TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The New York City Police Department (NYPD) announced that it has disbanded a unit dedicated to supervising Muslim residents of the city in an effort to stop terrorism.
Mayor Bill de Blasio 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 NYPD had worked with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spy on Muslim communities, infiltrating student groups, placing informants in mosques, as well as monitoring sermons and cataloguing Muslims who adopt Anglicized surnames.
Former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defended the surveillance tactic, saying that officers had followed the guidelines to create an early warning system to counter terrorism. But in a deposition in 2012, an NYPD chief testified that the division had not generated a lead on a terrorist attack in the previous six years.
NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said that detectives assigned to the unit had been transferred to other duties within the department's Intelligence Division.
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