A New Jersey man who beforehand sued the New York Metropolis Police Division in an unsuccessful quest to seek 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 through the Michael Bloomberg period has filed a brand new open-records lawsuit in opposition to town over spying claims, in keeping with data completely offered to WIRED.
The lawsuit will pose a take a look at for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s regulation enforcement insurance policies, as he spoke out vocally in opposition to the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers throughout a profitable election marketing campaign that coaxed these very communities to prove in file numbers.
Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was a part of the Rutgers Muslim Scholar Affiliation through the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was certainly one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, in keeping with an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked paperwork outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of destructive 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 of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s capability 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 beneath the New York Freedom of Data Regulation 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 stories on specific mosques—pertaining to group and spiritual organizations he participated in from 2006 by means of 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent enchantment, cites particular intelligence stories from that interval revealed 14 years in the past by the Related Press.
In an interview, Hashmi advised 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 passed 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 the USA.
A agency supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi mentioned 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. Nonetheless, it was Mamdani’s choice to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into motion.
