A New Jersey man who beforehand sued the New York Metropolis Police Division in an unsuccessful quest to discover out whether or not the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and fellow Muslims as a part of its infamous and expansive “mosque-raking” program throughout the Michael Bloomberg period has filed a brand new open-records lawsuit in opposition to the metropolis over spying claims, in accordance to information solely offered to WIRED.
The lawsuit will pose a check for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s regulation enforcement insurance policies, as he spoke out vocally in opposition to the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers throughout a profitable election marketing campaign that coaxed these very communities to end up in file numbers.
Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was a part of the Rutgers Muslim Pupil Affiliation throughout the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one in all dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, in accordance to an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked paperwork outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of detrimental publicity and a civil rights go well with that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not signal on to the settlement and misplaced his unique open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s capacity to use a “Glomar” response to his request for paperwork about the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such data.
Hashmi filed a brand new set of file requests beneath the New York Freedom of Info Regulation in February asking for a narrower set of data than his earlier request—weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of particular organizations focused by the Intelligence Division, and experiences on explicit mosques—pertaining to neighborhood and non secular organizations he participated in from 2006 by means of 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent enchantment, cites particular intelligence experiences from that interval revealed 14 years in the past by the Related Press.
In an interview, Hashmi advised WIRED he was motivated by the lack of his father in addition to his co-plaintiff in his unique go well with, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who passed away in November 2025), to take a second crack at uncovering the fact about the NYPD’s spying operations concentrating on Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York Metropolis, the surrounding states, and elsewhere in the United States.
A agency supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi mentioned he restarted his analysis into the Intelligence Division’s actions in New York and the surrounding areas in 2023, prompted by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a collection of protests in the previous three years that are now the topic of a pair of lawsuits alleging rampant First and Fourteenth Modification violations. Nevertheless, it was Mamdani’s determination to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into motion.
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