It’s insane enough on its own, but let’s move past the fact that the NYPD had a quasi-secret group tasked with spying on Muslims — not just individuals, but whole neighborhoods — simply because xenophobic NYPD officials equate Islam with terrorism. That’s absurd and anti-American enough on its own, yes, but the story gets even more ridiculous: According to unsealed court documents, the NYPD unit conducted surveillance in New York and New Jersey for six years, with cops filming mosques, recording license plates and more with zero probable cause, and in that six-year span the unit produced nothing. Zippo. No leads, no cases, no terrorism investigations, nothing.I’ll let the AP explain:The demographics unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and cataloged every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
Police hoped the demographics unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they’d know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.
But in a 28 June deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, assistant chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case.The NYPD unit led by Galati was known as the demographics unit, and as he readily admitted, nothing fruitful came from the unit’s work. But that doesn’t mean the demographic unit wasn’t trying its damnedest to investigate any old Muslim person on the street.For example, Galati testified how he focused on a pair of Pakistani men speaking to each other on the street about — of course — getting singled out at airports for being Muslim. “I’m seeing Urdu. I’m seeing them identify the individuals involved in that are Pakistani,” Galati said, according to the AP. “I’m using that information for me to determine that this would be a kind of place that a terrorist would be comfortable in.”“Most Urdu speakers from that region would be of concern, so that’s why it’s important to me,” he said.It’s almost comical that the NYPD made no cases in six years, but that also represents a ton of money and man-hours wasted chasing ghosts, not to mention the nigh-obscene ethical and civil ramifications of tasking officers with infiltrating local communities simply based on faith. This is exactly why people worry about spy blimps, cops’ phone-hacking computers, and GPS trackers: As technology makes surveillance easier and more efficient, technology can’t guarantee that the surveillance itself is warranted.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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