In a move designed to placate a small minority of New York City residents, the NYPD announced that it was disbanding its Demographics Unit.
The unit, which was a small segment of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, came under fire following a series of articles published by the Associated Press using leaked documents showed widespread surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere. Following the articles, several Muslim activist groups protested against the NYPD’s Counter Terrorism strategies. What came next was a series of lawsuits filed by “victims” of the Department anti-terrorism policies.
The “victims” claimed that the NYPD program had “caused a series of spiritual, stigmatic, and pecuniary losses.” The last being better translated as monetary losses.
But what had the unit actually done to deserve such castigation? It collected open source information of various neighborhoods in the greater New York area – i.e. “demographics” – where it was believed the greatest likelihood of Islamic terrorists would seek to assimilate themselves while plotting terrorist acts.
This belief was not based on conjecture but on solid precedent. In the late 1980s and early 90s, a small group of Islamic terrorists congregated in several area neighborhoods and frequented a select group of mosques that were in alignment with their radical theology.
The result was the first World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 23, 1993. The investigation into that attack uncovered an additional plot to blow up several national landmarks in the New York area, including the Statute of Liberty. John Miller, the new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence for NYPD knows these facts. He wrote about them (in part) in his book, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It.
But in comments reported this week regarding the disbanding of the unit, he said the unit wasn’t necessary and that the police did not need to work covertly when it comes to gathering information on a specific group.
If that is true, then the next NYPD unit that could be disbanded is the Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB). Formed in the 1970s, the OCCB has had enormous success against the Italian Mafia, “the Westies” of the Irish mob, Chinese Mafia, East German Mafia, and Russian Mafia and Colombian Drug Cartels using similar techniques and strategies as that of the Demographics or Zone Assessment unit. Those include surveillance, mapping, infiltration, use of informants, and covert operations.
Such a move by the Police Department would be deemed ridiculous. Is terrorism any less a threat to the city than organized crime?
The mayor and the department should listen to the entire New York City community and not a select few, or those who cry the loudest.
In regard to the allegations of illegal conduct by the Police Department in gathering information in the Muslim community at large, it should be noted that neither the FBI, the Justice Department nor the Inspector General for the CIA found evidence of illegality in the methods or strategies used by the NYPD Intelligence Division. In fact, in one of the lawsuits filed against them, U.S. District Judge William J. Martini found that the damages alleged were theoretical. The lawsuit made no claim of any actual injury.
As I noted when the opinion was issued, Martini found that it was “the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents” that created any possible harm, not the surveillance itself, which took place wholly in public.
The plaintiffs also failed to show “that they were targeted solely because of their religion,” Martini wrote. “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.”