Time For NYPD To Stop Harassing Muslims
Police Commissioner William Bratton said he’d discontinue the policy of his predecessor, Ray Kelly, of spying on Muslims, but has yet to fully make good on that promise.
As The Times’s Joseph Goldstein reported, the department is still running a program that singles out Muslims in a problematic way, this time to recruit them as informants. The department says the program, run by a squad of detectives euphemistically known as the Citywide Debriefing Team, has led to breaks in important cases. But the department has a long history of trampling on people’s rights during investigations of political activity, while making inflated claims about the value of its intelligence operations…
Some of those potential recruits have been hauled in for petty offenses or even noncriminal violations. In some cases they have been held in custody longer than necessary so that detectives can interrogate them about where they attend religious services, the names of relatives and where they spend their free time…
The Police Department is right to develop informants that would help them foil terrorist plots. But it would be counterproductive to do so in ways that violate the Constitution or make more people fear the police.
