By: Michaela Pluskovich
In the aftermath of September 11, the Demographic Unit within the NYPD's Intelligence Division initiated a program to secretly map and survey neighborhood sites in the city's Muslim communities. The program, exposed in a Pulitzer Prize winning investigation by the Associated Press in 2012, was referred to as “human mapping project” and detailed “locations of interest” that served as cultural hubs for Middle Eastern communities, which the police subsequently used to monitor and track these minorities for criminal and extremist behavior. As outlined in NYPD documents, some of the key indicators the police looked for included “extremist rhetoric,” such as café conversations, local newspapers, religious schools, local flyers, suspect charities, or criminal behavior, such as “untaxed cigarettes.” The results of the program, detailed in an article by The Atlantic Cities, shows that, besides its failure to detect any terrorists, the wide net cast on all Muslims resulted in a culture of paranoia and mistrust with respect to law enforcement. Indeed, the program unjustly targeted innocent citizens and legal permanent residents and has caused long-term damage to the reputation and trustworthiness of the NYPD within these communities.
The program was modeled after professional policing tactics relying on data to help identify “hot spots” of illicit activity, but by using “ancestries of interest” instead of actual criminality it unjustly targeted innocent persons and created an environment of fear and suspicion towards the police. Whereas the data driven methods of professional policing are intended to help law enforcement focus resources and time on troubled areas, the NYPD human mapping project relied on nationality, ethnicity, and religion to define potential risk. Similar to aggressive policing methods such as Stop-and-Frisk, those targeted were persons thought to be more likely to commit a crime, not necessarily those who were actual criminals. Since all persons of Middle Eastern background were put under surveillance, and police informants infiltrated Middle Eastern communities, the program in turn created an environment of fear and suspicion. The increased attention resulted in numerous ill effects that continue to be felt in minority communities in New York City today.
As a result of the NYPD’s human mapping project, “racial” profiling by the police led to basic violations of constitutional rights, and is directly responsible for police mistrust that continues today. The main impact of the surveillance program was a modification of behavior, manifested in the limitation of freedom of speech rights. As outlined in the The Atlantic Cities article, youths aware that they were being watched or that their communities were infiltrated by police informers no longer went to mosques or wrote with their friends on Facebook knowing that it could put them on the NYPD’s watch list. Similarly, restaurant and café owners modified their behavior to appear less “Middle Eastern,” for example by switching the channel from Al Jazeera to something more “American.” Since the police held all members of the targeted groups with equal suspicion, regardless of criminal behavior, a culture of mistrust developed between the local community and the police. Even though the program was shut down in 2011, people continue to live in fear and have a deeply ingrained sense of suspicion towards the police, which will take years or possibly generations to repair and counteract.
The true crime in the NYPD’s human mapper project is the department’s presumption that race, religion, or nationality constitutes a criminal risk. Racial profiling by law enforcement institutions and personnel is therefore not only used to target but also create fictionalized races that are based on nationalities and religion. While this should remind us that all races are socially constructed and connote to false presumptions and status symbols that influence individuals in analyzing and summarizing their environments, by turning these presumptions into policy the NYPD manifested them as a stigma that will be difficult to erase.
Your post touches on an interesting point about 9/11 and its connection to racialization. Since I was in elementary school when 9/11 happened, I had no idea what was really going on. I went on to middle school and learned about Islam as a religion. Yet the rampant fear post-9/11 created this interesting new attitude towards Muslims as a racial group based on religion and geography, which confused me endlessly. I remember hearing statements about how any woman with a hijab or man with certain type of headdress was effectively an Iraqi terrorist, but I couldn't imagine why that would be true since I don't think I had that idea ingrained in me of Muslims as being part of a race.
ReplyDeleteHaving a "Mapping Muslims" program definitely falls in line with this idea of racial profiling if we are to take it from this new perspective. I would say it is also a surprisingly blatant way of doing it considering how many people nowadays would reprimand a person for accusing them of picking out an African American or Latino person based on their dress, culture, and so on. The combination of this and Terry stops makes me really wonder what is happening to the legitimacy of the NYPD and how that will reveal itself in the coming years.
Anita Wu
This post demonstrates how policing methods can be twisted by departments. Professional policing tactics are supposed to use sound data actually related to crime to determine where police resources should be placed in order to be most effective. Instead, a belief in Islam and Middle Eastern ethnicity are being used to predict where future crime will occur, which is missing the point of professional policing. All this does is cause distrust of the police among the Muslim community, making it less likely they will actually support the police when they need their help.
ReplyDeleteCarly Wasserman
Michaela,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with you. The use of this "human mapping project" to surveille Muslim individuals is a complete violation of their constitutional rights. This reminds me of the "driving while black" phenomenon because in both instances a social group is being surveilled more than any other group simply because of race, ethnicity, color, religion, etc. As discussed in the Harris article, racial profiling leads to a lack of police legitimacy which decreases the likelihood that these social groups will one day serve as informants for the police. This makes me question whether Muslims who were at the Boston Marathon race and took pictures of the event submitted any pictures they took to aid in the investigation of the crime or if they were too apprehensive to do so.
-Lissette
Racial profiling is, admittedly, racist. However, the recent history of terrorism shows a correlation between acts of terrorism and the religion and ethnicity of perpetrators. The coincidences are too much to remain ignored. The human mapping project of the NYPD may have caused criticism from the affected groups and human rights activists, but the police cannot just do nothing while piles and piles of evidence from continuing acts of violence show that race or religion does play a part in the act of the perpetrators.
ReplyDelete- Sehun Lee
This is a great example of the ongoing racism that has been prevalent in our legal system since the birth of our country but which has since evolved to become a means rather than an end. In other words, rather than openly discriminate against people due to hatred and bigotry, we now cover up our racism in pursuit of ideologies like fighting the "war on terror" (for Muslims) or the "war on drugs" (for African Americans). Running with the parallel of Harris's Driving While Black article, I think this "human mapping project" is a good example of a pretextual stop as well, in that otherwise innocuous cafe conversations and minor criminal behavior are targeted in the hopes of gaining a terrorism charge. As with pretextual driving stops, this practice of racial profiling does incredible damage to communities, to the point that after 9/11 entire neighborhoods in the New York area which had been predominantly Muslim simply cleared out in order to avoid intense discrimination and hatred.
ReplyDelete-Molly Ruiz