Shamiur Rahman was a young man lost, with some minor misdemeanors on his record and little idea what he wanted to do in life. And so he reached out on Facebook to a Brooklyn College charity that aided the poor, Muslims Giving Back.
Rahman quickly became the group's top volunteer — showing up to every meeting, volunteering for every event, donating to every cause.
In retrospect, though, there were reasons to be suspicious.
"What he would do is, he'd show up late, after everyone had signed in," remembered Asad Dandia, co-founder of Muslims Giving Back, who welcomed Rahman into the group and into his home. "And so he'd wait for everyone to sign in, and then take a snapshot of all the emails and names and numbers of all those who signed in."
When Rahman volunteered to load food into cars for distribution, he'd take pictures of the license plates. And when he'd meet new people, he'd immediately get their phone numbers and friend them on Facebook.
"I attributed that to a deficiency in social etiquette, not to, ya know, informant-type work," Dandia said.
Turned out, informant-type work was exactly what Rahman was up to. Rahman was sent by the NYPD to infiltrate the group and collect information, part of a broad post-9/11 anti-terrorism effort by the New York Police Department to investigate all aspects of the Muslim community in order to turn the force into a counter-terrorism operation that could prevent attacks before they happened — instead of just arresting the culprits after the fact.
But the NYPD's methods infuriated Muslims who said their civil liberties were being violated. And Muslim leaders, including Dandia, sued in federal court in 2015. This spring they settled with the NYPD, which is now rolling out new controls stemming from a judicially-approved agreement to prevent the kind of religion-centered investigations undertaken in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001.
"We were pushing back against what we believe was the unconstitutional and unwarranted surveillance of the Muslim community by the New York Police Department, which we believe impeded and infringed on our rights to privacy and our rights to assembly and our rights to practice our faith freely," Dandia said on a recent Friday after prayers at the Islamic Center at New York University, where he graduated after transferring from Brooklyn College.
The new settlement installs a civilian representative on the internal NYPD committee that reviews investigations, limits how long police can investigate a mosque without filing charges, and only allows the use of undercover officers and informants after other less intrusive options have been exhausted. Perhaps most importantly, race, religion and ethnicity cannot be motivating factors to trigger an investigation.
As detailed in the book about post-9/11 Muslim surveillance, Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, the NYPD has long investigated specific communities: Italians and anarchists in the beginning of the 20th century; Germans and Japanese during World War II; Communists later on. Then in 1971, a lawsuit was filed against the NYPD after Vietnam War protesters and the Black Panthers alleged that police were photographing activists, posing as journalists and infiltrating civil rights organizations. That suit was known as the Handschu case, after lawyer and activist Barbara Handschu, the lead plaintiff.
The resulting legal settlement in 1985 limited when and how the NYPD could investigate political activity. A so-called Handschu Committee was created at the NYPD to approve requests for such investigations.
Then the planes hit the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and NYPD brass returned to federal court, arguing that the Handschu rules restricted law enforcement's ability to prevent terrorist attacks. So Charles Haight, a federal judge, agreed to some changes: the NYPD would have new freedom to use undercover officers, and investigations could be launched without specific evidence of possible crimes nor pre-approval from the Handschu committee.
With fewer constraints, the NYPD created a Demographics Unit that mapped where Muslims lived, worked, prayed and ate, compiling all of the information into a 65-page catalogue. The NYPD documented how often Muslim college students prayed during a whitewater rafting trip and which businesses across the Hudson River in Newark, N.J., sold halal products.
Informants recruited by the NYPD to visit mosques from Long Island to New Jersey to report on the ethnicities and license plate number of prayer-goers were known as "crawlers." Officers of Middle Eastern descent who eavesdropped in Muslim-owned cafes and barbershops were known as "rakers."
Muslim student groups were a particular focus. Dandia's Brooklyn College was particularly in the cross-hairs, according to Enemies Within, as a potential incubator for radicals. A new documentary, "Watched," details the the story of an undercover police officer known as "Mel" who infiltrated Muslim groups at Brooklyn College for nearly four years. The film documents the trauma felt by the students who were spied upon. Her identity may be revealed in an upcoming terrorism trial, although police are resisting such efforts.
When reporters from the Associated Press — Apuzzo and Goldman — uncovered the extent of the NYPD operations in Muslim communities in 2011, Muslim New Yorkers were furious. Compounding their anger was an acknowledgement from an NYPD official that the Demographics Unit failed to generate leads that led to criminal investigations.
"I refer to this as policing by religion, which to me is an absolute no-no when it comes to how you police a democratic society," said Professor Maki Haberfeld, who teaches NYPD officers at John Jay College how to police multicultural communities. "There is no way any democratic police force should involve itself in policing people because they come from a certain ethnic background, racial background or religion."
She said this method of policing also damages police-community relations, in that "no one will come up and provide information" to a hostile force. "So, even from the operational standpoint, it was a complete failure," she said.
The NYPD's methods had other ramifications. The mosque where Muslims Giving Back was based, for example, told Dandia that the group could no longer solicit donations from congregants. And fearing that visibility would draw attention from law enforcement, the group began blurring members' faces out on its Facebook page. Donations dropped and volunteer involvement fizzled.
Additionally, Dandia said he felt guilty for bringing negative attention to his community of Pakistani-American Muslims in Brooklyn — "because I was the one who introduced him" to the group.
"The implications after this came out were tragic," Dandia said. "There's a climate of fear, right, there's a climate of worry when you learn that someone who prayed at the mosque was an informant...and that had tangible, measurable effects."
Elsewhere, the Muslim Student Association at Hunter College put up a sign instructing members to "refrain from political conversations." And a Muslim-owned restaurant banned the airing of Al-Jazeera, in case it would be deemed suspicious.
Dandia's attorney, Ramzi Kassem, said to this day some Muslim New Yorkers won't report stolen phones or domestic violence incidents "because they don't want the NYPD to try to recruit them to become an informant." That stems from reports that if Muslims came into contact with law enforcement for something as simple as a traffic violation, they'd be questioned about their political beliefs.
"There's deep distrust for the NYPD's motivations in these communities because of this program, just like there's deep distrust of the black and Latino communities because of stop-and-frisk," said Kassem, who directs the CLEAR legal clinic at the CUNY School of Law for New Yorkers affected by post-Sept. 11 policies.
The most striking change the lawsuit triggered is the new civilian representative, who now sits on an internal NYPD committee that reviews investigations. That representative is a former federal judge and US Attorney in Connecticut, Stephen Robinson. He didn’t respond to interview requests. And the NYPD declined to comment for this story.
But John Miller, the NYPD’s top counter-terrorism official, addressed accusations about NYPD spying at a city council hearing in June. He said the Handschu settlement indicates that cops are addressing concerns about civil liberties. He vowed that the new civilian representative is given unfettered access to the courts to communicate any concern.
In other words: if the NYPD crosses the line again, the civilian rep can report it to a judge.
"When we go and meet with various members of our Muslim community and clergy members, they want to know are we watching people," Miller said. "What we hear all the time is people want us to do things lawfully and respectfully but comprehensively, so they don’t get shot or killed in a terrorist attack."
Robert Boyce, NYPD chief of detectives, told city council members that "the protection of civil liberties is as important to the police department as the protection of the city itself." He added: "After all, it is these very freedoms that we seek to defend against our adversaries."
There’s some skepticism. Haberfeld, the policing professor, believes that these new safeguards could be wiped away if there's another attack perpetrated by Muslims. And regardless, any future civilian representative — or any mayor who appoints the representative — could be unsympathetic to Muslim civil liberties.
Among the critics is Omar Mohammedi, a New York attorney who has his own lawsuit against the NYPD. He’s suing on behalf of an imam in Harlem and a former Rutgers University student who want to see their NYPD surveillance files.
"It's going to have more oversight, but a little oversight is nothing near what they should be," he said. "You know what the oversight is? It’s a token."
Mohammedi said the "token" oversight allows the NYPD to argue in public, in court and before city council that it's protecting Muslims' rights.
Still, Kassem called the Handschu settlement a landmark decision. "This is the first time since 9/11 that any law enforcement or investigative or intelligence agency has had its ability to spy on Muslims limited in any way," he said. "Before the NYPD could use undercovers or informants in mosques and community centers and political organizations as a first resort. What we’ve built into these revised rules is now, the NYPD can only use it if there's no less intrusive alternative."
As for Dandia, he said that years later, Muslims Giving Back has rebounded from the bad publicity and is operating out of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, running youth programming and hosting meals for the community. Dandia also has a job doing interfaith work, and he's headed back to NYU in the fall to pursue a master's degree. He hopes the settlement sets a national precedent for policing Muslims.
"To have played an integral role in that is very meaningful to me and something I will keep with me for the rest of my life," he said.