Last month, the NYPD announced that it would be disbanding its Demographics Unit, which practiced widespread, indiscriminate spying on New York’s Muslim communities

By Tamara El

The NYPD has been routinely pressuring Muslim immigrants, who have been busted for low-level crimes, to spy at mosques and other community gathering locations to make their previous offenses go away, according to a published report.

Detectives with the CityWide Debriefing Team combed city jails searching for Muslim immigrants to become their informants, according to documents and interviews cited by the New York Times, on Sunday.
The city announce last month that it had disbanded a controversial unit that did direct surveillance of mosque and other community landmarks.This practice of recruitment of informants from jails is still continuing, sources told The Post on Sunday.

“They’re basically trying to flip them, get information from what they know or what they can know”, by working as an informant, a law enforcement source told The Post.

Bayjan Abrahimi, a food cart vendor and immigrant from Afghanistan, got hauled into jail after a March 2009 dispute over a parking ticket. Abrahimi, who moonlights as a DJ at Afghan Weddings, agreed to help police just so he could get out of jail. “I saw `OK, OK, OK, because I want to finish, because I want to finish”, Abrahimi said. “At this time, I’m really scared”.

Abrahimi told cops his brother was a taxi cab driver in Afghanistan. The NYPD found Abrahimi “suitable for assignments locally and outside the city”, and described him to have “high potential to be used as an asset”, according to police documents cited by the Times.

-Tamara El(@MwiliHakalu)