Civil Rights Group Condemns NYPD’s Muslim Informant Program

A New York University (NYU) student attends a town hall to discuss the NYPD's surveillance of Muslim communities on February 29, 2012 in New York City. The Justice Department is beginning a review on a possible investigation of civil rights violations due to the surveillance, which allegedly included NYU students. Mario Tama/Getty Images

NEW YORK—A Muslim civil rights group condemned the New York Police Department Monday for running a program that recruited Muslims in city jails to become informants.

“The revelation that the NYPD is continuing its discriminatory policing of Muslims eliminates any doubt that the three federal lawsuits challenging the department’s practices should be pursued vigorously and that a federal court order is the only way to ensure that the NYPD will stop its unconstitutional practices,” a statement from Muslim Advocates, a national legal advocacy and educational organization, says.

The police department’s practice was first reported in the New York Times on Sunday. According to the article, an NYPD unit called the Citywide Debriefing Team searched the city’s jails for immigrants, mostly Muslim, in order to persuade them to become police informants.

The police department announced last month that it had disbanded the controversial unit that sent undercover officers to spy on Muslims in mosques.