(NEW YORK) MintPress — The NYPD, it seems, will stop at nothing in its post 9/11 mission of thwarting terrorist threats against the city.
Commissioner Ray Kelly said over the weekend that it is going to launch an all-seeing “Domain Awareness System” combining city-wide video surveillance with law enforcement databases. Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, he said the city developed the software with Microsoft.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to officially unveil the new program as early as next week.
It is the latest in a long series of controversial moves by the NYPD, which has been under fire since revelations at the beginning of the year of an unauthorized collaboration between the department and the CIA that began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The NYPD, according to a lengthy investigation by the Associated Press (AP), started targeting ethnic areas throughout New York City in ways that would be considered a breach of civil liberties if conducted by the federal government, as the CIA is prohibited from spying on Americans.
The AP discovered that the NYPD sent undercover officers into minority neighborhoods, with a focus on Muslim communities, as part of a “human mapping” program, monitoring daily life, gathering intelligence on residents and scrutinizing imams.
It turned out that the NYPD operations were devised with a great deal of help from the CIA, blurring the lines between foreign and domestic spying.
That was just the tip of the iceberg.
Overstepping boundaries
Soon after came revelations that the NYPD had monitored the websites of Muslim Student Associations at 16 universities across the Northeast, including several in New York state as well as Ivy League colleges.
That same week, a report obtained by the AP showed that plainclothes officers from the NYPD’s Demographics Units conducted surveillance operations in New Jersey’s biggest city, Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims.
There was no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior on the part of those surveilled, but the NYPD was building databases of where Muslims work, eat, shop and pray. Police conducted surveillance of Muslim communities in New York’s Suffolk and Nassau counties on suburban Long Island as well.
Racial profiling
Adding insult to injury, it was revealed that Commissioner Kelly lied about his role in a controversial film about radical islam, « The Third Jihad, » that in 2010 was shown to more than 1,400 New York City police officers and supervisors who had gone for counter terrorism training.
The movie, produced by the conservative Clarion Fund, shows dramatic footage of bombings and mayhem while the narrator says: “This is the true agenda of much of Islam in America.”
Kelly originally maintained he was not involved but later acknowledged that in 2007 he had given the filmmakers a 90-minute interview, speaking about the threat of a nuclear or biological terror attack on the city. NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the commissioner’s appearance in the film was taken from other sources.
“The film was bad enough, using it in training was bad enough, Commissioner Kelly taking part was bad enough, but they are comfortable lying to the Muslim community, lying to the media and lying to the city,” Cyrus McGoldrick of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) told MintPress News at the time.
Heavy handed tactics
One of the latest disputes over NYPD practices stems from its « stop and frisk » program. Public advocate Bill de Blasio recently said that the department was administering a “fatal dose.”
“We can’t have the social fabric continuing to be torn,” he asserted, noting that the high number of stops, especially among young African-Americans and Hispanics, has made many residents distrustful of the officers patrolling their neighborhoods.
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, NYPD officers stopped people 684,330 times in 2011, the highest number since the department started collecting the data in 2002. That is an increase of 14 percent from 2010 and some 600 percent from 2002, the first year of Mayor Bloomberg’s administration.
Just 12 percent of the stops led to arrests or summonses and a mere 1 percent to the recovery of a weapon.
“The NYPD is out of control, and the culture and practices of the Department need a full-scale overhaul so that everyone’s fundamental rights are respected and all communities can trust and respect the police,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman.
The “Domain Awareness System” is likely to provoke similar condemnation.