NYPD recently announced that it was disbanding a program that sent plain clothed officers into Muslim neighborhoods to conduct surveillance of the local population.
On the Monkey Cage, Rachel Gillum shares some research on attitudes of Muslims in the US that suggests this is a good idea. She argues that:
The Muslim-American community has served as a major resource for law enforcement since 9/11, with some scholars citing Muslim-Americans as the single largest source of initial information leading to disrupted terrorism plots since 2001. Such community assistance is particularly important in stopping homegrown attacks which tend to involve more “lone wolf” actors, making them more difficult to detect by law enforcement. Indeed, it was a Muslim immigrant who first reported suspicious activity in the 2010 case of Faisal Shazad, convicted in the Times Square bombing attempt.
The NYPD’s spying tactics, guided by a former CIA official, stirred debate over whether the NYPD was infringing on the civil rights of Muslims and illegally engaging in religious and ethnic profiling. Findings from recent studies based on MANOS data– a nationally representative survey of 500 Muslim-American respondents collected online by YouGov in March 2013 –suggest that such programs that unfairly target Muslim communities can create feelings of cynicism and reduce Muslims’ willingness to voluntarily assist police in criminal investigations.
She notes that the survey showed that only 14% of the respondents from NYC thought that the police "behave fairly toward Muslim suspects" as opposed to 34% in the national survey. This is important because belief in the fairness of police behavior is related to people's willingness to cooperate with the police. Lower levels of belief in the fairness of police in NYC, presumably related to NYPD spying, suggests that it would be easier to keep terrorist plots a secret in NY's Muslim neighborhoods than in other such neighborhoods around the nation.
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