Group: end BPD Muslim surveillance
Activists say Muslims unfairly targeted
Muslim activists in Boston have called on the city’s police department to end a program that they say enables racism against Somali youth, under the guise of preventing terrorism.
Earlier this month, the Muslim Justice League sent a letter to Boston Police Department Commissioner William Gross, requesting that he “recall its officers from participation in” the Youth and Policing Initiative Plus (YPIP), a countering violent extremism (CVE) program funded by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security in 2017.
“Various policies, programs and practices ostensibly aimed at promoting national security — from the Muslim Ban to CVE — treat us as members of a suspect community,” wrote Shannon Al-Wakeel, executive director of MJL, in the letter. “We are tired of our communities being treated as threats and wish instead to live in a society that respects the dignity of all its members.”
According to the program’s description on the National Police Foundation website, YPIP’s main objectives are to “1. Expand and bolster community-led activities in Boston; 2. Build trust between the Somali community and the Boston Police Department; and 3. Build resilience in the Boston Somali community, particularly among youth.” The program is meant to work with youth in the Somali community, focusing on Roxbury, to prevent “violent extremism” growing out of “risky behaviors.”
The MJL, along with six other activist organizations, first brought their concerns to then-Commissioner William Evans in 2017, saying that the program would enforce violent stereotypes about Muslims and Somali people based on their religion, ethnicity and race, as well as infringe on their privacy by monitoring their movements and activities.
“CVE is just a euphemism for racial and religious profiling,” said Nimra Azmi, staff attorney for Muslim Advocates, in a statement. “Instead of protecting Boston’s young people, BPD is singling them out for monitoring because of their religion.”
The original Somali community liaison for YPIP in Boston withdrew after seeing draft surveys for participants and police officers, according to public records requests made by the MJL, but the program continued anyway.
A spokesman for BPD declined to comment.
The original letter written to BPD in 2017 inspected the grant request to DHS, in which risk factors for violence in young Somali males included “unaccountable times and unobserved spaces,” something the writers of the letter found concerning, in that it implied privacy for teenage boys was dangerous.
The police department is also reportedly looking into expanding YPIP into the city’s schools.
“Society suffers when any group of people is marginalized or treated with suspicion because of their racial, national, ethnic, religious, sexual or gender identity,” said Rahsaan Hall, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts’s Racial Justice Project. “The use of CVE programs to extend state surveillance into the activities of Muslim youth — merely because they are Muslim — is deeply troubling, and perpetuates Islamophobia, which is particularly unnecessary in the current political climate.”
