NEW YORK — Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work as a paid government informant, said the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.
“We need you to pretend to be one of them,” Rahman recalled the police telling him. “It’s street theater.”
Shamiur Rahman, who said he plans to move to the Caribbean, said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was “detrimental to the Constitution.” After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police – and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the Associated Press – he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.
Rahman’s account shows how the NYPD unleashed paid informants on Muslim neighborhoods, usually without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using. more
The NYPD is the largest police department in the nation and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has held up its counter terrorism tactics as a model for the rest of the country. But its tactics are under increasingly withering fire. In more than six years of surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods by eavesdropping on conversations and cataloging mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed in late August.
In related stop-and-frisk activity, The New York Civil Liberties Union reports that while innocent New Yorkers have been subjected to these “street interrogations” more than 4 million times since Mayor Bloomberg entered City Hall, 87 percent of the persons stopped last year were either black or Hispanic. Of those, however, barely one-in-ten of the stop-and-frisk encounters targeted minorities ended in arrest.