New York to Appoint Monitor to Review Police’s Counterterrorism Activity

New York will appoint an independent monitor to scrutinize the Police Department’s counterterrorism activities, lawyers said in court documents as they moved to settle a pair of lawsuits over surveillance targeting Muslims in the decade after the Sept. 11 attacks. The agreement would restore some of the outside oversight that was eliminated after the attacks, when city leaders said they needed more flexibility in conducting investigations.

In the years that followed, the Police Department secretly built files on Muslim neighborhoods, recorded sermons, collected license plates of worshipers, and documented the views of everyday people on topics such as drone strikes, politics and foreign policy. The settlement does not explicitly prohibit any methods that are currently allowed, and the city does not admit any wrongdoing. Police officials said that many of the provisions of the agreement — such as barring investigations based solely on religion, race and ethnicity — simply codified changes that had already been in place. But civil rights lawyers say some tactics that investigators used over the past decade violated the Constitution and probably would not have been allowed if anyone outside the Police Department had been reviewing the investigative files. The city agreed to place a civilian lawyer, appointed by the mayor, inside the Police Department to review intelligence files and report potential wrongdoing to the police commissioner, the mayor or a federal judge.