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posted by martyb on Sunday April 08 2018, @09:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the out-in-the-open dept.

NYPD Pays $1 Million, Vows Surveillance Reforms After Settling with Muslims in New Jersey

The NYPD will pay more than $1 million in legal fees and damages, and pledge to end religious-based surveillance, as part of a settlement with New Jersey Muslims who alleged that police officers crossed the Hudson River in the years after Sept. 11 to monitor their mosques, stores and schools.

The lawsuit followed shocking revelations in the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press series that the NYPD cast a wide net in its surveillance of Muslims -- even traveling outside New York to photograph license plates parked outside mosques and infiltrate Muslim Student Associations at colleges. The settlement mandates that the NYPD now notify New Jersey authorities, like municipal police and county prosecutors, when operating in their jurisdictions. But it can still conduct investigations across the Hudson River.

Also as part of the settlement, the NYPD confirmed that it dismantled the Demographics Unit that surveilled Muslims, and certain records from the Muslim surveillance operations will be expunged.

This is the third surveillance-related lawsuit that the NYPD has settled. Last year, as part of a settlement in New York, the NYPD barred religious-based surveillance under its so-called Handschu Guidelines and appointed a civilian monitor to oversee investigations of political activity. Its new policies regarding surveillance now extend to New Jersey. The NYPD will also allow the New Jersey plaintiffs to recommend changes to the NYPD's training policies as they pertain to religion and the First Amendment.

Also at Reuters, NYT, and Al Jazeera.


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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday April 09 2018, @08:46AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday April 09 2018, @08:46AM (#664299) Journal

    Some select people from the following groups claim that they are terrorists (or words to that effect) *because* of their membership in, or the beliefs of, the group

    The problem is the relative sizes of the sets 'people who self-identify as X and are terrorists' and 'people who self-identify as X'. As a percentage of the general population of the USA, more people who self identify as Muslim are terrorists than people who self identify as white (not mutually exclusive categories), but in absolute numbers it's the other way around and the difference isn't so great. The proportion of the population white males ages 18-40 that are terrorists appears to be higher than the number of muslims that are terrorists (and many of them use their skin colour and gender as part of their justification), so should everyone in that group be observed? In all cases, the ratio is about 1:100,000 terrorists:non-terrorists, so you're only slightly better than a random sample of the population if you focus on any of these groups. Worse, the number of terrorists not in these groups is fairly similar to the number in the groups, so if you're immediately discounting people not in one of the groups from your potential list of suspects then you're going to miss something.

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