For Immediate Release: November 14, 2011
Contact: Bina Ahmad, 608-658-4228; Lamis Deek, 212-226-3999; Garrett Wright, 646-459-3012
The New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG-NYC) condemns the ongoing joint NYPD-CIA surveillance, harassment, infiltration, deliberate disruption, and persecution of New York City and area Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.
A series of articles released by the Associated Press has documented and made public a massive domestic spying apparatus set up by the NYPD with active participation from the CIA. This program destroys these communities’ privacy, liberty, security, and right to exist free from government interference.
The joint NYPD-CIA operation puts these communities under an endless and competing system of surveillance that includes police monitoring of mosques, homes, elementary schools, colleges and universities, restaurants, community and political organizations, stores, other institutions of civic and social life. The NYPD utilizes a “Demographics Unit” to deploy hundreds of undercover officers, countless informants, and technological surveillance to place entire communities under illegal surveillance. Over the years, an aggressive campaign of predatory prosecution was launched wherein informants, who themselves were induced with financial and immigration incentive to act as provocateurs, entrapped Muslims so as to justify the brutal war on Muslims at home and abroad.
Despite the revelation by the Associated Press series that the NYPD targeted these communities on the basis of religion and race within New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Commissioner Kelly initially deceived the public by denying the existence of this program before the New York City Council earlier this month. The NYPD has yet to disavow the use of such a program.
The NLG-NYC condemns these racist, Anti-Muslim, unconstitutional, and immoral governmental assaults on freedom, dignity, and justice. These attacks are the latest in a long history of racist profiling and targeting of communities of color, including the shameful NYPD-FBI COINTELPRO campaign of murder and frame-ups directed against the Black Panther Party and Young Lords Party, as well as the ongoing NYPD racial profiling of African Americans and Latinos through abusive policing practices.
The NLG-NYC joins the Muslim Communities of New York and New Jersey in demanding the following:
- The immediate cessation and disclosure of all surveillance, and infiltration operations targeting Muslim, Black, Arab, and South Asian communities and the passage of anti-racial profiling legislation.
- An end to predatory prosecutions and the entrapment schemes that law enforcement agencies have been conducting in New York and throughout the United States.
- Attorney General Eric Schneiderman publicly address and investigate these abuses by the NYPD, in response to Sen. Kevin Parker’s letter, dated October 5, 2011.
- The establishment of an independent commission to investigate the role of the CIA and to oversee the surveillance operations of the NYPD to ensure that no additional misconduct and constitutional violations occur.
- The establishment of guidelines that clearly state, once and for all, what practices are prohibited and intolerable in a free society.
- Ongoing oversight of all future actions of the NYPD.
The National Lawyers Guild, founded in 1937, is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.