Is the Obama Administration Serious about Anti-Muslim Demonization in Law Enforcement?

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Friday August 05, 2011 · 4:06 PM PDT

2011/08/05 · 16:06

On August 4, 2011, the White House released a new strategy to counter violent extremism. The Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) expressed support for the plan, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States, which must be seen as a rejection of the Senator Joe Lieberman’s (I-CT) and Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) narrow focus on Islamic-inspired terrorism as the pre-eminent domestic threat. The administrations plan recognizes that “individuals from a broad array of communities and walks of life in the United States have been radicalized to support or commit acts of ideologically-inspired violence.”

LIBERTY BEAT

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Friday July 22, 2011 · 11:42 AM PDT

2011/07/22 · 11:42

PRA’s groundbreaking exposé of how tax dollars fund anti-Muslim trainings for police and counterterrorism personnel won the attention of news outlets and policy makers at its release this spring. We’ve been keeping the pressure on the Department of Homeland Security to stop funding flawed and bigoted training courses and in the last week our efforts have gotten a boost from CNN and National Public Radio.

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Saturday July 09, 2011 · 6:35 AM PDT

2011/07/09 · 06:35

Post-9/11 congressional mandates for better interagency information sharing have often been taken in a direction that undermines community safety and threatens personal privacy. According to new government records released to the public on July 6, 2011, the FBI is using its clout to cajole state and local law enforcement agencies into participating in the Secure Communities program (S-Comm) of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under S-Comm, law enforcement agencies share sensitive data, collected for the purpose of stopping crime, with other agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security. ICE, which is part of Homeland Security, then uses the data for civil immigration enforcement. Thus, S-Comm turns local police into immigration agents.

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Friday October 01, 2010 · 7:47 AM PDT

2010/10/01 · 07:47

A recent Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s investigations of certain domestic advocacy groups from 2002-2006 found that the agency considered routine civil-disobedience violations, such as trespassing or vandalism, potential terrorism. For example, the Bureau determined that spilling human blood on walls, an American flag, and pictures were “forceful acts” sufficient to trigger inclusion on terror watchlists. The FBI today threatens to label peace activists – and a wide swath of people with whom they associate – as “terrorists” because of First Amendment activities that include travel and public education. Apparently, the bad practices under the Bush administration have not been reformed.

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Monday August 16, 2010 · 10:57 AM PDT

2010/08/16 · 10:57

It’s well known that the FBI has historically abused its power to investigate non-criminal Americans—in the 1960s, the FBI relied on informants and undercover agents to burglarize the offices of the Socialist Workers Party and other movement organizations to steal membership lists, bank accounts, and other sensitive data. Now, a proposed amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would allow the FBI to bypass judicial review and obtain this same information on demand.[1]

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Tuesday August 03, 2010 · 7:23 AM PDT

2010/08/03 · 07:23

As Guantanamo is in the agonizingly slow process of shutting its doors, another kind of facility seems poised take its place on U.S. soil. Communication Management Units (CMUs), special divisions within American prisons nicknamed ‘Little Guantanamos,’ house political and terrorism convicts who are denied the basic services provided to prisoners in the United States. These inmates are not permitted basic access to communication ranging from telephone use length, visitation frequency, and postal service privacy. [1]

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Thursday July 29, 2010 · 8:05 AM PDT

2010/07/29 · 08:05

Behavioral profiling, the latest trend in pre-emptive policing, has been used in America’s airport terminals since 2003 when the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program was implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) across the United States. This past May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GOA) issued a report assessing the program’s effectiveness, how much validity was established before SPOT went nationwide, and any improvements that could be made. The results reveal serious flaws in the SPOT program’s makeup and implementation.

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Wednesday July 21, 2010 · 7:31 AM PDT

2010/07/21 · 07:31

A Texas City police officer, Cpl. Tom Robison, detained freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield during the first week of July 2010 for taking pictures of public signs. The law enforcement harassment of Mr. Rosenfield resembles hundreds of similar acts around the country, where taking pictures on public land in the bright of day is mistaken for "surveillance." The Coast Guard and BP have recently raised eyebrows along the Louisiana gulf coastline for blocking photographers’ access to beaches and marshland under the pretext of safety for "boom maintenance workers," according to independent photojournalist Georgianne Nienaber. See: Kevin Gosztola, "Embedded Media Only Allowed to Cover Oil Disaster?" (May 20, 2010).

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Thursday July 15, 2010 · 7:00 AM PDT

2010/07/15 · 07:00

On Monday this week, the New York Times announced that its investigation of NYPD “stop and frisk” practices from 2006 through 2010 found police stopped 52,000 people in a small eight-block predominantly black neighborhood called Brownsville. That’s one stop per year for every one of the neighborhood’s 14,000 residents. Police claim that almost half of those stops were prompted by “furtive action” of the resident. Action by Congress to ban profiling based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion is long overdue, but Congress has been diverted by politicized and uninformed calls to use race-based profiling as a counterterrorism tool.

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Monday July 12, 2010 · 6:15 AM PDT

2010/07/12 · 06:15

Since 9/11, practicing Islam has been unfairly viewed as suspicious in some circles, including among many in law enforcement. On December 20, 2009, in Henderson, Nevada, a concerned caller notified police that seven Muslim men were praying in a gas-station parking lot. The men had been traveling through the area and had stopped to perform one of the five daily prayers required in their religion. Although the caller did not describe any illegal conduct, the Henderson police investigated the "incident," detaining the seven Muslims for approximately forty minutes and searching their vehicle. No arrests were made that night, but the FBI recently questioned five of the men again. [1] Muslim advocacy groups have raised alarms about this unfair and prejudicial treatment, emphasizing that the men were doing nothing suspicious and should not have been placed under so much scrutiny for an innocuous, legal activity.

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Thursday July 08, 2010 · 7:40 AM PDT

2010/07/08 · 07:40

In an expansion of the national Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative (SAR), law enforcement and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials recently tied both Amtrak and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) into the initiative. Unfortunately, although SAR is meant to help intelligence analysts "connect the dots," it has a major flaw: it encourages police to gather and share information about completely legal activities in which thousands of people engage every day. Many of these activities are so common that racial, religious, and ethnic factors often determine whether the activities are perceived as "suspicious." [1]

LIBERTY BEAT

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Wednesday July 07, 2010 · 1:57 PM PDT

2010/07/07 · 13:57

On June 10, 2010, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and his cosponsors Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. This bill, which would give the president power to restrict or shut down the Internet during emergencies, threatens civil liberties, including the right to free speech. The unprecedented bill is Congress’s most comprehensive piece of legislation concerning cybersecurity during a national crisis.

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Is the Obama Administration Serious about Anti-Muslim Demonization in Law Enforcement?

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