The Arab-American community and the ACLU, together with the NYCLU and CUNY’s CLEAR Project, filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the New York Police Department’s surveillance of NYC’s Muslim community. The lawsuit was announced at a press conference Tuesday morning at One Police Plaza.

The landmark lawsuit charges that the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program has imposed an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers. It was filed on behalf of religious and community leaders, mosques and a charitable organization that were all swept up in the NYPD’s dragnet surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The City of New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen are listed as defendants. It argues that the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment’s right to the free exercise of religion and guarantee of neutrality toward all religions, and the New York State Constitution.

The lawsuit asks the court to end the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program, and to prevent future surveillance based solely or predominantly on religion in the absence of individualized suspicion of criminal activity.

“When a police department turns law-abiding people into suspects because they go to a mosque and not a church or a synagogue, it violates our Constitution’s guarantees of equality and religious freedom,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project. “No one questions that the NYPD has a job to do, but spying on innocent New Yorkers because of their religion is a wrong and ineffective way to do it. We are asking the court to end the NYPD’s unconstitutional religious discrimination.”

“NYPD surveillance has affected every facet of American Muslim life in our city,” said Ramzi Kassem, supervising attorney at CLEAR and associate professor of law at CUNY. “The program has stifled speech, disrupted communal life and chilled religious practice and it has criminalized a broad segment of American Muslims.”

“The NYPD is supposed to protect New Yorkers but it is instead stigmatizing hundreds of thousands of community members as disloyal and inherently dangerous simply because of their religion,” said NYCLU Legal Director Arthur Eisenberg. “Religious diversity has been a foundation of life in New York City for more than 300 years. This program not only violates our Constitution and our values as Americans and New Yorkers, but it promotes ignorance and prejudice.

Jacob Kornbluh – YWN via Press Release)