A New Jersey man who beforehand sued the New York Metropolis Police Division in an unsuccessful quest to search out 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 in the course of the Michael Bloomberg period has filed a brand new open-records lawsuit towards town over spying claims, in keeping with info solely offered to WIRED.
The lawsuit will pose a check for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s legislation enforcement insurance policies, as he spoke out vocally towards 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 Scholar Affiliation in the course of the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one in all dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, in keeping with an Related Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked paperwork outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of adverse publicity and a civil rights swimsuit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi didn’t signal on to the settlement and misplaced his unique open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court docket of Appeals resolution affirmed the NYPD’s skill to make use of a “Glomar” response to his request for paperwork concerning the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such data.
Hashmi filed a brand new set of file requests underneath the New York Freedom of Info Legislation 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 reviews on specific 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 attraction, cites particular intelligence reviews from that interval printed 14 years in the past by the Related Press.
In an interview, Hashmi informed WIRED he was motivated by the lack of his father in addition to his co-plaintiff in his unique swimsuit, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who handed away in November 2025), to take a second crack at uncovering the reality concerning the NYPD’s spying operations concentrating on Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York Metropolis, the encircling states, and elsewhere in america.
A agency supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi stated he restarted his analysis into the Intelligence Division’s actions in New York and the encircling areas in 2023, prompted by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a sequence of protests previously three years that are actually the topic of a pair of lawsuits alleging rampant First and Fourteenth Modification violations. Nevertheless, it was Mamdani’s resolution to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into motion.
