NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spying Program

A New Jersey man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in an unsuccessful quest to find out whether the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and fellow Muslims as part of its notorious and expansive “mosque-raking” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new open-records lawsuit against the city over spying claims, according to information exclusively provided to WIRED.

The lawsuit will pose a test for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out vocally against the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that coaxed those very communities to turn out in record numbers.

Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association during the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of negative publicity and a civil rights suit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign on to the settlement and lost his original open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to his request for documents about the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such records.

Hashmi filed a new set of record requests under the New York Freedom of Information Law in February asking for a narrower set of records than his previous request—weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of specific organizations targeted by the Intelligence Division, and reports on particular mosques—pertaining to community and religious organizations he participated in from 2006 through 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent appeal, cites specific intelligence reports from that period published 14 years ago by the Associated Press.

In an interview, Hashmi told WIRED he was motivated by the loss of his father as well as his co-plaintiff in his original suit, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who passed away in November 2025), to take a second crack at uncovering the truth about the NYPD’s spying operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York City, the surrounding states, and elsewhere in the United States.

A firm supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he restarted his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in New York and the surrounding areas in 2023, prompted by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a series of protests in the past three years that are now the subject of a pair of lawsuits alleging rampant First and Fourteenth Amendment violations. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into action.