Responding to a lawsuit alleging unlawful and unconstitutional police surveillance of Muslim communities, lawyers under New York Mayor Bill de Blasio have doubled down on the arguments of his predecessor, advancing the notion that the New York City Police Department did not engage in dictionary-defined surveillance of the plaintiffs in the suit and contending that any harm that may have been caused to them was the fault of reporters, not law enforcement. In newly filed court documents, the de Blasio administration has offered, for the first time, its position in one of several key lawsuits accusing the NYPD of running a harmful east coast surveillance program aimed at members of the Islamic faith outside of New York City. The argument put forward by the new administration, which rode into office on promises of NYPD reform, is an extension of defenses offered by lawyers for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. The lawsuit that triggered this turn of events – Hassan v City of New York – was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Muslim Advocates, a non-profit, in June of 2012 on behalf of nearly a dozen Muslim plaintiffs from New Jersey who claim to have suffered from the NYPD’s haphazard intelligence operations. Together the plaintiffs claim to have been swept up in an illegal, unconstitutional, interstate NYPD surveillance program, solely because of their religion. Their case was dismissed in February and appealed the following month, forcing the de Blasio administration to now take a clear legal position on the issue of Muslim surveillance conducted outside New York. For the plaintiffs’ lawyers, that response was disheartening. “It’s really disappointing,” Omar Farah, a CCR lawyer working on the suit told The Intercept. “It really is a full-throated defense by the de Blasio administration of the same practices that his predecessor put in place.” In a statement to both The New York Times and The New York Daily News, a spokesman for the city’s law department said the recent filing, “does not address broader policy issues concerning surveillance of Muslim communities, but rather technical legal issues.” The 11 plaintiffs in the Hassan suit include a coalition of New Jersey mosques, current and former college students, the principal of a grade school for Muslim girls and a decorated Muslim veteran of the Iraq War. In its initial 2012 response to the plaintiffs, lawyers for the Bloomberg administration argued that the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim communities, houses of worship and restaurants was not unconstitutional; that rather than religious profiling the surveillance was “more likely the result of a non-discriminatory intent by the NYPD to deter and detect terrorism in the post 9/l I world”; and that the damage alleged by the plaintiffs may have been based on “fears and speculation.” “No one has ever said that surveillance is unconstitutional,” said Farah. “But surveilling individuals, groups, entire communities on the basis of a protected characteristic–which is their race or religious background–is unconstitutional.” The NYPD’s expansive surveillance of Muslim communities was first revealed in 2011 in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories published by the Associated Press. In a damming collection of reports based on internal NYPD documents and extensive interviews, the AP documented how in the wake of September 11 a division of the NYPD known as the Demographics Unit, later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit, attempted to reinvent itself as an intelligence agency, rather than a division of a municipal police department. Funded in part by White House counter-narcotics dollars and shaped by a former senior CIA officer paid by both the agency and the department, the NYPD unit conducted intelligence gathering operations throughout the eastern seaboard, dispatched Mosque “rakers” into religious centers, assigned informants to develop personal relationships with young Muslims – including by taking part in seemingly harmless activities like white water rafting – and focused intelligence gathering on 28 “ancestries of interest” (all but two of which are majority Muslim and together comprise 80 percent of the planet’s Muslim population). At one point, another top former CIA officer turned cop, who was crucial in guiding NYPD operations, described his hopes of having an NYPD informant in every mosque within a 250-mile radius of New York City.

Informed by Israeli intelligence strategies deployed in the West Bank, the idea behind the surveillance was to map out “hot spots” of potential terrorist activity. The NYPD’s surveillance operations at times ran afoul of federal law enforcement terrorism investigations and, in the case of surveillance outside NYPD jurisdiction, were sometimes conducted without the knowledge of local elected officials. A senior NYPD officer involved in the program later testified that the department’s efforts did not produce a single lead, though their work did result in an extensive list of top-notch Middle Eastern restaurants and cricket fields. In what legal critics have characterized as a flagrant violation of the NYPD’s own rules, not to mention the law, information gathered by officers and informants —who were often recruited with money or through coercion — was stored by the police department in the absence of proof, or sometimes even suspicion, of criminal activity. The surveillance programs uncovered by the AP led to lawsuits, including the Hassan case in New Jersey and a federal suit filed in New York by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project at CUNY Law School. The stories also breathed new life into decades-old litigation surrounding legal foundations for NYPD surveillance writ large. In the case of the New York suits, the litigation is “currently stayed pending settlement discussions.” In the New Jersey case, however, the legal fight continues. In April, the NYPD announced that it had abandoned the Demographics Unit operations at the heart of the AP reports. De Blasio called the decision, “a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.” But problems persist for vulnerable Muslims in New York City and elsewhere. In May, just one month after the disbanding of the Demographics Unit was announced, The New York Times published an extensive report on another secretive NYPD unit: the Citywide Debriefing Team. According to the report, since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the unit’s detectives have “combed the city’s jails for immigrants — predominantly Muslims — who might be persuaded to become police informants,” conducting 220 interviews in the first quarter of 2014 alone. While NYPD officials defended the unit as an effective asset, men who were approached by the detectives as potential informant recruits, often jailed on petty charges, described their interactions with officers as coercive and frightening.