NYPD settles lawsuit over spying on Muslims at NJ mosques, schools after 9/11

The New York Police Department has agreed to not engage in surveillance on the basis of religion or ethnicity as part of a settlement of a lawsuit that challenged its monitoring of Muslims at mosques, schools and businesses in New Jersey in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The agreement, announced Thursday, also calls for the New York Police Department to follow certain protocols, which are still being developed, when it conducts activities in New Jersey. The settlement also calls for the department to permit the plaintiffs of the lawsuit, including Muslim residents, business owners, student groups and clergy, to provide input for a new policy guide that will govern the activities of the department’s intelligence bureau. The policy guide will also be made public.

The plaintiffs will also contribute to a section of the police training manual relating to “how not to discriminate when policing,’’ said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, one of the organizations that represented the 10 plaintiffs.

Khera said the NYPD conducted surveillance on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two student Muslim associations in New Jersey, which were located on Rutgers University's campuses in Newark and New Brunswick. Some of the mosques are in Paterson and Newark, though it is not clear how many.

Without admitting any wrongdoing, the city also agreed to pay the 10 plaintiffs a total of $75,000. The settlement also calls for the city to pay $950,000 in attorney fees, costs and expenses.

“Today’s settlement sends a message to all law enforcement agencies loud and clear: Simply being Muslim is not a basis for suspicion, and cannot be a basis for surveillance," Khera said during a conference call announcing the settlement. "Today is truly a good day for the civil rights for all Americans."

The settlement was submitted to the court on Thursday for approval, she said.

In a statement on the NYPD website, the department and the City of New York said they are not admitting to any misconduct or violation of law by agreeing to settle the case.

"The City, the NYPD and the plaintiffs worked long and hard, in good faith, to achieve a settlement that provides for more transparency around the policies and practices of the Intelligence Bureau while not hampering our ability to conduct authorized investigations under the Handschu Guidelines," said John J. Miller, the NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism. "Forging partnerships and maintaining the confidence of all communities is an essential element in fighting crime and terrorism."

The Handschu guidelines regulate the department's investigations of political activity.

Omar Farah, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the settlement exemplified the power of coordinated legal action and community mobilization while also serving as a warning to law enforcement agencies everywhere to "abandon identity-based policing in all its forms."

"Attempting to predict criminality on the basis of race or religion is repugnant and it never works — except to humiliate and criminalize targeted communities,'' he said in a statement.

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Muslim Advocates and the Center for Constitutional Rights, both of which are nonprofit organizations, filed the suit in 2012 in federal court in Newark on behalf of businesses, business owners, students and a decorated Iraq war veteran, all of whom alleged they had been harmed by the surveillance. It was the first case to challenge the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program. Two more were subsequently filed in federal court in Manhattan and Brooklyn; the city has since settled both.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit that was settled Thursday claimed that, since January 2002, the NYPD had monitored the lives of Muslims in New York City and surrounding states, particularly New Jersey. They alleged that they were monitored solely because they were Muslim or believed to be Muslim, and that the surveillance was not based on evidence of wrongdoing.

Police, the plaintiffs claimed, listened in on sermons and conversations, recorded worshipers’ license plates, mapped and photographed locations that are owned or frequented by Muslims and mounted surveillance cameras on light poles, aimed at mosques.

They also claimed that the NYPD sent undercover officers into mosques, student organizations, businesses and neighborhoods that it believed to be “heavily Muslim.”

Yet, by the NYPD’s admission, Khera said, the surveillance program never produced a single lead.

“There is no reason a police officer should be scribbling notes on little girls attending school, or noting what type of clothes someone wore to a store,'' she said. "This was not lawful policing, but just blatant discrimination against innocent Americans."

The surveillance program, which the NYPD has since discontinued, was first reported in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories by The Associated Press.

The plaintiffs claimed in the lawsuit that they lost business when customers learned of the surveillance, that their professional image suffered, and that the surveillance created an atmosphere of fear in which people were afraid to worship or speak out about politics and religion.

Moiz Mohammad, a member of the Muslim Students Association at Rutgers, claimed in the suit that he had avoided discussing his faith openly at the organization’s gatherings for fear of being watched or documented.

Syed Farhaj Hassan of Helmetta, in Middlesex County, a sergeant in the Army reserves and the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, claimed in the suit that he decreased his mosque attendance significantly because he believed that being affiliated with mosques that were under surveillance could jeopardize his ability to hold a security clearance and that the association would tarnish his reputation among fellow soldiers.

“We are proud that we stood up to the most powerful police force in the country and against the suspicion and ignorance that guided their discriminatory practices,’’ Hassan said. “We believe the legal rulings and settlements, in this case, will endure as part of a broader effort to hold this country to account for its stated commitment and its obligation to uphold religious liberty and equality.”

W. Deen Shareef, Convener of the Council of Imams of New Jersey, said when he found out about the "blanket surveillance" of Muslims in New Jersey he immediately called a meeting, and said that he and other imams wanted to make sure that the rights afforded to citizens would be defended. He said the surveillance undermined rather than enhanced public safety.

Since 1975, he said, Muslim community members had been working hand in hand with law enforcement officials in New Jersey at the municipal, county and state level.

"When we found out that the New York Police Department had disrupted that relationship, we were disappointed and somewhat angered by the fact that it placed in jeopardy the relationship that we had worked so long to establish with law enforcement officials in the state of New Jersey,'' he said. "It's important for us to pay attention to those things that threatened the rights of every citizen of the United States of America."

Terms of the settlement

In addition to agreeing to not engage in religious and ethnic-based surveillance, the NYPD agreed that the court-approved Handschu guidelines, which govern investigations of political activity in New York, shall also apply to any activity in New Jersey, said Bahar A. Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. All NYPD law enforcement activities related to investigations involving political activity in New Jersey must have a valid law enforcement purpose, according to the settlement.

“In addition, the NYPD has agreed to develop specific protocols limiting its ability to conduct enforcement activities in New Jersey,’’ Azmy said, adding that it will likely involve the consent of New Jersey prosecutors and law enforcement.

The NYPD confirmed it has dismantled its Zone Assessment Unit, which was designated to undertake the Muslim surveillance, Azmy said. The department had announced in 2014 that it had abandoned the program, which sent plainclothes detectives to Muslim neighborhoods.

The Police Department, under the settlement, agreed to expunge certain records pertaining to the plaintiffs that may have been collected while the Zone Assessment Unit was in operation, Azmy said.

The settlement also states that a high-ranking official within the department's intelligence bureau shall attend a public meeting in New York City where Muslims from New Jersey, including the plaintiffs, will have an opportunity to speak to them directly.

Payments to the defendants vary. The largest, $22,500, will go to the Council of Imams in New Jersey. Other individual plaintiffs received $1,250 or $5,000, while organizations and companies will recieve $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000.

“I want to stress that money has never been the reason that plaintiffs brought this case, let alone, stayed resolved for six years,’’ Azmy said. “This case for them has always been about fundamental principles.”

Azmy said that while the settlement is significant on its own terms, it also sits within a broader context of Muslim-American activism that seeks to hold law enforcement accountable and to promote transparency at a time when he said “full-throated racism and xenophobia” are part of the White House policy.

“We hope it sends a strong signal therefore that profiling of the sort that consumes this White House is unconstitutional, and there are communities who will mobilize and exert their growing power to challenge those activities and prevail,'' Azmy said.



Long road to an agreement

Settlement talks started soon after Oct. 13, 2015, when a federal appeals court in Philadelphia ruled the lawsuit could move forward, Khera said. In its 60-page decision, the three-judge panel likened the surveillance program to the government’s treatment of “Jewish-Americans during the Red Scare, African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement, and Japanese-Americans during World War II.”

“It was a historic ruling, because, for the first time, we had in this post-9/11 climate, we had a federal appeals court saying to a law enforcement agency that you cannot single out a group of Americans based on their faith, and treat simply their faith as the basis for suspicion,’’ Khera said. “That was a wonderful message to be sent, not to just the NYPD, but all law enforcement agencies.”

That ruling followed a February 2014 dismissal of the suit by a federal judge who ruled that the likely motive of the surveillance was to find terrorists hiding among law-abiding Muslims and that any harm would have been caused not by the police but rather by The Associated Press for exposing the surveillance.

New York City had already reached settlements on two similar lawsuits that claimed the surveillance was discriminatory and violated Muslims' rights.

“With this settlement, that kind of concludes the three cases, and we also see it as the beginning of a kind of a new chapter, so to speak, in the NYPD’s relationship with our communities," Khera said.

She added that it "is our intent to continue to work closely with Muslim communities in ensuring that the NYPD is actually doing what they say they are going to be doing, and ensure compliance."

Email: alvarado@northjersey.com