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The New York Police Department will strengthen safeguards against illegal surveillance of Muslims in investigations of terror threats and install a civilian representative on an advisory committee that reviews the probes under the terms of a settlement of two high-profile civil rights lawsuits, lawyers said on Thursday.
The announcement of a deal following months of negotiations formally ended litigation over accusations that the nation’s largest police department cast a shadow over Muslim communities with a covert campaign of religious profiling and illegal spying.
The settlement modifies and adds restrictions on surveillance set by the court-ordered Handschu decree, which was put in place in response to surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and ‘70s. The decree was relaxed following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks to allow police to more freely monitor political activity in public places.
The city had begun settlement talks last year, and a tentative deal in the Brooklyn case had been reached in June. Although it doesn’t require the NYPD to admit any wrongdoing or the city to pay monetary damages, the agreement “will curtail practices that wrongly stigmatise individuals” while making investigations “more effective by focusing on criminal behaviour,” said Arthur Eisenberg, legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Muslim groups had called the findings faulty and inflammatory. “This settlement is important in light of escalating anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes in the US, but at the same time we hope Mayor de Blasio will be more vocal about why the department was simply wrong to engage in religious profiling of the Muslim community in the first place,” the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.
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