[lg policy] New York: In a Post-9/11 City, a Person=?windows-1252?Q?=92s_?=Language Can Be a Cause for Police Suspicion

Tue Aug 28 15:08:55 UTC 2012

In a Post-9/11 City, a Person’s Language Can Be a Cause for Police Suspicion
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: August 27, 2012 6 Comments

Earlier this summer, Thomas P. Galati, commanding officer of the New York
Police Department’s elite intelligence division, sat for an unusual legal
interrogation, during which he talked of his keen interest in Urdu-speaking
New Yorkers.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly rejects the view that his department’s
intelligence unit violated limits on investigations of political groups.

“I’m seeing Urdu,” Assistant Chief Galati said of the data generated by his
eight-person demographics unit, which has eavesdropped on thousands of
conversations between Muslims in restaurants and stores in New York City
and New Jersey and on Long Island. “I’m using that information for me to
determine that this would be a kind of place that a terrorist would be
comfortable in.”

Chief Galati, whose job it is to stalk the terrorists who may live in our
midst, continued along this line. “A potential terrorist could hide in
here,” he said. “Most Urdu speakers would be of concern.” All of which
sounds reasonable, sort of, maybe. Except that something in the
neighborhood of 80,000 New Yorkers, mostly of Pakistani and Indian descent,
speak Urdu.  A little later, Chief Galati turned to those New Yorkers —
perhaps another 20,000 or 30,000 — who speak Bengali.

“The fact that they are speaking Bengali is a factor I would want to know,”
he said, adding that the information was used solely to be able to
determine where “I should face a threat of a terrorist and that terrorist
is Bengali.” But here is the problem for those eager spies among us. Asked
if all of this compiling of Urdu- and Bengali- and Arabic-language
hangouts, and all of this listening in on the chatter, had resulted in tips
about potential terrorist plots, Chief Galati conceded it had not.

“I could tell you that I have never made a lead from rhetoric that came
from a demographics report,” Chief Galati said. (His larger intelligence
division has participated in many terror investigations.) The lawyer Jethro
Eisenstein, arguing on behalf of plaintiffs in a long-running civil
liberties dispute, conducted the legal grilling of Chief Galati. He is
trying to determine whether the Police Department’s counterterrorism
policies violate a consent decree limiting surveillance of political groups.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly adamantly rejects this view, and
critics might want to tiptoe carefully here. We live in a world dangerous
in many corners, with enough people who wish us ill to cause a Mr. Kelly to
stare at his ceiling some nights. Top police officials note, reasonably,
that the 9/11 Commission found that six of the 2001 attackers lived in
Paterson, N.J., because that city had an Arabic-speaking community. And a
handful of the many New York mosques scouted by the police demographics
unit have in the past proved remarkably hospitable to very inhospitable
men, not least those steeped in the forbidding Salafi strain of Sunni Islam.

Chief Galati argues that if his agents overhear conversations that voice
support for, say, Osama bin Laden, such sentiments are worth knowing. This
fear too is not easily dismissed. I recall in 2002 talking with a cleric in
a mosque on the other side of the tracks of the City of Lackawanna in
upstate New York. I was trying to figure out why this seemingly gentle man
had allowed a stern young man from Saudi Arabia to counsel impressionable
Yemeni-American teenagers.

That stern sort turned out to be an Al Qaeda recruiter. And those
impressionable young men ended up in training camps in Pakistan and now are
doing long stretches in penitentiaries in the United States.

So there are dangers, and clerics who are too incautious by half.

The problem is analogous to that raised by the department’s stop-and-frisk
tactic. Are there too many gangbangers with too-ready access to dangerous
handguns? Yes, this does not give the police the right to randomly stop
black men between the ages of 15 and 30. And a few angry young men from
Yemen or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia in the streets of New York City do not
give the police the right to treat all as if they might offer a safe harbor
to terrorists.

New York — and for that matter terrorists — rarely conforms to the communal
templates laid down by Chief Galati. If I’m looking for a Pakistani
terrorist, he says, I’m hanging with the Urdu speakers. “I’m not going to
waste my time in a restaurant where they speak Arabic,” he noted.

Such assumptions might have led an investigator to overlook Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed. Mr. Mohammed, the mastermind of the attack on the World Trade
Center, was of Pakistani origin, but grew up in Kuwait. And when he was
tried for his many crimes at a tribunal at Guantánamo, his translation was
not English to Urdu, but English to Arabic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/nyregion/in-a-post-9-11-city-a-persons-language-can-be-a-cause-for-police-suspicion.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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