On February 21 PlayCo hosted an Idea Lab discussion with Vincent Warren, the Executive Director of The Center for Constitutional Rights, and Hina Shamsi, the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. The conversation was presented in conjunction with PlayCo’s production of I Call My Brothers by Swedish playwright Jonas Khimiri and focused on the NYPD’s racial profiling practices . One of the key points of the discussion addressed the ACLU’s lawsuit against the NYPD for it’s covert surveillance program of New York City’s Muslim community. That program has employed mapping Muslim communities, photo and video surveillance, the use of police informants, and maintaining an intelligence database on local Muslims. This week the new Police Commissioner, William J. Bratton, announced that he plans to end the program and disband the controversial unit. The announcement has been applauded by the Muslim community and civil liberties organizations, but those organizations are questioning whether the the police practices associated with the program will also end and what will become of the intelligence data collected by the NYPD.
