star-Ledger editorial writer Jim Namiotka spoke last week with Diala Shamas, a Liman Fellow at CUNY’s law school and one of the report’s co-authors. An edited transcript appears below:
Q. The constitutional problems with this program are clear. But what’s the human toll?
A. The human toll is both individual and communitywide. What became clear was the impact on American Muslims’ ability to practice their religion. They don’t know who to trust anymore at the mosque. The idea that the NYPD targets markers of religiosity, that translated into trying to avoid appearing “overtly Muslim” — a beard, a traditional robe.
Surveillance has a devastating impact on community dynamics. When people can’t trust anyone because they don’t know if the next person is an informant, it creates an atmosphere that is unwelcoming, that is quiet.
We also found that surveillance silences political speech. Many of our interviewees weren’t as comfortable speaking up in class, or participating in political activities or student clubs.
Q. How did surveillance force people to change their lives?
A. One student stopped attending the mosque after he found out that one of the guys he befriended was an informant.
Imams talked about being particularly careful in everything they said because anything can be taken out of context and land them, or their congregation, in a police file.
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Q. Will there be long-term damage?
A. The program hasn’t been shut down. Everything indicates that it’s ongoing; the NYPD continues to defend the program. Not a single one of those defenses has shown that this is an effective strategy. They rely mostly on fear-mongering, and are offensive to New Yorkers and New Jersey residents.
The long-term damage has yet to be seen. There are reasons surveillance tactics aren’t tolerated in free societies. You have an entire segment of the population withdrawing its voice from public conversations. That’s something that is in some ways immeasurable.
Q. Can the damage be undone?
A. We’ll make great strides by at least stopping the surveillance program, acknowledging that it is harmful, discriminatory, ineffective and costly. If members of the American Muslim communities are given a credible reason to believe this is no longer happening in their neighborhoods, then we can start rolling back or mitigating some of the harms.
Q. Like stop-and-frisk, the NYPD says it’s following the threats. Post-9/11, many people believed those threats might hide inside the Muslim community. How do you counter that?
A. Two ways: Under the NYPD’s own admission, this blanket intelligence gathering hasn’t yielded a single lead of criminal activity.
The other is that this is the sort of scapegoating we’ve heard about in prior generations, from the darker pages of American history. In World War II, when we interned Japanese-Americans, we heard similar rhetoric painting an entire group as an “enemy from within.”
We don’t really look back at that time with a lot of pride, and history has proven that that’s not a good way to keep people safe.
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Q. Is there an acceptable way to accomplish the same goals?
A. Good, sound police work. The police may monitor me if they can convince a judge that I’m doing or about to do something illegal. But using lawful expression of political opinions, race or religion as a basis for profiling is just lazy and is no substitute for good police work.
Q. Unlike stop-and-frisk, this isn’t just a New York problem, is it?
A. We know the NYPD sent its officers to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And while this is going on at the NYPD, very similar tactics are being employed elsewhere — by other police departments, and by the federal government. We just happen to have the damning, granular details about the NYPD through their leaked documents.
We need to start asking our policymakers tough questions about why entire communities are being targeted in a post-9/11 world, even though it’s coming at a great cost to all of us, with no indication that it’s making us any safer.
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