NYPD Admits To Spying On Muslim Brooklyn College Students

Recently, Gothamist reported that the NYPD had an undercover officer pose as a student at Brooklyn College who had recently converted to Islam in order to infiltrate Muslim groups on campus.

The officer, known undercover as “Mel,” surveilled law-abiding Muslims for at least four years up until December of 2014, eight months after the de Blasio administration pledged to stop the NYPD’s blanket surveillance of innocent Muslims.

At the time, Brooklyn College’s ISO [Islamic Society] was known for adhering to a particularly conservative interpretation of Islam. The group was segregated on the basis of gender, and the men and women did not spend time together socially. Mel was surrounding herself with women who covered their faces and wore long robes, but she did not even wear a hijab. Her religious practices did not seem to change, at least in the initial years the women knew her, and Mel never mentioned struggling with her new dual identity, a common experience for converts of any faith.

It was as though Mel’s decision to take the shahada, and the time she spent amongst much more observant Muslim women, had no affect on her or her religious practice. Soon some ISO members began to doubt that her conversion was genuine.

The in-depth investigation is well-reported and worth a full read, check it out here.

Last week, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism John Miller went on WNYC to talk about the article. He allowed that the details of the Gothamist story were true but took issue with the idea that there was an overarching blanket surveillance on Muslims.

During the interview, Miller said that the need to prevent terrorist attacks sometimes comes into conflict with the need to respect constitutional rights. “We have two sets of tensions that pull against each other every day, and the hardest thing to have to do is find a balance.”

Gothamist asked one of their sources about their reaction to Miller’s comments, “But this I am told is for my own good, for public safety—and just like that I find myself outside the scope of who qualifies for that safety.”