A Change In Plans
Last Friday, I posted on the plan of the Los Angeles Police Department to "map" out the neighborhoods where Muslims are gathered so that it could "protect" them from radical Islamists determined to perpetrate further terrorist attacks. The plan was not well received by Muslims, nor by other large segments of the city's population. There was enough of an outcry (including an editorial by the Los Angeles Times), that the plan has now been shelved, according to an article in today's Los Angeles Times.
The LAPD on Wednesday abruptly scrapped a program to map the city's Muslim population, a major retreat for a department that said the system was needed to identify potential hotbeds of extremism.
The reversal comes after a week of protests from Muslim groups and civil libertarians, who equated the mapping with religious profiling. Others questioned whether it was possible for the LAPD to accurately map the city's far-flung Muslim community.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing said Wednesday that in the wake of the protests, officials would drop the mapping aspect of the plan but continue their efforts to reach out to the Muslim community. Downing and other police officials plan to outline the new strategy to Muslim American activists at a meeting today.
Dropping the mapping aspect of the plan was necessary for a very simple reason: it would hardly have been possible, something the LAPD obviously hadn't quite reasoned through, if department members' Congressional testimony is any indication:
During Oct. 30 testimony before Congress, Downing described the plan as an attempt to "mitigate radicalization."
Downing and other law enforcement officials said police agencies around the world are dealing with radical Muslim groups that are isolated from the larger community, creating potential breeding grounds for terrorism. He cited terror cells in Europe as well as the case of some Muslim extremists in New Jersey arrested in May for allegedly planning to bomb Ft. Dix.
What Dep. Chief Downing failed to appreciate is that the concept of Muslim is not the same concept as Chinese, or Hispanic, or even African American. Islam is a religion, not a nationality and not a race. There is no Islam Town in Los Angeles, no Little Mecca. Muslims reside all over the greater metropolitan area. While there may be pockets of immigrants in European cities who are all Muslim, that certainly has not played out in Southern California.
Simply dropping out that element of the LAPD plan, however, does not make it all better. If the LAPD truly wants to reach out to the Muslim community so that there is a free flow of information should certain dangerous elements begin appearing, then it should do so in a more intelligent, less confrontational way. A good way to start would be to actually listen to the various leaders in the community about their concerns, especially as to the profiling and intelligence gathering activities done by police and social service agencies in the area. Another good step would be to include those leaders earlier in the process whenever any "new plan" is being formulated rather than dropping it on them as a fait accompli, as they did with the mapping idea.
In other words, the LAPD should start treating all of the city's residents with the respect to which they are entitled.
The LAPD on Wednesday abruptly scrapped a program to map the city's Muslim population, a major retreat for a department that said the system was needed to identify potential hotbeds of extremism.
The reversal comes after a week of protests from Muslim groups and civil libertarians, who equated the mapping with religious profiling. Others questioned whether it was possible for the LAPD to accurately map the city's far-flung Muslim community.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing said Wednesday that in the wake of the protests, officials would drop the mapping aspect of the plan but continue their efforts to reach out to the Muslim community. Downing and other police officials plan to outline the new strategy to Muslim American activists at a meeting today.
Dropping the mapping aspect of the plan was necessary for a very simple reason: it would hardly have been possible, something the LAPD obviously hadn't quite reasoned through, if department members' Congressional testimony is any indication:
During Oct. 30 testimony before Congress, Downing described the plan as an attempt to "mitigate radicalization."
Downing and other law enforcement officials said police agencies around the world are dealing with radical Muslim groups that are isolated from the larger community, creating potential breeding grounds for terrorism. He cited terror cells in Europe as well as the case of some Muslim extremists in New Jersey arrested in May for allegedly planning to bomb Ft. Dix.
What Dep. Chief Downing failed to appreciate is that the concept of Muslim is not the same concept as Chinese, or Hispanic, or even African American. Islam is a religion, not a nationality and not a race. There is no Islam Town in Los Angeles, no Little Mecca. Muslims reside all over the greater metropolitan area. While there may be pockets of immigrants in European cities who are all Muslim, that certainly has not played out in Southern California.
Simply dropping out that element of the LAPD plan, however, does not make it all better. If the LAPD truly wants to reach out to the Muslim community so that there is a free flow of information should certain dangerous elements begin appearing, then it should do so in a more intelligent, less confrontational way. A good way to start would be to actually listen to the various leaders in the community about their concerns, especially as to the profiling and intelligence gathering activities done by police and social service agencies in the area. Another good step would be to include those leaders earlier in the process whenever any "new plan" is being formulated rather than dropping it on them as a fait accompli, as they did with the mapping idea.
In other words, the LAPD should start treating all of the city's residents with the respect to which they are entitled.
Labels: Terra Terra Terra, Well Duh
posted by Diane at 3:45 PM
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