A top New York City Police Department official on Sunday criticized Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s calls to secure and patrol Muslim neighborhoods in the wake of the Brussels terror attacks.
“I think patrol and secure was a subtext for occupy and intimidate,” John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “I think if you listen to what he said and how he said it.”
{mosads}New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton last week slammed Cruz, saying his comments are reason he’s not going to be come president, adding he takes “great offense” at Cruz’s remarks.
Miller said on Sunday that he’d spoken with Bratton about the remarks. He said the United States is the proudest country on the planet because it has been a leader in “freedom and human rights.”
Miller listed Japanese internment as well as torture after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as moments of shame in the country’s history.
“These are things that on reflection through history, the American people have rejected and each one of those is driven by fear,” he said.
He noted that candidates should not be campaigning on fear and using that as leverage.
“That’s not the direction American policing should be taking in a democracy,” he said.
Miller said the responsibility of police officers is to “protect and serve.”
In 2014, the NYPD ended a secret program in which plainclothes officers surveilled Muslim neighborhoods.