NYPD Held Mall Terrorism Exercise After Kenya Attack

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 11, 2013

On Wednesday, the New York Police Department admitted it had conducted a late night drill at a closed shopping mall in November following the terrorist attack at a mall in Kenya on September 21. Police officials said the undisclosed drill was conducted in order to prevent chaos in the event such an attack occurred in New York.

NYPD boss Ray Kelly told the media during a news conference at police headquarters that the exercise was designed to rest the response of police officers. The NYPD boasts of having thwarted more than a dozen terrorist incidents since the September 11, 2001, attacks. Kelly said now “is a time for vigilance and not complacency. The world we are in remains a very dangerous place.”

Details about the police drill held at the Kings Plaza in Brooklyn arrives at the same time as news that the alleged Somali al-Shabab attackers numbered three or four and were not heavily armed as the media claimed during the stand-off at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The New York Police Department report on the siege states that only four terrorists took part in the attack and they were lightly armed with AK-47 rifles. 67 people, mostly civilians, were killed during the attack. The NYPD report concludes that the attackers may have escaped the mall on the first day of the attack. Kenyan police and military conducted a three day siege of the mall.

It was initially claimed that 18 heavily armed gunmen had participated in the raid. “Security sources familiar with the operation to retake the mall said it would have been daunting for even the best-trained soldiers in the world,” The Times reported on September 28. Despite the “bravery of have-a-go heroes,” the newspaper reported, it took hours for a disorganized and under-equipped Kenyan military to respond. Friendly fire resulted in the shooting of a policeman by the military. The military assault resulted in the collapse of several floors of the mall.

The Kenyan government and its intelligence service knew about the al-Shabab attack and had positioned assets at the mall, according to counter-terrorism documents. “We cannot say that this attack comes as a surprise,” said Farah Maalim, former deputy speaker of the Kenyan National Assembly, according to The Guardian. “The possibility of something like this happening, and of failures in the Kenyan intelligence community, has worried us for years. We have an intelligence service more worried about internal party politics than about threats to national security.”

NYPD positioned “critical response vehicles’ tlo New York malls following the Kenya attack in September.

A Harvard trained lawyer who works for the World Bank, Bendita Malakia, claimed she was rescued by an American security team five hours after the assault began. The American’s assertion raised the possibility that American intelligence also knew about the attack beforehand.

Following the attack, counter-terrorism experts warned that an attack of similar magnitude might occur in the United States. “The fear is that if a couple young men returned to the United States with training to conduct military attacks on U.S. citizens, you could take the template of this mall attack that’s happening right now in Kenya and apply it to the U.S.,” Anders Folk, the former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, told the Washington Times in September.

“There possibly could be Americans over there that we don’t know about, and that’s one of my biggest concerns,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, told CNN. McCaul said “the idea that they can come back into the United States is a real valid concern.”

This article was posted: Wednesday, December 11, 2013 at 2:21 pm

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NYPD Held Mall Terrorism Exercise After Kenya Attack

New mayor names Bratton to run NYPD

Fred Prouser / Reuters file

Los Angeles police chief William Bratton speaks to reporters at a news conference in downtown Los Angeles in this September 9, 2002 file photo.

By Richard Esposito
NBC News

Bill Bratton, who pioneered the crime-fighting techniques that helped make New York the nation’s safest big city as its top cop two decades ago, will return to his old job under incoming mayor Bill de Blasio.

Bratton, 66, and a contributor to NBC News, served as NYPD commissioner from Mayor Rudy Giuliani from 1994 to 1996, where he was widely lauded for a swift and dramatic reduction in crime, including homicide, which had been at an all-time high. His first job in New York, however, was as head of the Transit Police under Giuliani’s predecessor, Democrat David Dinkins, from 1990 to 1992. De Blasio served as an aide in the Dinkins administration.

De Blasio is set to announce Bratton’s appointment at a press conference in Brooklyn Thursday morning.

The long decline in New York’s crime statistics began when Bratton helmed those subway cops. He returned briefly to his native Boston to head the police force there until Giuliani brought him back as commissioner in 1994 to apply his theories of community policing to the nation’s largest police department.  They were theories that first took shape during that tenure as the head of the subway police.

As NYPD commissioner, Bratton managed to take guns off the street and reduce so-called “quality of life” crimes such as car theft, by using “Broken Windows” police practices, in which police addressed the small crimes that blighted neighborhoods. The crack dealers, petty criminals and squeegee men who plagued New York and shaped its national image began to disappear from the streets.

But as crack, gun violence and quality of life hassles were the key issues of that time, today the issues are civil liberties, the proper role of technology in policing public spaces, and the reshaping of “Stop and Frisk” – the stop and search program that became a lightning rod during the administration of Mayor Mike Bloomberg and a centerpiece of last fall’s mayoral campaign.

Current commissioner Ray Kelly stood behind the policy, which was unpopular among many city residents because it overwhelmingly targeted young black and Latino men. 

“I think it’s going to send a message to the cops and to the community that you can keep crime down and you can do it in a just way,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit that advises law enforcement agencies. “Bill Bratton is one of the most experienced police chiefs in the world. This will be his seventh police chief job. New York is lucky to get him.”

Bratton has been the force behind a change in policing that placed his disciples in many key jobs  across the nation.

He took his techniques to Los Angeles as the LAPD’s top cop in October 2002, reconfigured key parts of the city’s oft-troubled police department and presided over a nearly 30 percent reduction in crime before leaving the post in 2009.

Since then he has been a private sector executive and a driving force in the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as well as an influential voice at PERF, where he served as president.

“The challenge back when Bratton came in to New York in the 90s was it had over 2200 homicides,” said Wexler. “Today it has less than 400. Back then it was getting crime down. Today it is keeping crime down. And doing that in a way that insures the cops that he has their backs and the communities that he understands and respects their needs.”

“I think from my view of the challenges that the NYPD has before it, primarily the public perception of stop and frisk and its impact on minority populations, he is a perfect pick,” said Michel Moore, assistant chief of the LAPD. “He is an insider and an outsider, he has never left New York or that department in his heart. But he has also been an outsider for the past seventeen years. So he’s a bit of a white knight.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, which has fought stop and frisk in the courts, said in a statement it was “look[ing] forward to working with the new mayor and police commissioner to ensure that fundamental changes are made to the NYPD, including a top-to-bottom culture shift that ends racial profiling and the abuse of stop and frisk.”

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New mayor names Bratton to run NYPD

Report: NYPD Top Cop Candidate Used Stop-and-Frisk in LA

Former Los Angeles Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton, who is now a leading candidate to head the New York City Police Department under newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio, expanded the use of “stop and frisk” while in California, a practice de Blasio has vowed to end in New York.

The New York Daily News reports that in 2002, the year Bratton began his tenure at the LAPD, police stopped 587,200 suspicious pedestrians and drivers.

Six years later, with Bratton in office, The Daily News said, the number climbed to 875,204, marking a hike of nearly 50 percent, according to a May 2009 report from the Harvard Kennedy School.

And while critics, including de Blasio, complain that under New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, blacks and other minorities are targeted under stop-and-frisk laws, minorities were also being stopped by Bratton’s police officers under the same laws in Los Angeles.

When stop and frisk was at its peak under Bratton in 2008, 23 percent of all the people police stopped were black, even though African-Americans only represented about 9 percent of the city’s population at that time. Meanwhile, non-Hispanic whites, or about 30 percent of all Los Angeles residents, were stopped 15 percent of the time, but Hispanics, who represented nearly half the city’s population, were stopped about half the time.

Meanwhile, in New York in 2008, when civil rights groups launched their class action lawsuit against the city over the stops, 53 percent of those being stopped were African-Americans, who made up a quarter of the city’s population. Another 32 percent of those stopped were Hispanic and 11 percent were white. However, whites made up about 44 percent of the city’s population, while Hispanics represented 28 percent.

But unlike in New York, more stops resulted in arrests in Los Angeles. According to the New York Civil Liberties union, only about 6 percent of the NYPD stops ended up in arrests. However, the Harvard study said in Los Angeles, 30 percent of the stops brought an arrest.

“The pattern (in L.A.) suggests that police officers stopped people for good reasons and were willing to have the district attorney scrutinize those reasons,” the study said.

Related Stories:

• Stop-and-Frisk Ruling ‘Deeply Flawed,’ NYC Tells Judges
  


• NYPD Police Commissioner: Stop-and-Frisk ‘Saving Lives’
  

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Newsmax – America

Report: NYPD Top Cop Candidate Used Stop-and-Frisk in LA

Former NYPD sergeant questions sister"s killing by police in Washington

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1 of 5. Valarie (L) and Amy Carey, sisters of Miriam Carey, the woman involved in the Capitol Hill shooting, attend a news conference outside their home in the Brooklyn borough of New York, October 4, 2013.


Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri








By Edward Upright


NEW YORK | Sat Oct 5, 2013 4:36am EDT





NEW YORK (Reuters) – Police in Washington could have avoided shooting dead a woman pursued by officers in a car chase that led to the lockdown of the Capitol this week, the driver’s sister, former New York police sergeant Valarie Carey, said late on Friday.




The family of Miriam Carey, whose one-year-old daughter Erica was in the car with her during the encounter with police on Thursday, has said she suffered from post-partum depression.




Carey, 34, a resident of Stamford, Connecticut, tried to drive her black Infiniti coupe through a barrier near the White House, then sped toward Capitol Hill, leading police on a high-speed chase that ended when her car got stuck on a median and police shot her.




“My sister could have been any person traveling in our capital,” Valarie Carey told reporters outside her Brooklyn home. “Deadly physical force was not the ultimate recourse and it didn’t have to be.”




The chase and shooting came at a time of high political tension in the U.S. capital with Congress debating how to resolve the shutdown of the federal government. The Capitol was locked down after the shots were fired.




In another incident that caused alarm in Washington, a man appeared to have set himself on fire at the National Mall on Friday. He was listed in critical condition at a hospital.




Law enforcement sources said Carey did not shoot a gun and there was no indication she had one.




“I’m more than certain that there was no need for a gun to be used (by police) when there was no gunfire coming from the vehicle,” Valarie Carey said. “I don’t know how their protocols are in D.C., but I do know how they are in New York City.”




Representatives from the Capitol Police and the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department could not be reached for comment early on Saturday.




DEPRESSION




The Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement the shooting is under investigation by its internal affairs division with assistance from the Secret Service, the Capitol Police and the FBI.




A Secret Service officer was struck by Carey’s car outside the White House during the incident on Thursday, said U.S. Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan.




A Capitol Police officer was hurt when his car struck a barricade during the mid-afternoon chase, which ranged over about a mile and a half and lasted just a few minutes, officials said.




At the news conference in Brooklyn, Carey’s other sister, Amy Carey-Jones, described to reporters the struggles her sibling had with post-partum depression.




“I can tell you that she was a law-abiding citizen, carefree and loving. She had a baby and she did suffer from post-partum depression with psychosis,” Carey-Jones said, adding that her sister had been receiving medication and therapy.




The visibly emotional sisters held hands during the news conference. They had traveled to Washington earlier in the day to identify their sister to authorities with the use of photos, Carey-Jones said.




Investigators are focusing on whether Carey had mental problems that triggered her actions, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.




Eric Sanders, an attorney for the Carey family and a former New York police officer, said the woman’s relatives have not decided whether to take legal action.




Carey’s daughter was unharmed when taken in by the District of Columbia Child and Family Services on Friday, said Mindy Good, a spokeswoman for the agency.




Carey was a licensed dental hygienist, according to records kept online by the state of Connecticut. She had been employed at a dental office but at the time of her death was no longer working there, said Carey-Jones, who declined to go into detail about her sister’s work.




(Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Janet Lawrence)





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WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

Former NYPD sergeant questions sister"s killing by police in Washington

NYPD places full body scanners on the streets

New video exposes NYPD brutalizing students in protest against Petraeus’ professorship

Former CIA chief David Petraeus (AFP Photo / Karen Bleier)

Video footage has emerged showing New York police using heavy-handed tactics while detaining students protesting against former CIA chief David Petraeus becoming a university professor. RT spoke to one of the arrested rally participants.

The video shows a demonstrator being pressed against the pavement by several policemen, with one of the captors punching the man’s exposed kidney area.

The footage supports the claim of the activists from the City University of New York (CUNY) that police were brutal in dispersing a rally on Tuesday, when 75 people took part in a demonstration protesting former CIA chief, David Petraeus, being given a teaching position at the school.

Six of the protesters were arrested that day and have been charged with obstruction of governmental administration, riot, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. One of them is 24-year-old Denise Ford, who spent 28 hours in police custody following the rally.

“They pushed us on to the street and they just started from there where they grabbed one of my comrades, slammed his head against the car and were just all on top of him”, Ford told RT’s Marina Portnaya. “Then I went to try help him out and in the process I ended up falling in between two cars on the back of my head. Then I proceeded to get up. And when I looked to the back of me there were cops on top of my other comrade. I witnessed they picked up his shirt and a police officer took two to five blows to his kidneys. And then a cop just came and grabbed me, pulled me back and cuffed me”.

The Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY, the organizer of the rally, issued a press release which described what happened on Tuesday as a “brutal, unprovoked police attack during a peaceful protest” and cited eyewitnesses accounts as proof of that.

“As students were chanting ‘War Criminal Petraeus Out of CUNY Now,’ I was shocked to see several police officers grab and brutalize one of the demonstrators,” said City College student Yexenia Vanegas, according to the press-release. “This was completely unprovoked, as demonstrators made clear that they were there to defend our university in a peaceful protest.”

Petreaus’ involvement with the university has been met with broad criticism from students, faculty and staff members who say they don’t want their college to host the man who oversaw wars, drone strikes and alleged torture tactics in the Middle East. Academics and graduate students at CUNY have released a statement calling for all charges to be dropped against the six students arrested by the NYPD.

“We emphatically support the efforts of these CUNY students to resist the attempts by the U.S. government and the CUNY administration to turn the university into an infamous “war college” with the appointment of Petraeus.  He is responsible for countless deaths and innumerable destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war commander and chief of the CIA,” the letter reads.

Petreaus’ plans to begin a new career as a visiting professor for CUNY have been met with criticism this summer. In July news emerged he would receive a six figure salary for the job. Following widespread indignation the ex CIA chief’s lawyer announced that the general would fill the post for just $ 1.

“Whether being paid $ 200,000 or $ 1, this mass murderer must not be allowed to teach at CUNY,” a leaflet calling for September protests reads.

The demonstration occurred during a fundraiser event, outside CUNY’s Macauley Honors College where Petraeus has been appointed to teach a class on public policy.

Source: RT

End the Lie – Independent News

New video exposes NYPD brutalizing students in protest against Petraeus’ professorship

New video exposes NYPD brutalizing students in protest against Petraeus’ professorship

Published time: September 21, 2013 12:05

A screenshot from RT video

Download video (24.51 MB)

Video footage has emerged showing New York police using heavy-handed tactics while detaining students protesting against former CIA chief David Petraeus becoming a university professor. RT spoke to one of the arrested rally participants.

The video shows a demonstrator being pressed against the pavement by several policemen, with one of the captors punching the man’s exposed kidney area.

The footage supports the claim of the activists from the City University of New York (CUNY) that police were brutal in dispersing a rally on Tuesday, when 75 people took part in a demonstration protesting former CIA chief, David Petraeus, being given a teaching position at the school.

Six of the protesters were arrested that day and have been charged with obstruction of governmental administration, riot, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. One of them is 24-year-old Denise Ford, who spent 28 hours in police custody following the rally.

“They pushed us on to the street and they just started from there where they grabbed one of my comrades, slammed his head against the car and were just all on top of him”, Ford told RT’s Marina Portnaya. “Then I went to try help him out and in the process I ended up falling in between two cars on the back of my head. Then I proceeded to get up. And when I looked to the back of me there were cops on top of my other comrade. I witnessed they picked up his shirt and a police officer took two to five blows to his kidneys. And then a cop just came and grabbed me, pulled me back and cuffed me”.

The Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY, the organizer of the rally, issued a press release which described what happened on Tuesday as a “brutal, unprovoked police attack during a peaceful protest” and cited eyewitnesses accounts as proof of that.

“As students were chanting ‘War Criminal Petraeus Out of CUNY Now,’ I was shocked to see several police officers grab and brutalize one of the demonstrators,” said City College student Yexenia Vanegas, according to the press-release. “This was completely unprovoked, as demonstrators made clear that they were there to defend our university in a peaceful protest.”

Petreaus’ involvement with the university has been met with broad criticism from students, faculty and staff members who say they don’t want their college to host the man who oversaw wars, drone strikes and alleged torture tactics in the Middle East. Academics and graduate students at CUNY have released a statement calling for all charges to be dropped against the six students arrested by the NYPD.

“We emphatically support the efforts of these CUNY students to resist the attempts by the U.S. government and the CUNY administration to turn the university into an infamous “war college” with the appointment of Petraeus.  He is responsible for countless deaths and innumerable destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war commander and chief of the CIA,” the letter reads.

Petreaus’ plans to begin a new career as a visiting professor for CUNY have been met with criticism this summer. In July news emerged he would receive a six figure salary for the job. Following widespread indignation the ex CIA chief’s lawyer announced that the general would fill the post for just $ 1.

“Whether being paid $ 200,000 or $ 1, this mass murderer must not be allowed to teach at CUNY,” a leaflet calling for September protests reads.

The demonstration occurred during a fundraiser event, outside CUNY’s Macauley Honors College where Petraeus has been appointed to teach a class on public policy.

RT – USA

New video exposes NYPD brutalizing students in protest against Petraeus’ professorship

NYPD labels mosques terrorism enterprises

Muslim worshippers attend Jumu’ah prayers in the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, New York, August 16, 2013

The New York Police Department is conducting massive spying operations on all mosques and secretly earmarking them as terrorism organizations, a new report says.

The NYPD has opened at least a dozen “terrorism enterprise investigations” into mosques since the 9/11 attacks, according to interviews and confidential police documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise allows police to spy on the imams even without specified evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

The terrorism designation also means that anyone who attends Muslim prayer services is a potential subject of an investigation and surveillance, according to the report.

The NYPD used a tactic called TEI, which allowed officers to monitor political or religious speeches whenever the “facts or circumstances reasonably indicate” that the people were involved in plotting terrorism.

The report is also based on a new book entitled “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America” by AP reporters. The book is based on hundreds of previously unpublished police files and interviews with current and former NYPD, CIA and FBI officials.

The NYPD has declined to comment on the report, according to AP.

Many of the investigations stretch for years allowing surveillance to continue even though the NYPD has never criminally charged a mosque or Islamic organization as a terrorism enterprise.

The AP first revealed in 2011 that the NYPD was spying on Muslims in the city. The new documents show that the NYPD investigated countless innocent New York Muslims and put information about them in secret police files.

Civil rights lawyers in the US have sued NYPD, saying the Muslim spying programs are unconstitutional and make Muslims afraid to practice their faith.

“I have never felt free in the United States. The documents tell me I am right,” Zein Rimawi, one of the Bay Ridge mosque’s leaders, said after reviewing an NYPD document describing his mosque as a terrorist enterprise.

AHT/ARA

PRESS TV RSS News

NYPD labels mosques terrorism enterprises

Is the NYPD Worse Than the NSA?

Reuters

The surveillance debate triggered by Edward Snowden’s leaks frequently features government spokespeople assuring Americans that the authorities aren’t targeting us with their spying activities. Implicit is the notion that if Americans were being targeted, that would be an abuse of power. 

In New York City, the debate is different, because there’s no doubt about the NYPD’s surveillance tactics: they’re definitely targeting innocent Americans citizens and legal residents. And that’s an ongoing abuse of power, even if comparatively fewer people have heard about it.

We’ve known for some time that innocent Muslim Americans were ethnically profiled by undercover NYPD officers, causing significant, under-acknowledged hardship in affected communities. Earlier this summer, Charlie Savage reported on four C.I.A. officers embedded within the NYPD, despite the strict rules governing the spy agency’s behavior within the United States. And today, New York has published “The NYPD Division of UnAmerican Activities,” in which Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman unearth even more alarming details about the NYPD Demographics Unit.

• Official secrecy defined the program from the beginning. “Documents related to this new unit were stamped NYPD SECRET. Even the City Council, Congress, and the White House–the people paying the bills–weren’t told about it.”
  

• This is straight-up profiling. “They mapped, looking for 28 ‘ancestries of interest.’ Nearly all were Muslim. There were Middle Eastern and South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and Egypt. Former Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Chechnya were included because of their large Muslim populations. The last ‘ancestry’ on the list was ‘American Black Muslim.’”

• Files on New Yorkers were started on the flimsiest of pretexts. “One Muslim man made it into files even though he praised President Bush’s State of the Union address and said people who criticized the U.S. government didn’t realize how good they had it. Two men of Pakistani ancestry were included for saying the nation’s policies had become increasingly anti-Muslim since 9/11. Muslims who criticized the CIA’s use of drones to launch missiles in Pakistan were documented.”

• Inevitably, spying was used for purposes other than counterterrorism. “Surveillance turned out to be habit-forming… Undercover officers traveled the country, keeping tabs on liberal protest groups like Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Police infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups and those that marched against police brutality. Detectives monitored activist websites and copied the contents into police files, including one memo in 2008 for Kelly that reported the contents of a website about a group of women organizing a boycott to protest the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man killed the morning before his wedding.

The full story contains a lot more objectionable behavior, and after reading how the undercover officers operate it’s easy to understand why the unit would cause Muslim American mosque attendees, small business owners and patrons, and students throughout the city to grow paranoid in their daily lives. And defenders of the program are unable to point to even a single case where it prevented a terrorist attack — in fact, they can’t even point to a terrorism-related arrest or prosecution. 

Usually, when I write phrases like, “This is how a secret police force with files on innocent Americans starts,” I’m issuing a warning about the future. But the NYPD literally started a secret police unit that began indiscriminately keeping files on innocent Americans. This isn’t a warning about a slippery slope. It is an observation about ongoing abuse of civil liberties in America’s biggest city.

Master Feed : The Atlantic

Is the NYPD Worse Than the NSA?

Is the NYPD Worse Than the NSA?

Reuters

The surveillance debate triggered by Edward Snowden’s leaks frequently features government spokespeople assuring Americans that the authorities aren’t targeting us with their spying activities. Implicit is the notion that if Americans were being targeted, that would be an abuse of power. 

In New York City, the debate is different, because there’s no doubt about the NYPD’s surveillance tactics: they’re definitely targeting innocent Americans citizens and legal residents. And that’s an ongoing abuse of power, even if comparatively fewer people have heard about it.

We’ve known for some time that innocent Muslim Americans were ethnically profiled by undercover NYPD officers, causing significant, under-acknowledged hardship in affected communities. Earlier this summer, Charlie Savage reported on four C.I.A. officers embedded within the NYPD, despite the strict rules governing the spy agency’s behavior within the United States. And today, New York has published “The NYPD Division of UnAmerican Activities,” in which Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman unearth even more alarming details about the NYPD Demographics Unit.

• Official secrecy defined the program from the beginning. “Documents related to this new unit were stamped NYPD SECRET. Even the City Council, Congress, and the White House–the people paying the bills–weren’t told about it.”
  

• This is straight-up profiling. “They mapped, looking for 28 ‘ancestries of interest.’ Nearly all were Muslim. There were Middle Eastern and South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and Egypt. Former Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Chechnya were included because of their large Muslim populations. The last ‘ancestry’ on the list was ‘American Black Muslim.’”

• Files on New Yorkers were started on the flimsiest of pretexts. “One Muslim man made it into files even though he praised President Bush’s State of the Union address and said people who criticized the U.S. government didn’t realize how good they had it. Two men of Pakistani ancestry were included for saying the nation’s policies had become increasingly anti-Muslim since 9/11. Muslims who criticized the CIA’s use of drones to launch missiles in Pakistan were documented.”

• Inevitably, spying was used for purposes other than counterterrorism. “Surveillance turned out to be habit-forming… Undercover officers traveled the country, keeping tabs on liberal protest groups like Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Police infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups and those that marched against police brutality. Detectives monitored activist websites and copied the contents into police files, including one memo in 2008 for Kelly that reported the contents of a website about a group of women organizing a boycott to protest the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man killed the morning before his wedding.

The full story contains a lot more objectionable behavior, and after reading how the undercover officers operate it’s easy to understand why the unit would cause Muslim American mosque attendees, small business owners and patrons, and students throughout the city to grow paranoid in their daily lives. And defenders of the program are unable to point to even a single case where it prevented a terrorist attack — in fact, they can’t even point to a terrorism-related arrest or prosecution. 

Usually, when I write phrases like, “This is how a secret police force with files on innocent Americans starts,” I’m issuing a warning about the future. But the NYPD literally started a secret police unit that began indiscriminately keeping files on innocent Americans. This isn’t a warning about a slippery slope. It is an observation about ongoing abuse of civil liberties in America’s biggest city.

Master Feed : The Atlantic

Is the NYPD Worse Than the NSA?