FBI school recruiting at Muslim schools appears targeted at surveillance rather than ordinary outreach

Evidence

Louay explained why the high-school pitch wasn’t very successful. “Most of the kids were too young to get what was going on,” he said. Al-Noor’s students, after all, begin attending in elementary school, and a memory flashed in my brain of when the police used to visit my elementary school in Canada as a public-relations exercise. We kids would invariably ask to see the officer’s gun, and he would always refuse to take it out. Instead the burly officer would handcuff our young female teacher, to our great preteen delight. At the time such a practice was common to all the schools in my district, but how many schools does the FBI regularly visit to promote its service? Their recruiting campaign at al-Noor seemed calculated to solicit something else to me. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 782

Categorization

• QUESTION: How many other communities receive FBI recruiting visits to their elementary schools, and what does the pattern of visits reveal about targeting?
• SEED: An essay comparing the innocence of school-based police PR (handcuffing a teacher) to community-targeted federal recruiting as a way to expose who is treated as a suspect population.