Los Angeles Police Map Muslims

CAIRO — The Los Angeles Police Department's anti-terrorism bureau is planning to create a map on Muslims communities in the city to fight radicalization and ghettoization, drawing immediate fire from rights and Muslim advocacy groups for racial profiling the sizable minority.

"There are people out there who believe in extreme violent ideology who present a threat to the American people, and that is what we are trying to prevent," Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief who heads the counterterrorism bureau, told the Los Angeles Times on Friday, November 9.

"This could be called another prevention strategy."

Downing said mapping the Muslim communities would enable police to study their culture, history, language and socioeconomic status to better understand them.

If a community is isolated, it may be determined that it is susceptible to extremist ideology, he said.

"We are seeking to identify at-risk communities," Downing told the paper.

"We are looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated. We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities."

There are 500,000 Muslims in Los Angeles, the second largest Muslim concentration in the US after New York City.

American Muslims are estimated between six to seven million, less than three percent of the country's 300 million population.

Racial Profiling

The mapping project has immediately provoked diatribe from rights and Muslim advocacy groups.

"This is anti-Semitism reborn as Islamophobia," said Shakeel Syed, director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California.

"We certainly reject this idea completely. This stems basically from this presumption that there is homogenized Muslim terrorism that exists among us."

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim advocacy group in the US, also blasted the move.

"Who is going to decide who are the moderates?" said Hussam Ayloush, CAIR executive director for the Los Angeles area.

"Are Muslims who criticize the war in Iraq moderate?"

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that the move is nothing but racial profiling.

"When the starting point for a police investigation is ‘let’s look at all Muslims,’ we are going down a dangerous road," ACLU lawyer Peter Bibring told The New York Times.

"Police can and should be engaged with the communities they are policing, but that engagement can’t be a mask for intelligence gathering."

ACLU joined Muslims groups in sending a harshly-worded letter to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

"Singling out individuals for investigation, surveillance, and data-gathering based on their religion constitutes religious profiling," said the letter.

"In addition to constitutional concerns … religious profiling engenders fear and distrust."

Six years after the terrorist 9/11 attacks, many American Muslims complain that they continue to face discrimination and stereotyping because of their Islamic attires or identities.