NYPD treated ordinary religious observance as a terrorism indicator

Evidence

Reminiscent of the COINTELPRO playbook that subverted African American civil rights groups in the 1960s, including Black Muslims, the NYPD sent paid infiltrators into mosques, student associations, and Muslim communities, where they took photos, recorded license plate numbers, and kept notes of political conversations. One of the informants, paid $1,500 a month, stated in a court affidavit, “My NYPD boss Steve told me that the NYPD did not think the John Jay Muslim Student Association [MSA] was doing anything wrong, they just wanted to make sure.” Moreover, the informant admitted, “the members of the MSA were religious Muslims, and according to my NYPD boss Steve, the NYPD considers being a religious Muslim a terrorism indicator.” — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 926

Categorization

• XREF: Explicitly connects to COINTELPRO and the surveillance of Black civil rights groups; this is a cross-community parallel to the reader’s existing work on state power against minorities.
• SEED: Article angle: how the COINTELPRO playbook was recycled against Muslim Americans — a direct institutional continuity between two surveilled communities.
• DEEPTHINKING: The informant’s testimony captures the total inversion of civil liberties: the NYPD itself didn’t suspect wrongdoing, yet surveillance continued, and religious devotion itself was deemed a red flag — surveillance with no articulable suspicion at all.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 926