Written by Don Byrd
The New York Police Department had a goal of enlisting a confidential informant in every mosque in the state, during a sweeping surveillance operation uncovered by an Associated Press investigative team. Their newest report reveals comprehensive files maintained by the intelligence office containing details of mosques and mosque attendees.
Those documents offer the first glimpse of what the NYPD’s informants — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — gleaned from inside the houses of worship. And, along with hundreds of pages of other secret NYPD documents obtained by The Associated Press, they show police targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations.
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The NYPD Intelligence Division snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived to pray. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. Plainclothes detectives mapped and photographed mosques and listed the ethnic makeup of those who prayed there.“It seems horrible to me that the NYPD is treating an entire religious community as potential terrorists,” said civil rights lawyer Jethro Einstein, who reviewed some of the documents and is involved in a decades-old, class-action lawsuit against the police department for spying on protesters and political dissidents.
This is religious profiling at its worst, turning an entire community of faith into investigative targets. What goes on inside our houses of worship is sacred, and the expression of our most fundamental liberty. Should we have to wonder if the guy in the next pew might be watching and listening for the government, just because of our faith? In America?
