NYPD denies 9/11-era surveillance targets Muslims and BLM protesters. Some New Yorkers are skeptical

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — New York Police Department Terrorist Squad officers pounded on Derrick “Dwreck” Ingram’s door one day last August. Two helicopters hovered above his building. His apartment lights flickered; his outgoing calls would not go through. Every call he placed was funneled to an NYPD line where officers waited on the other end to hear Ingram surrender.

Eventually, his cellphone was shut off.

As officers read Ingram his own social media posts on the other side of his door, some of them very personal, he said, he realized that the NYPD had tracked him for a long time.

“It was insane and scary,” Ingram said. “I knew this had been a planned, strategic thing. I’m seeing, you know, the drones in my window with cameras connected to them, so I knew this was some type of huge deal.”

Ingram believes NYPD besieged him to set an example. He’s a prominent activist in New York City, where he's stood at the frontlines of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Part of his role within the city’s activist communities involves teaching others about police surveillance technology.

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Members of the NYPD push protestors away from Union Square in Manhattan after protests started to get violent late in the evening May 30, 2020. Police started pushing back after protestors began throwing items at police. Protests and marches took place throughout the city for a second day over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Members of the NYPD push protestors away from Union Square in Manhattan after protests started to get violent late in the evening May 30, 2020. Police started pushing back after protestors began throwing items at police. Protests and marches took place throughout the city for a second day over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He knows from history that Black activists experience intense police scrutiny. Undercover NYPD officers infiltrated the Black Panther Party's Manhattan chapter in the late 1960s, a group of lawyers wrote in an NYCLU article. Police tracked political and civil rights activists who orchestrated protests. That is until the group of lawyers intervened in the next decade to block police from investigating political and religious activity.

But the 9/11 attacks reignited an emphasis on police surveillance that targeted people based on color and creed — this time Muslim, Arab and South Asian New Yorkers. The NYPD, though, denies training surveillance tactics on these populations.

Legal actions have limited some surveillance in recent years. But Muslim and Black people, politically active and not, in New York still worry about how they're being watched as technology advances. First, they want transparency from the NYPD.

Navigating a 'necessary evil'

If you ask James Hughes — a retired NYPD officer — he isn’t supposed to be here. Alive, that is.

Hughes was ending a midnight shift when the first plane hit one of the towers in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. He rushed to the chaos with other officers, trying to help people out of the building and push onlookers back. The second tower fell and with it a large piece of debris that hit and killed his partner.

“That could have been me,” he said.

Hughes spent two subsequent weeks sifting through the rubble with other first responders. Before the attacks, Hughes was with the narcotics unit at his department, but he was moved to the counterterrorism unit shortly after 9/11. He’d stay there until his retirement in 2014. He remembers the department always having some role in surveillance, but efforts intensified after 9/11.

“We were very big on facial recognition," Hughes said. "All I had to do was take a picture of somebody and find out everything from what you did today to what you ate today.”

Hughes considers the extent of surveillance a “necessary evil” to keep people safe.

He does, however, recognize the liability of placing such enhanced surveillance technologies in the hands of every police officer. All of whom are still human, still capable of teetering the line between right and wrong.

“Power is one of the most dangerous drugs there is. When you can find out that you can do something and you can actually use it for your own personal means, it’s very, very dangerous,” he said.

The NYPD boasts one of the world's largest networks of cameras, license plate readers and other surveillance devices "designed to detect and prevent terrorist acts," according to the department's website. The city allocated $47 million for NYPD technology upgrades in this fiscal year's budget.

In 2013, the CLEAR project filed a lawsuit along with the ACLU and its New York chapter against the NYPD. It’s known as Raza vs. City of New York, and it cited discriminatory and unjustified surveillance of Muslims in New York. CLEAR — an acronym for Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility — supports Muslim, Arab, South Asian and other communities in and around New York City that are targeted by government agencies "under the guise of national security and counterterrorism," according to the clinic's webpage.

John Miller, the Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism for the NYPD, denied that a Muslim surveillance program existed. But some department documents, uncovered by AP journalists who revealed the secret program, suggest otherwise.

That team was tasked with identifying businesses that employed "a specific ethnicity." The slideshow listed "ancestries of interest" and "communities of interest," among them Egyptian, Iraqi and Afghan.

Miller said the department had "very collaborative meetings" with Raza plaintiffs. However, those same organizations behind the case published a report called "Mapping Muslims" that found evidence that contrasts Miller's claim.

NYPD’s presence was felt where Muslim people congregated after 9/11, said Martin Stolar, a New York City civil rights attorney who was on the team that brought the 1970s lawsuit forward. The ACLU, one of the plaintiffs in the Raza case, reported undercover agents watched worshippers at religious services up to 100 miles away. Officers recorded license plates in mosque parking lots, Stolar said. Ingram said he advises BLM protesters to avoid driving their cars to demonstrations.

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Ingram is on the board of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, also known as STOP. The nonprofit believes there was at least one investigation of BLM-affiliated demonstrations approved by the Handschu committee, according to STOP Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn. The committee monitors the NYPD's compliance with guidelines of the same name that keep the department from investigating political and religious activity.

The Handschu committee came together after lawyers, including Stolar, who defended activists in the 1970s won their lawsuit. The case — Handschu v. Special Services Division — challenged “old-time massive surveillance” the NYPD conducted “of peoples’ political activity,” Stolar said.

Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in this Sept. 11, 2001, file photo. A beam from the World Trade Center will be on display in South Bend Thursday. AP File Photo/Gulnara Samoilova
Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in this Sept. 11, 2001, file photo. A beam from the World Trade Center will be on display in South Bend Thursday. AP File Photo/Gulnara Samoilova

It required the NYPD to obtain permission from the Handschu Authority — at the time it consisted of two high-ranking NYPD officers and a civilian member — if they suspected a religious or political group of criminal activity.

Then 9/11 happened.

David Cohen, the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence at the time, argued that the Handschu guidelines hindered the Intelligence Division’s ability to investigate terrorism. He wanted them abolished, Stolar said.

In April 2003, a U.S. District Court judge approved revised guidelines that granted Cohen the power to authorize investigations without the Handschu Authority.

“When Cohen gets rid of the controls, that’s when this massive surveillance commences,” Stolar told the USA TODAY Network. “The same police department techniques that were used, and are currently in use, were used against the Muslim community.”

In 2017, "historic" updates to the Handschu guidelines reinstated a civilian representative to the committee, said Naz Ahmad, staff attorney with the CLEAR project at City University of New York School of Law.

“I would say since the new guidelines came into place we’ve definitely been involved in meeting with the civilian representative, trying to make sure he understands the impact of surveillance on communities in the New York City area,” Ahmad said.

The civilian representative — a position held by former Southern New York U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Robinson since 2017 — is required to issue reports evaluating how the department’s doing in accordance with the Handschu guidelines. The committee grew to 11 members who, besides Robinson, are leaders within the NYPD.

In his third report, released in January 2021, Robinson reported a 5% decrease in the number of requests the Handschu committee reviewed compared to the previous year. He stated the NYPD complied with the guidelines.

That report cut off before racial justice protests erupted, however. CLEAR expects data that includes protests to be presented in a fourth report anticipated to come out later this summer.

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Stolar, who is not a member of the committee, addressed one Handschu issue in 2020 in a letter to Peter Farrell, the deputy chief of the Special Federal Litigation Division with the New York City Law Department. Stolar questioned why NYPD officers and FBI agents interrogated protesters who violated curfew about their political associations and activities, likening this to NYPD Intelligence conduct after Cohen took over.

As a result, the NYPD invited Stolar to look at police reports about these interrogations. There was no record that police asked protesters any political questions, Stolar said, so it appeared the NYPD followed the guidelines.

Still, Stolar said NYPD "messed up" handling protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. A report from the New York City Department of Investigation found that "limited intelligence" gleaned from social media posts that were hostile toward police officers "was used to justify a disproportionate response."

"When the police are under attack they respond ... they think everyone who's attacking them must be a criminal," Stolar said. "In certain cities, there was looting ... that gives [police] the cover to investigate criminal activity."

NYPD wasn't alone after 2001 or in 2020 — it had support from federal authorities. The Associated Press found that the NYPD used White House funds for surveillance tools in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods.

CLEAR and the Movement for Black Lives analyzed 326 criminal cases U.S. prosecutors initiated that were tied to uprisings and protests between May and October 2020. Of these cases, 41 mentioned a defendant's beliefs or associations, the report reads. Typically, these people told officers they were protesting police brutality.

Handschu guidelines cover investigations — broadly defined as a collection of information — into people or groups, but does not keep police away from protests. It is officers’ responsibility to respond for traffic and control, Stolar said, but not to intervene with the political activity of the crowd.

Handschu guidelines vs. surveillance tools

Legal experts focused on surveillance have been disappointed by the operations of the most recent Handschu guidelines, including Cahn.

“While I think Judge Robinson has done quite a bit to try to engage advocates and build trust, I think that NYPD is using this process to legitimize the status quo, ignoring the ways that NYPD surveillance is driven by bias and systematically targeted at communities of color, particularly Muslim New Yorkers," Cahn said.

Cahn said the public still does not get a clear idea of NYPD Intelligence operations, but when “we do get a peek behind the curtain … it’s quite damning.”

As recently as 2016, 95% of NYPD Intelligence investigations reviewed still focused on Muslims or people engaged in political activity associated with Islam, according to a New York City Office of the Inspector General investigation.

Although areas with large Muslim populations in New York City are still surveilled, Stolar said he does not see the massive surveillance now that the population experienced post-9/11.

Still, legal advocacy organizations like STOP want to know exactly what tools are being used to track these communities, and how. The lack of transparency surrounding police surveillance tools motivated STOP and other groups to push for passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, in New York City. After Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the act into law last July, the NYPD was required to publish impact reports and use policies about such technology.

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Less than a year later, first attempts at these reports stirred deep concern among a long list of groups including STOP, the NAACP, Legal Aid Society and professors from several renowned law schools, among others. They argued in a letter that the policies simply recite civil rights laws and antidiscrimination policies, but did not address systemic racial discrimination present in surveillance technology.

Numerous studies found racial bias among other issues with facial recognition technology. A federal government study found this technology produced the most false positives when used on American Indian, African American and Asian populations.

The POST Act was just a first step in limiting discriminatory NYPD surveillance tactics.

“In the first instance we fought for transparency because you can’t outlaw what you can’t see,” Cahn said.

Protesters at NYC's City hall, near the NYPD Headquarters on June 2, 2020. They are protesting over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis. Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day. Credit: Robert Deutsch via USA TODAY NETWORK
Protesters at NYC's City hall, near the NYPD Headquarters on June 2, 2020. They are protesting over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was in police custody in Minneapolis. Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day. Credit: Robert Deutsch via USA TODAY NETWORK

Living amid facial recognition technology

NYPD officers who swarmed Ingram’s apartment last summer carried papers with his photograph labeled “Facial Recognition Technology.”

He learned when his case was dismissed that police had gathered “a huge dossier of discovery” that included footage of him NYPD captured by tapping into CCTV cameras in his neighborhood.

“I think the first step would be stopping complete use of facial recognition technology until we have a full command on it,” Ingram said. “In the interim, use the money we put into technology that'll surveil people and over-surveil poor, marginalized communities … and utilizing that to help the impoverished communities grow, thrive, have food.”

He suggests other activists cover their faces at demonstrations “unless they’re willing to put themselves out there and possibly be monitored or attacked.”

A bill working its way through the New York Senate would prohibit NYPD from using biometric surveillance, tracking that uses peoples’ bodies. That includes facial recognition, which creates a face map using geometric constructs based on certain anchor points.

As for Ingram, he took time to reset after his case was dropped. He unplugged his Alexa after he learned police had tracked him that way. His fellow organizers communicate with him differently because they worry he is still being monitored.

But, he said, he hasn't navigated life much differently following his encounter with police.

“I guess I have justifiable paranoia now,” Ingram said. "With me having a little bit of a platform, I feel like at this point if I am being monitored, which I probably am, I don’t care."

"I'm not doing anything illegal. I'm using my God-given rights to protest a government I don't agree with."

Sammy Gibbons and Jasmine Vaughn-Hall on Twitter: @sammykgibbons and @jvaughn411.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: 9-11 NYPD surveillance leads New Yorkers to demand transparency