NYPD paid me to ‘bait’ Muslims: Shamiur

Cops asked Shamiur to follow 'create and capture' strategy, he also takes photos inside mosques

 

Shamiur Rahman.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent, who worked as a paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit said he was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things.
Shamiur lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press during an interview on October 15.
He now denounced his work as an informant, as police 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,” Shamiur recalled the police telling him. “It’s street theater.”
Rahman 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 AP - he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.
Shamiur’s account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighbourhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.
The AP corroborated Rahman’s account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler.
The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police. Friends confirmed Rahman was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Rahman, said the tactics he described were used by informants.
Informants like Shamiur are a central component of the NYPD’s wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighbourhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques - known informally as “mosque crawlers” - tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.
The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
Police recruited Shamiur in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanour drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences.
An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.
The next month, Shamiur said, he was on the NYPD’s payroll.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. He has denied widespread NYPD spying, saying police only follow leads.
In the interview, Shamiur said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.”
He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.