Mayor Cory Booker Investigating NYPD's Spying On Muslims In Newark

Newark Mayor Cory Booker tells the AP he's undertaking an investigation into the NYPD's surveillance of Muslims in his city. The spying came to light in the Associated Press's most recent report about the NYPD's counterterrorism efforts, which have been criticized for racially profiling Muslims. "We're going to get to the bottom of this," Booker says. "This raises a number of concerns. It's just very, very sobering." In fact, the NYPD's efforts to build a database of Muslims in Newark was so clandestine that Booker didn't even know about it. The AP reports:

For months in mid-2007, plainclothes officers from the NYPD's Demographics Units fanned out across Newark, taking pictures and eavesdropping on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims. The result was a 60-page report, obtained by The Associated Press, containing brief summaries of businesses and their clientele. Police also photographed and mapped 16 mosques, listing them as "Islamic Religious Institutions."

The report cited no evidence of terrorism or criminal behavior. It was a guide to Newark's Muslims. Police conducted similar operations outside their jurisdiction in New York's Suffolk and Nassau counties on suburban Long Island, according to police records. The documents obtained by the AP show, for the first time in any detail, how those efforts stretched outside the NYPD's jurisdiction. New Jersey and Long Island residents had no reason to suspect the NYPD was watching them. And since the NYPD isn't accountable to their votes or tax dollars, those non-New Yorkers had little recourse to stop it.

Yesterday Mayor Bloomberg vigorously defended the NYPD's "Demographics Unit," telling reporters, "The police department goes where there are allegations. And they look to see whether those allegations are true... Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight." But the AP reports that there were no allegations of terrorism in the Demographics Unit, "and the documents make clear that police were only interested in locations frequented by Muslims." Err, shut up stupid facts; let's talk about whitewater rafting!