I am calling on Chancellor Nancy Cantor to demand an explanation from the New York Police Department, and, if certain allegations are borne out, to make a forceful public complaint about its behavior.

On Saturday, The Associated Press reported the NYPD conducted surveillance of Muslim student associations at several universities outside of New York City — including Syracuse University — in 2006, 2007 and 2009. Some of this surveillance took the form of daily visits to student websites, but a ‘person familiar with the program’ claims the NYPD also once had a student informant working on the SU campus.

Reportedly, the Erie County Sheriff’s Department also urged the NYPD to monitor ethnic Somali students and professors at the University at Buffalo. Other non-city schools where the NYPD watched Muslim students, or at least their websites, include Rutgers University, Clarkson University and the SUNY campuses at Albany, Potsdam and Stony Brook. The police told the AP that they conducted this surveillance ‘to get a better handle’ on what happens in Muslim student associations.

The AP has already exposed the existence of an NYPD intelligence program that was designed with the help of the CIA. This program has involved extensive spying on ordinary Muslim citizens and residents in New York City. Now it appears this spy apparatus has been used at SU.

This sort of surveillance — targeted at entire populations on the basis of their religious beliefs, national origins, nonviolent political activism or other factors that have nothing to do with the investigation of actual crimes — is inimical to the freedom of our society. It perpetuates ethnic suspicion, erodes constitutional requirements that police have ‘probable cause’ to investigate us and undermines our constitutional rights to freedom of speech, association and religion.

The NYPD undoubtedly has fine motives. Terrorism is a frightening part of our world. But the police are no more justified to go on fishing expeditions among young Muslims than they would be to spy on the St. Thomas More Campus Ministry just to make sure it has nothing to do with people like anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph. This kind of thinking does not produce useful intelligence. It does create second-class citizens.

I call on SU to investigate the AP’s report and take swift action to make sure all of our students are protected from this sort of official abuse.

Yours truly,

Jonathan Wilfred Wilson

Doctoral candidate, Department of History 

Published on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm