Few communities in the US should be as concerned about Ted Cruz’s proposal to aggressively surveil Muslims than Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge. The neighborhood is home to one of the largest Muslim enclaves in the country, estimated at over 30,000. A walk down Fourth Avenue will turn up as many shop awnings in Arabic as in English, and women in hijab and niqab are as common a sight as business suits in Manhattan’s financial district.

But here, perhaps as much as anywhere, the reaction for many is closer to apathy.

Cruz’s comments “seem like a revelation to everyone else and my response is that it’s already been happening,” said Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York. Sarsour, a lifelong Brooklynite and Bay Ridge resident added: “Muslim communities around the country have been under constant surveillance for the past 15 years.”

Cruz, currently second in the race for the Republican nomination, proposed that law enforcement officials ramp up efforts to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods” in response to the terror attacks in the Belgian capital of Brussels on Tuesday. Isis has claimed credit for the bombings that left 31 people dead and more than 200 injured.

But as Sarsour observed, such a program is nothing new. The NYPD famously embarked on an expansive dragnet of surveillance efforts directed at the city’s Muslim residents in the wake of 9/11. One of those programs – known as the demographics unit – was assembled to study and map 28 “ancestries of interest”, the Associated Press reported in 2011, most of them Muslim. Undercover officers in this unit were tasked with visiting community locations like bookstores and cafes to look for “hot spots” of potential extremist sentiment.

Faisal, a 17-year-old Bay Ridge resident said he couldn’t remember a time before the possibility of surveillance was a normal part of life. “It’s just part of growing up Muslim in New York, I guess,” he said, shrugging.

The NYPD suspended its demographics program under Mayor Bill de Blasio’s direction in 2014, a move Cruz described on Wednesday as a kowtow to “political correctness”. New York, Cruz said in a statement, “succumbed to unfounded criticisms and eliminated the efforts of law enforcement to work with Muslim communities to stop radical Islamic terrorism.”

New York officials fired back quickly, with the mayor’s office calling Cruz’s statement “blatantly false” and police commissioner Bill Bratton calling the plan out of step with American values. Bratton added “the statements [Cruz] made today is why he’s not going to become president of this country.”

The city is facing continued litigation over the surveillance of Muslims including the pending case of Hassan v City of New York, which is seeking to have the courts declare the surveillance program unconstitutional, order the NYPD to “immediately stop spying on our clients”, and destroy any records related to the programs.

Omar Fareh, one of the attorneys arguing the case for the Center for Constitutional Rights said “blanket, discriminatory policing of a religious group – based as it is on crude stereotypes – simply does not work. It was right of Mr Bratton to acknowledge as much in his recent remarks.”

Bratton even defended the abandoning of the demographics program in November, claiming “not one single piece of actionable intelligence ever came out of that unit in its years of existence”.

Sarsour said the end of the program was welcome, but added by the time it was shut down, “it had already accomplished its mission to map the Muslim community. They know where we are.”

We cannot go anywhere else. We’re here. Maybe they don’t love us but we love them. Zein Rimawi

The now-defunct demographics unit did not encompass the sum of the NYPD surveillance tactics that activists and community members find far more distressing, either. In the same November press conference where Bratton defended the end of the program he spoke cheerfully about the other methods for identifying threats like “social media, use of informants” and the “development of relationships”.

“There’s no shortage of ability to get intelligence,” Bratton said at the time.

Fahd Ahmed knows these methods well. Ahmed is the acting executive director of the South Asian Organizing Center, which has been protesting and promoting activism around Muslim profiling since 9/11. He recalls in 2012 how during a protest against the police for the very act of surveillance, “we had someone come join our contingent who we later found out was an NYPD informant,” Ahmed said. “He kept coming to events. Not really knowing people, not really socializing with people and building connections – just showing up.”

Defenders of these informant programs say they have led to the diffusion of credible threats, like the 2004 arrest of Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay for an alleged bombing plot on the New York City subway system planned with an informant. Detractors argue that these informant interactions amount to entrapment, preying on impressionable young minds.

Ahmed said the city made “a lot of fanfare” out of the closing of the demographics unit, but stressed it was virtually defunct anyways. “The other programs that actually were spying and doing intelligence gathering in the community continue,” he said.

More recently, in January the city settled a lawsuit that accused the NYPD of suspicionless and warrantless blanket surveillance, agreeing to not pursue investigations where “race, religion, or ethnicity is the substantial or motivating factor.” But in the settlement the department admitted to no “improper practices” and claimed that the anti-discrimination component was just a reiteration of what had been their policy all along.

But Zein Rimawi doesn’t fully recognize that NYPD. The Palestinian-American immigrated to Bay Ridge from a small town north-west of Jerusalem in 1982 and said post-9/11 profiling has “terrorized” him and his family. “They came to my house, they came to my business, and they stop me in the street,” Rimawi said. He is a board member of the Arab Muslim American Federation and is very active in the local Muslim community.

Rimawi, who has been employed in a variety of fields, now works coordinating a senior center where older New Yorkers, mostly Arab-Americans, come for meals and activities. In his opinion the relationship between the the local precinct in Bay Ridge and the Muslim community is actually “very strong”, but he added “these other officers come from Manhattan with these programs and who knows what they’re thinking.”

As for Cruz, and the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, who has repeatedly proposed a moratorium on Muslims entering the US, Rimawi said their overblown rhetoric is making the post-9/11 attitude towards Muslims look like “a honeymoon”.

But Rimawi was not wavered by any of it. “We cannot go anywhere else. We’re here. Maybe they don’t love us but we love them. It’s up to the people whether they will accept us,” he said.