NEW YORK - A special New York Police Department unit that prompted controversy by tracking the daily lives of Muslims to detect terror threats has been disbanded, police officials said Tuesday.
Police Department spokesman Stephen Davis confirmed that detectives assigned to the unit had been transferred to other duties within the department’s intelligence division.
An ongoing review of the division by new Police Commissioner William Bratton found that the same information collected by the unit could be better collected through direct contact with community groups, officials said.
In a statement, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, called the move “a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that our cops and our citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.”
The Demographics Unit, conceived with the help of a CIA agent working with the Police Department, assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Plainclothes officers infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and cataloged Muslims in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
Former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly had defended the surveillance tactics, saying officers observed legal guidelines while attempting to create an early-warning system for terrorism. But in a deposition made public in 2012, a Police Department chief testified that the unit’s work had never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation in the previous six years.
In Washington, 34 members of Congress had demanded a federal investigation into the Police Department’s actions. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he was disturbed by reports about the operations, and the Justice Department said it was reviewing complaints received from Muslims and their supporters.
Information for this article was contributed by Jennifer Peltz of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 04/16/2014