NEW YORK (AA) - Several US-based rights groups led by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday filed a legal action against what they said the New York Police Department's "unconstitutional policy and practice of targeting entire Muslim communities for discriminatory and suspicionless surveillance."
"The NYPD's vast religious profiling program has cast an unjustified badge of suspicion and stigma on hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, based on nothing more than their religious faith and practice. We represent civic and religious leaders, two mosques, and a charitable organization, all of whom were swept up in the police department's dragnet surveillance because they are Muslim," ACLU said in a statement on its website.
The group said, "the NYPD's surveillance program would be unthinkable if it targeted churches or synagogues, Christian reading rooms or Jewish community centers. The fact that it maps and sends informants into mosques and Muslim-owned businesses is no different. Like all Americans, our Muslim communities are entitled to protection from discriminatory religious profiling and intrusive police surveillance."
"This discriminatory profiling and the harms it has caused our clients violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, and the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion and guarantee of government neutrality toward religion.
"Our suit 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. It also seeks to expunge the records of all of our clients created because of the program, and to appoint a monitor to ensure that New York City truly ends all of the unconstitutional practices inherent in its religious surveillance efforts," ACLU said.
