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News > World

NYPD Violated Rules on Probing Muslim Groups: Report

  • A woman wearing a headscarf walks past a New York Police Department officer as he stands in Rockefeller Center in New York, U.S., August 23, 2016.

    A woman wearing a headscarf walks past a New York Police Department officer as he stands in Rockefeller Center in New York, U.S., August 23, 2016. | Photo: Reuters

Published 24 August 2016
Opinion

New York PD's inspector general finds investigators consistently failed to get proper authorization for surveillance of Muslims. 

The New York City Police Department routinely violated court-mandated rules on handling investigations into organized political activity, and particularly that of Muslims, the department's watchdog said in a report released on Tuesday.

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The 64-page report by the Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD found police were non-compliant with a number of rules governing the conduct of probes, including routinely extending investigations after their legal authorization expired. The examination also showed that police used confidential informants without proper documentation.

The report said 95 percent of police investigations governed by the guidelines involved individuals or political activities predominantly associated with Islam. The report said it investigated cases closed between 2010-2015.

The report was intended to measure the department's compliance with a longstanding set of rules, known as the "Handschu" guidelines, first imposed on the NYPD decades ago as part of a federal court settlement.

"These failures cannot be dismissed or minimized as paperwork or administrative errors," the report said. "The very reason these rules were established was to mandate rigorous internal controls to ensure that investigations of political activity - which allow the NYPD to intrude into the public and private aspects of people's lives - were limited in time and scope and to ensure that constitutional rights were not threatened."

The regulations were relaxed following the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to allow police to expand counter-terrorism and intelligence efforts.

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Earlier this year, the city agreed to settle a lawsuit that claimed a secretive NYPD program that conducted broad surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, mosques and businesses violated the Handschu guidelines. The unit that oversaw those investigations was disbanded in 2014 after Mayor Bill de Blasio took office.

At a news conference on Tuesday, police officials characterized the violations as technical and administrative errors, not a failure to renew expired cases.

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