Neighbors Spying on You? New Program Spreading Across the US Takes Neighborhood Watch to Scary New Level

Suspicious Activity Reporting asks citizens to keep an eye out on their neighbors -- but the results could be terrible.

March 31, 2012

Crime in Los Angeles is a gritty enterprise, and donning an LAPD badge has historically involved getting your hands dirty. Long before the New York Police Department was spying on Muslim students, the LAPD was running a large-scale domestic spy operation in the 1970s and ’80s, snooping on and infiltrating more than 200 political, labor and civic organizations including the office of then Mayor Tom Bradley. Today, the LAPD isn’t quite so aggressive, but it still employs a directive titled Special Order 1, which permits police officers to deem what is “suspicious” and then act on it.

SO 1 enables LAPD officers to file Suspicious Activity Reports on observed behaviors or activities. Where things get murky, however, is how SAR guidelines categorize constitutionally protected, non-criminal and commonplace activities such as using binoculars, snapping photographs and taking notes as indicators of terrorism-related activity. The SARs are coupled with the LAPD’s iWatch program, a campaign the police pioneered to encourage regular citizens to report “suspicious” activity, including “a person wearing clothes that are too big or too hot for the weather,” or things that just plain old don’t “look right.”

Far from being merely a local phenomenon, the standardized program that the LAPD developed in 2008 served as the lead model for a National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. “Success” stories from the LAPD’s program are used in national training material, and the LAPD touts it as “the first program in the U.S. to create a national standard” for terrorism-related procedures.

NYPD report on Muslim shops includes stores owned by Jews, Catholics

Kings Row, a Brooklyn clothing store, was included
in a report about Muslim businesses. “I happen to be
a Sephardic Jew," said shop owner David Idy. " My
family is from Egypt, but I was actually raised in
Bensonhurst and consider myself an American.”

NYPD anti-terror detectives were compiling lists of businesses, stores and mosques linked to Muslim New Yorkers with Syrian, Albanian and Egyptian roots.

By Rocco Parascandola AND Corky Siemaszko / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Published: Friday, March 9, 2012, 7:41 PM
Updated: Friday, March 9, 2012, 10:31 PM

NYPD anti-terror detectives compiled lists of businesses, stores and mosques linked to Muslim New Yorkers with Syrian, Albanian and Egyptian roots.

But they didn’t do a very thorough job.

The owners of most of the establishments listed in the “Syrian Locations of Concern Report” told The Daily News Friday they are neither Syrian nor Muslim.

“I think it’s pretty comical that my store would be in this report,” said David Idy, owner of Kings Row, a clothing store on Avenue U in Brooklyn. “I happen to be a Sephardic Jew. My family is from Egypt, but I was actually raised in Bensonhurst and consider myself an American.”

Cops also listed a Bronx barber shop called “Dino’s European Hair Style,” noting that its owner is Albanian and its close proximity to the North Bronx Muslim Center.

Shop owner Sammy Eirovic said, “I’m not Albanian, I’m Montenegran.”

“Honestly, I’m really surprised anybody would be spying on me,” he said. “We just cut hair.”

Among the supposedly Egyptian-owned businesses listed by the NYPD were defunct nightclubs like the Cleopatra on 5th Ave. in Brooklyn, which served liquor — something observant Muslims shun.

The reports were obtained by the Associated Press, whose ongoing probe of NYPD spying has sparked sharp criticism from Islamic and civil rights groups — and prompted strong rebuttals by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly.
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Who Really Owns The NYPD? Turns Out It's Not Such A Rhetorical Question

I wrote last week about the multi-million dollar contribution to the NYPD from JPChase, but it turns out the corporate influence goes much deeper than that. Pam Martens, an activist who successfully sued the NYPD after her arrest for handing out leaflets about corruption at Citibank, tells us a lot of things we didn't know about the relationship between the NYPD and Wall Street, and it's jawdropping information:

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye. READ MORE