The New York Police Department has disbanded a surveillance unit formed after 9/11 to monitor Muslim communities in the city. The move follows protests from Muslims and civil rights groups that filed lawsuits, demanding that the programme be scrapped right away.
Called the Demographics Unit and later the Zone Assessment Unit, the surveillance programme remained a secret until 2011, when The Associated Press published documents on the unit and its activities. In an announcement on Tuesday, the NYPD said that “as part of an ongoing assessment of Intelligence Bureau operations, personnel assigned to the Zone Assessment Unit were reassigned to other duties within the Intelligence Bureau”. The unit, according to it, has been largely inactive since January.
“Understanding certain local demographics can be a useful factor when assessing information regarding potential threats coming to the attention of the New York City Police Department, it has been determined that much of the same information previously gathered by the Zone Assessment Unit may be obtained through direct outreach by the NYPD to the communities concerned,” the NYPD said.
New York’s recently-installed Mayor Bill de Blasio described the decision as a “critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys”. In a statement, he said: “Our administration has promised the people of New York a police force that keeps our city safe, but that is also respectful and fair.”
The Muslim Advocates and the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which filed a lawsuit in 2012 challenging the unit and its activities, said they were pleased that the unit has been disbanded but would want to ensure that the surveillance has stopped. “While we welcome the dismantling of the Demographics Unit as a long overdue step towards reining in the unconstitutional excesses of the NYPD, what has to stop is the practice of suspicion-less surveillance of Muslim communities, not just the unit assigned to do it,” the two bodies said a joint statement.
They said they would continue to work, through litigation and advocacy, “to ensure the NYPD is fully and finally respecting the rights of the Muslim community”. Their lawsuit, dismissed in February, is currently under appeal. The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called it an important first step, even while commenting that “the damage of unconstitutional mass spying on people solely on the basis of their religion has already been carried out and must be addressed”.