New York Police Department (NYPD) is in the news again for wrong reasons. It’s campaign to carry photos of citizens with its officers via Twitter backfired,as users flooded the hashtag with photos decrying alleged police brutality.

Not sometime ago it had to disband its Demographic Unit, which was engaged in spying on Muslim neighborhoods, infiltrating groups and eavesdropping on conversations across the northeastern United States, in the years following the Sept. 11 attacks. It had to finally admit that this secret Demographics Unit failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead. Senior police officers of the department had to confess that the police gathered information on people even when there was no evidence of wrongdoing, simply because of their ethnicity and native language.

It may be added here that Adam Goldman, a journalist who with the help of his colleague Matt Apuzzo first broke this story about New York Police Department’s Muslim Spy Programme in a series of articles they wrote for Associated Press for which they were rewarded with Pulitzer Price.

Interestingly it was quite a coincidence that when the world at large was discussing how NYPD tried to stigmatise a community and terrorise a people, reports about the ‘informer-cop nexus behind Islamic Fundamentalism in Tamil Nadu’. Continue reading On Community Profiling →