Ex-NYPD cop: End of unit spying on Muslims "breathtaking"
The news Tuesday that the New York City Police Department is disbanding a unit specifically focused on monitoring the daily lives of area Muslims came as a "breath of fresh air" to former NYPD Detective Sergeant Joseph Giacalone, now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
"To have something this big change so quickly, it's breathtaking, because historically the NYPD doesn't change fast," Giacalone told CBS News' Crimesider.
For 12 years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly ran the department, but in January, Bill DeBlasio was sworn in as mayor and soon thereafter appointed Bill Bratton as top cop.
According to a statement from the NYPD, the department decided to disband the unit because "it has been determined that much of the same information previously gathered by the Zone Assessment Unit may be obtained through direct outreach by the NYPD to the communities concerned." The NYPD says that the unit has been "largely inactive" since January and that its officers have been reassigned.
The Zone Assessment Unit, originally known as the Demographic Unit, was established in 2003, but not publicly revealed until a series of reports by the Associated Press in 2011. The unit used plain-clothes officers who spoke languages like Arabic and Urdu to gather information by documenting conversations, visiting mosques, and creating maps of where people from majority-Muslim counties prayed, ate and shopped, for the purpose of developing leads to prevent future terrorist attacks.
But, according to a 2012 deposition of Thomas Galati, then the department's chief intelligence officer, the unit - whose tactics infuriated the Muslim community and led to multiple lawsuits - didn't develop any leads between 2006-2012, and he didn't know of any others prior to his arrival in 2006.
Giacalone says the reasons for disbanding the unit are likely myriad, including the fact that counter-terrorism work is very expensive and that the department is likely to lose officers in the next few years. Still, he points to the anger and distrust the program has sowed among the city's Muslim population as a possible deciding factor.
"We need to have collaborative partnership with these communities so they will tip us off," says Giacalone. "If you don't have the respect of the community you won't get the information."
Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, told Crimesider that the NYPD has a long way to go when it comes to building trust and respect with the people they've been targeting.
"Closing down this unit doesn't mean the NYPD will stop spying on Muslims," she says. Sarsour says she is concerned that the same kind of surveillance work will continue in other units scattered throughout the department.
For five years, Sarsour says that her group - and other advocates for the city's Muslim-American community - had no contact with the NYPD, so being invited to an April 9 sit-down with Bratton and his counter-terrorism chief, former CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, was a step forward.
Sarsour said that Bratton was cordial and made an effort to distance himself and his department from the actions of his predecessor.
"But," says Sarsour, "forgetting 12 years of psychological warfare is not something that's going to happen because we met with Bratton."
