By Roni Ayalon
NEW YORK, NY – New York City Mayor Eric Adams appointed Muhammad Faridi as the next Civilian Representative of the New York City Police Department’s (NYPD) Handschu Committee, making him the first Muslim-American to serve on the panel.
According to AmNY, The Handschu committee is an “internal NYPD body that was formed in 2017 — under former Mayor Bill de Blasio — following a pair of federal suits that alleged the department engaged in improper investigations of the Muslim community.”
“The committee is charged with assessing whether NYPD investigations into political or religious activity are in compliance with the Handschu Guidelines, which were established through a 1985 consent decree that bars the department from investigating political or religious groups in the absence of ‘specific information’ linking them to a crime,” said the ACLU.
The ACLU briefing explains how the 2017 settlement created the role of the Civilian Representative to provide “an ‘outsider’s’ perspective to the deliberations of the NYPD Intelligence Division as it considers investigations directed at political and religious activities.”
The ACLU said the committee was first created due to a series of court cases establishing the need for police oversight, including the 1971 case Handschu v. Special Services Division that “targeted the abusive surveillance techniques employed by the NYPD Intelligence Division — including the misuse of informants, the infiltration of political groups, and the leaking of information from police dossiers in ways that injured individual reputations and employment opportunities.”
Although a settlement that “established appropriate oversight Guidelines” came out of this case, “they were weakened in the aftermath of 9/11,” charged the ACLU.
In 2011, there were reports of “widespread and abusive surveillance directed at Muslim communities,” said the ACLU, which, with the NYCLU, and the CLEAR project at CUNY Law School, filed Raza v. City of New York, challenging the constitutionality of the NYPD’s discriminatory and unjustified religious profiling.
The ACLU said many of the original Handschu rules and guidelines were reestablished as a result of the case’s 2017 settlement.” However, there was “a significant new element in the settlement…: the creation of the position of Civilian Representative,” added the ACLU.
“Under the terms of the 2017 agreement, the mayor had the authority, after five years, to seek the elimination of the position — putting this important oversight at risk. He properly chose not to do that,” said the ACLU, praising Mayor Adams for his “decision to continue this important check on potentially abusive surveillance and investigative NYPD practices that had been employed to target disfavored political and religious groups.”
