NYPD paid Shamiur to 'bait' Muslims

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who used to work as a paid informant for the New York Police Department's intelligence unit, said he was assigned to “bait” Muslims into saying provocative things.
He had been living a double life. He used to take pictures inside mosques and collect names of those who attended group-study on Islam, Shamiur told the Associate Press during an interview on October 15.
The teenager now regrets his work as an informant, as police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture”.
He said the strategy involved starting conversations on jihad or terrorism with a person and recording the response for sending it to the NYPD.
For this, he used to earn as much as $1,000 a month and also goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.
“We need you to pretend as one of them,” Shamiur recalled police as saying him. “It's street theatre.”
Shamiur said he now believed his work against Muslim New Yorkers as an informant was “detrimental to the constitution”.
The time since he had disclosed the details of his work for police to his friends and informed the police that he had been contacted by the AP, he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler “Steve”. He found the handler's phone number disconnected.
Shamiur's account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighbourhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Shamiur said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.
The AP corroborated Shamiur's account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between him and his police handler.
It also reviewed the photos Shamiur had sent to police. His friends confirmed Shamiur was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Shamiur, said the tactics he described were used by informants.
Informants like Shamiur are a central component of the NYPD's wide-ranging programmes to monitor life in Muslim neighbourhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected licence plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques -- known informally as “mosque crawlers” -- tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there's no evidence they committed a crime.
The programmes were allegedly built with unprecedented help from the CIA.
Police recruited Shamiur in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanour drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences.
An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.
The next month, Shamiur said, he was on the NYPD's payroll.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. He has denied widespread NYPD spying, saying police only follow leads.
In the interview, Shamiur said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.”
He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.