The New York Police Department announced yesterday it would be disbanding its Muslim surveillance unit, drawing criticism from anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney.
Commissioner William Bratton announced the NYPD would be abandoning its controversial program that spied, mapped and documented the everyday activities of community members in New York city and beyond. Critical questions remain about what will become of the data that has already been collected and what other steps will be taken to rid the agency of bias-based police practices. Gaffney, of course, disapproved of the move and sounded the alarm about the dangers of no longer monitoring “incubators of jihadism.”
“In other words, from now on, NYPD will be reduced to asking for tips about jihadists from self-appointed ‘representatives’ of Muslim-Americans – who just happen to be adherents to shariah and the jihad it commands,” he wrote in a blog post. “Care to bet your life on that arrangement?”
This is not the first time those in the anti-Muslim movement have defended the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program. Last October, Pamela Geller and her allies held a press conference arguing for the continuation of the program and denounced Mayor Bill de Blasio’s opposition to it.