The NYPD treated ordinary Muslim community spaces as terrorism incubators

Evidence

Even the most mundane facts of their lives: The New York City Police Department released a report in August 2007 which claimed that the “emerging threat” to law enforcement resides with “unremarkable” Muslim men under thirty-five who visit what the reports dubs “terrorism incubators”: mosques, “cafés, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores,” in other words, precisely the places where I have been hanging out. I can attest from my experience to the false conclusions of the report, which it seems to me seek to justify the NYPD’s antiterrorism budget. But perhaps the more pertinent question about the report concerns how we have arrived at a place where the NYPD assumes that every average Muslim under thirty-five is a potential terrorist. Something has surely gone terribly wrong when law enforcement premises its work on policing the ordinary and the unremarkable. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 1130

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how counterterrorism surveillance of ‘banal’ daily spaces — cafés, bookstores, butcher shops — inverts the logic of law enforcement by criminalizing the ordinary itself.
• XREF: Connects to the NYPD secret surveillance of Muslims documented by the AP in 2012 and to Foucault’s shift from punishing acts to policing identities. — connects to: NYPD simultaneously courts and surveils the same mosques it publicly honors; The CIA-trained NYPD ran a human mapping surveillance program of Muslim communities