This will come as little surprise to Muslim families living in America’s most religiously diverse city. NYPD’s Inspector General Philip Eure revealed on Tuesday a wildly disproportionate number of investigations into Muslim communities without authorization and past court-mandated deadlines.
The 67-page report shows that “in 100 percent of the cases reviewed by the inspector general, the department also didn’t adequately explain why it was extending investigations that hadn’t turned up evidence of unlawful activity.”
This is not the first time the NYPD has been caught pursuing unlawful practices against Muslims in the name of enforcing the law.
In 2012, an AP investigation highlighted that, with unprecedented help from the CIA, the NYPD was paying informants $1,000 a month and placing them in communities with the explicit goal of baiting Muslims into making inflammatory comments. Informants were instructed to “create and capture”: provoking conversations about jihad and terrorism at study groups and mosques, and capturing the responses.
According to the ACLU, the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims spans across different departments, including its Demographics Unit, the Intelligence Analysis Unit, the Cyber Intelligence Unit, and the Terrorist Interdiction Unit. All of this law enforcement scrutiny is based on the unconstitutional targeting of a religious belief.