Ahmed’s presentation on Civil Rights and Surveillance centered on a recent court case, Hamid Raza vs. NYC, which explored the NYPD’s surveillance of the city’s Muslim population. Surveillance was based entirely on religion and without suspicion of wrongdoing, and included mapping activity of so-called “Muslim hotspots” such as mosques.
Some of the questions that Ahmed chose to focus on during his presentation were the issue of checks on police and whether this type of policing is helpful. Firstly, surveillance was conducted without warrant, which both infringes on the affected people’s constitutional liberties and does not limit the scope of an investigation. Ahmed made the interesting point that if police were to watch anyone long enough, they would of course find small infractions. In terms of whether surveillance to this extent is actually helpful, a police representative admitted that the NYPD’s mapping activities did not generate a single lead and did not result in a single terrorism investigation, which calls into question the practical effectiveness of surveillance.
Settlement reforms of the case included prohibiting surveillance based on religion, race, and other factors; time limits and reviews for open cases; civilian representation in the NYPD; and, limited use of undercover agents and informants without evidence of suspicion. These reforms led into the discussion questions for the class: will these reforms act as red tape to slow down the NYPD; and, why be scared of surveillance if you are doing nothing wrong?
The class intertwined both moral and practical arguments during the discussion. While surveillance laws were relaxed in 2003 to make the city safer, these laws did not give the NYPD the authority to decide to spy on Muslims. In addition to this overstep, the NYPD paid recruited informants in cash and incarcerated informants in lesser sentences, which could have easily translated to informants framing innocent people. As Professor Gitter said during the discussion, it is one thing to listen to a sermon at a mosque, and another thing to ask leading questions with the intent of prompting a controversial remark. An interesting comparison was brought up to the London camera system, which allegedly discourages terrorism using the principle that people who know they are being watched will not commit crime.
This idea leads well into some of the moral arguments the class discussed, which centered around constitutional liberty, racism, and personal experience. The United States is not a police state and its citizens should not be subject to invasions of privacy – as both Yigal and Chris argued. The US is built on the “innocent until proven guilty” notion, and, as such, Muslim men should not be stopped in the street for supposedly random searches unless they are exhibiting suspicious behavior. Our focus should rather be on actual threats to the country – some of the class’s examples included hate groups like the KKK, homicides, suicides, drunk drivers, and heart disease.
It was at this point during the class that the discussion shifted toward the context of terrorism as being committed by Muslim men. On one hand, when white, Christian men perform acts of terrorism, those men are considered mentally compromised. The class agreed that the context of the Middle East needs to be considered when evaluating the threat of ISIS, whose propaganda appeals to a select group of disenfranchised young men in both the Middle East and Europe. As it usually does, the debate shifted again to the questions of whether the US should have even gotten involved in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries. Some of our classmates argued that it is because the US bombs affected countries that teenagers are more likely to become radicalized, others argued that these countries need to build their own democracies and fight their own wars if they want to survive in the long run. The issues of US interest and how the US can support democracy in these countries wrapped up the class, making it a very well-informed and thrilling debate, overall.
