Another dumb idea from Donald Trump – surveillance of mosques

Donald Trump, our national bull in a China shop, recently advocated surveillance of American mosques as a counterterrorism tactic.   He points with approval to the extensive surveillance of mosques conducted by the New York City Police Department after 9/11.   In the current fearful climate resulting from the Paris attacks, it’s not hard to imagine local law enforcement agencies taking Trump seriously.  In fact, as the NYPD’s experience demonstrates, such religion-based policing puts America at greater risk.

One approach to domestic counterterrorism in Muslim-American neighborhoods is the community policing model, in which police and the FBI seek the cooperation of Muslim Americans in identifying terrorist activity.  That requires building trust and confidence between the counterterrorism officials and Muslim Americans.  A different approach is to treat Muslim-American communities as enemy territory, like a neighborhood in Islamabad, and employ techniques that the CIA uses abroad, including massive surveillance and infiltration by agents or recruits.  That model generates distrust and destroys cooperation.

{mosads}The method that Trump advocates is the CIA model.  The NYPD tried it and, not only did it apparently fail to find any terrorists, the mosque surveillance actually degraded our ability to stop terrorist attacks, almost certainly violated the constitution, and embroiled the NYPD in civil rights litigation. 

After 9/11, the NYPD established an Orwellian-named “Demographics Unit” that was the conception of a CIA officer, Lawrence Sanchez, who was then working at the NYPD while still on the CIA payroll.  The Demographics Unit targeted Muslim-American communities, both in New York and New Jersey, solely on the basis of religion.  Among other tactics, the NYPD took pictures and videos, and recorded the license plate numbers, of mosque congregants; mounted cameras on poles to photograph worshipers entering mosques; and infiltrated undercover operatives, known as mosque crawlers, into mosques, as well as into Muslim student organizations and businesses.  The NYPD’s ultimate objective was to infiltrate every mosque within a 250-mile radius of New York City.  

In 2012, documents concerning the Demographic Unit were leaked to Associated Press reporters.  The disclosure of the targeting of their mosques and communities based on religion outraged Muslim Americans in and around New York City who had been working with the NYPD to stop terrorism.  Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York in Brooklyn, said that “as we were inviting [NYPD] Commissioner [Raymond] Kelly and his leadership into our mosques – into our institutions – he was coming through the back door.”  At seeing her organization’s name on a Demographics Unit document, she said, “I started crying.  I felt betrayed.” 

Other counterterrorism officials were appalled by the NYPD’s tactics when they came to light.  In an unusual public criticism of another law enforcement agency, Michael Ward, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark division, publicly stated that the NYPD surveillance had hurt the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts by damaging the trust the FBI had built up with Muslim-American communities.   As Agent Ward explained, “When people pull back from cooperation, it creates additional risks, it creates blind spots.  It hinders our ability to have our finger on the pulse of what’s going on around the state, and thus it causes problems and makes the [counterterrorism] job much, much harder.”  Recently, a federal court of appeals allowed a lawsuit against the NYPD by Muslim-American residents and businesses in New Jersey to proceed to the fact-finding stage.  The court found that the allegations of surveillance against the Muslim-American communities, if proven, established religious discrimination in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

As to the claims that the Demographics Unit was effective in stopping terrorist attacks, no mosque or Muslim enterprise was ever charged with terrorist activity.  In fact, AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who broke the story of the surveillance, wrote in their book “Enemies Within” that the Demographics Unit “neither followed leads nor generated any.”

In 2014, a new Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton, disbanded the Demographics Unit.  But that Unit’s ill-starred experience demonstrates that Trump’s premise for the surveillance of mosques is fundamentally flawed.  In the end, as was observed by the appeals court that upheld the New Jersey Muslim’s claim of religious discrimination, loyalty to America is a matter of the heart and mind, not religion, race or color. 

Wallance is an attorney based in New York City.