New York to Appoint Monitor to Review Police’s Counterterrorism Activity
Source: New York Times
New York will appoint an independent monitor to scrutinize the Police Department’s counterterrorism activities, lawyers said in court documents Thursday as they moved to settle a pair of lawsuits over surveillance targeting Muslims in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The agreement would restore some of the outside oversight that was eliminated after the attacks, when city leaders said they needed more flexibility in conducting investigations. In the years that followed, the Police Department secretly built files on Muslim neighborhoods, recorded sermons, collected license plates of worshipers, and documented the views of everyday people on topics such as drone strikes, politics and foreign policy.
The settlement does not explicitly prohibit any methods that are currently allowed, and the city does not admit any wrongdoing. Police officials said that many of the provisions of the agreement — such as barring investigations based solely on religion, race and ethnicity — simply codified changes that had already been in place. But civil rights lawyers say some tactics that investigators used over the past decade violated the Constitution and probably would not have been allowed if anyone outside the Police Department had been reviewing the investigative files.
“These safeguards will be a strong check against the discriminatory surveillance of Muslim communities that we challenged in our lawsuit,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, who represents plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits. “We hope the settlement shows that effective policing isn’t at odds with constitutional policing.”
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Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/nyregion/new-york-to-appoint-monitor-to-review-polices-counterterrorism-activity.html
By MATT APUZZO and AL BAKERJAN. 7, 2016