New York’s police start to realize that beating up and arresting immigrants is making them distrustful of cops. In response, a police chief has an idea, borne out of his time colonizing the Philippines: control the population by recruiting local community members to police their own people. 

From Wondery, Crooked Media and PushBlack.

Empire City is made with a commitment to ensure the stories of those who were and are still  impacted by the NYPD are always part of the stories we tell ourselves about the police, about America, and about democracy.

Voices & References:

Asad Dandia https://www.newyorknarratives.com/our-narrative

Matt Guariglia https://www.matthewguariglia.com/

Daniel Czitrom https://www.mtholyoke.edu/directory/emeriti-retired-faculty/daniel-czitrom

Albert Samaha https://www.albertsamaha.com/

New York Narratives https://www.newyorknarratives.com/

TRANSCRIPT

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Asad Dandia was standing in the parking lot of his local mosque after evening prayers when a friend came up to him. This friend was a fellow Muslim and an off duty cop. He said they needed to talk.

Asad Dandia: And we reached his car and he asked me if I had my phone on me. I’m like Yeah, I got my phone on me and I get him my phone and he takes his phone and he rolls them both into a cloth. He opens his car trunk and he throws that the cloth in the trunk shuts it and says, I need to speak to you without these present.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Asad started getting nervous. His friend looked serious.

Asad Dandia: And he kind of looks both ways. And he says there’s no easy way for me to tell you this, but you’re being watched. I said what in the world are you talking about? He said, Asad I just came back from the precinct. There’s a file with your name and your photos in it. The police are trailing you as we speak.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Asad’s heart started racing. Why would the police be following him? But he knew his friend wouldn’t make this up.

Asad Dandia: This is coming from that from someone who’s in it. Right. And this is not just like your boy on the block. Like, yo, I think that dude is a spy. No, this is someone who’s in in saying, like, I saw. I saw a binder with your name on it.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: This officer told Asad, Be careful, man. Whatever you’re doing, that’s drawing the police’s attention. Stop doing it. Think about yourself. Think about your family.

Asad Dandia: I was terrified. I was legitimately scared. Who am I going to talk to? I’m not gonna talk to my parents. My parents are going to panic. I’m not going to talk to the police because they’re the ones who are perpetrating this. So who am I going to talk to?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: All Asad could do was grab his phone from the trunk of the car, head home, and hope this was all some kind of weird misunderstanding. And maybe if he just ignored it and kept living his life, it would all go away.

Asad Dandia: I was like 17 or 18 years old. Thinking about college, girls, you know, rebelling against family and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Were you listening to music? What were you listening to.

Asad Dandia: I’m an old school hip hop guy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: All right.

Asad Dandia: You know. Nas.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Correct, sir. That’s the correct answer. [laughter]

Asad Dandia: But yeah, just another working class child of immigrants growing up in the city. And I was a Muslim kid, you know, getting in touch with my faith.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Asad was living with his mom and dad near Coney Island in southern Brooklyn. And when he wasn’t in school, he liked hanging out with his buddies, shooting the shit at the loud Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood. He and his friends founded a mutual aid organization called Muslims Giving Back. They deliver groceries and other essentials to anybody who needed it across the city. And other young Muslims in Asad’s community wanted to get involved. When they would message him on Facebook asking what they could do. Asad would always say, cool, why don’t you come down and join us at the mosque for Friday prayers and we can talk about how to get you started. One week, a young person took him up on that offer. His name was Shamiur Rahman. Shamiur was tall and lanky. And after his first visit to the mosque, he started coming down to Coney Island multiple times a week to attend prayers to make grocery deliveries and just to kick it, with Asad and his friends. They were providing food to his community. The ultimate form of safety. Over time, Asad and Shamiur got close. And one day Shamiur told Asad that he was struggling to understand some of the Muslim rituals and to get his prayers right.

Asad Dandia: So I said, You know what? Why don’t you come over? We’ll play some video games and we’ll hang out. And, you know, in the night when everybody’s asleep will be up praying. And so he came over and he ate my mom’s food. Right. And, you know, if my mom gives me food. You know, it’s a sealed deal. Like you’re. You know, she loves you. And then at night, we’re praying together. Prayer is a very vulnerable, very intimate thing. Right. That’s not something you want to do in front of everybody all the time.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Asad felt like this was the beginning of a real friendship and he was grateful to have Shamiur in his life.

Asad Dandia: It’s really sad when I think about the way he betrayed us.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: One day, about six months after he met Shamiur. Asad is in the car with a friend coming back from a food delivery.

Asad Dandia: And I get a text message telling me to check Facebook. Something big had just happened. So we stopped the car and then I’m checking on my phone and the first thing I see is a confession from Shamiur out of the blue. And he says, I was an informant sent by the NYPD to investigate terrorism.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It was a lengthy, scattered post on Facebook. He writes, I was just pretending to be friends with you because honestly, I thought I was fighting terrorism. But let’s be real. It’s all a fucking scheme. He says he’s done being a police informant. Quote, It ruined my life and made me something I’m not. So as Asad is sitting in the car reading this Facebook post, he’s realizing that he had met Shamiur one month before his cop friends warning Shamiur had never been his friend. It was a lot to process.

Asad Dandia: I got my phone in my hand and my hand and my hand just dropped and I started reciting my prayers. I had a whole lot of guilt. And me, because I was the person who had brought him into the community, introduced him to my friends, you know, had him break bread with a lot of us.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And in that same Facebook post, Shamiur implores other undercover Muslim informants to quit. He writes, Forget the money. It’s not worth your freedom.

Asad Dandia: So what he was saying is that when he showed up to our events and he showed up to our programs, he said he had seen others whom he had known were informants. And who knew that he was an informant.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Oh, so not just him.

Asad Dandia: Yeah, it was a couple of them. Apparently, we never found out who they were.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: When the NYPD surveilled Muslims like Asad and created informants like Shamiur, they said they were doing it to fight terrorism and to make sure the political activities stay peaceful. I had mostly heard stories like this from the 60s with the FBI surveilling people like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and my own father claiming that they’re fighting terrorism and political violence. But none of these people were terrorists, and neither was Asad. [music plays] The NYPD has been figuring out how to blend in and gain the trust of communities that it thinks aren’t American enough. For over a century. And the playbook back then can tell you a lot about what the police are hiding today. From Wondery and Crooked Media. I’m Chenjerai Kumanyika and this is Empire City. Episode seven. The American Problem. [music plays] If you’re reading the newspapers in the late 1890s, in the years right after the Lexow Commission, you might see some scary headlines sounding the alarm about three groups criminals, radicals and immigrants. And a lot of times all three are described as the same dangerous folks. One of these fear mongering articles in the New York Times reads like a field guide to the East Side of Manhattan. It’s three full pages framed with oversize illustrations of Syrians with fez hats, Arab women with their faces wrapped in scarves and of rabbis with yarmulkes and long beards. It’s a who’s who, of which immigrant group you should fear the most.

Matt Guariglia: You have a city that in the span of, you know, 50 or so years went from being 80% English, speaking to 40% native English speaking.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Matt Guariglia, a historian of policing and surveillance, says that New York is rapidly diversifying linguistically, culturally and ethnically.

Matt Guariglia: And you have a police force that is much slower to diversify. It does not look like the city that it is policing.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The Times article warns New Yorkers that immigrants are taking over their city. And most people don’t understand how extreme, immoral and dangerous these foreigners can be. [music plays] One NYPD administrator calls it the American problem.

Matt Guariglia: So there were these huge swaths of the city that the police that, you know, kept police commissioners up at night.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And one group at the top of that list is Italians or his article calls them the degenerate Sons of the Caesars.

Matt Guariglia: So Italians with their their their culture that they or is often referred to as medieval and then racially further away from that were Chinese New Yorkers, which, you know, they called an enigma.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: It’s wild for me to learn about this because now New York loves to show off places like Chinatown and Little Italy, like those are places the city invites you to see. But back then, folks were threatened by communities of immigrants. Now, of course, if you actually live in immigrant communities anywhere in the United States, they aren’t an enigma to you. Immigrant neighborhoods are full of schools, businesses, churches and social clubs where folks work, dance, eat and pray together. But even praying while Italian can be threatening, some New Yorkers fear Italians are more loyal to the pope and to Rome than to America. And so for white police who don’t speak Italian in a city that fears Italians, everything going on in those neighborhoods is suspect.

Matt Guariglia: Rather than like learn what these neighborhoods are about, rather than go in there and talk to people and get to know communities and and get to know the spaces they inhabit. There are all these proposals in the late 19th and early 20th century that they should just demolish neighborhoods.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And so city leaders decide to do exactly that. Today’s Chinatown used to be known as Mulberry Bend.

Matt Guariglia: Which is mostly inhabited by Italian immigrants, which police say, you know, a criminal can run into and disappear forever. They just they demolish it and they turn it into a park.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: This kind of reminded me of Seneca Village. If you’re seeing it is dangerous and not American enough, the wealthy see your home and your community as something that can be destroyed and rebuilt according to their vision. And I would hope that after all, the immigrants did testify about police violence and abuse at the Lexow Committee, the city might force the NYPD to go a little easier on immigrant communities. But even though the cops were getting exposed behind the scenes at a trial, there’s an unspoken agreement between business owners, elite New Yorkers and the police department.

Daniel Czitrom: We don’t care what you do. When you’re beating up people or dealing with prisoners, or we don’t care what you do with the prostitutes or the saloon keepers or the counterfeiters, as long as you keep your boot on the neck of the labor movement, socialists, anarchists, all these people. The police department is our shield against anarchy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Historian Daniel Czitrom says that the police see all kinds of immigrant communities as potential radical hotspots, including the Russian Jewish community.

Daniel Czitrom: Emma Goldman, 25 year old refugee from Russia, is scaring the hell out of New York City, giving speeches in the Lower East Side and Union Square about how if you’re hungry, you got to go into the bakeries and take the bread. You know.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Goldman isn’t just saying that to grab headlines. Struggle is real.

Daniel Czitrom: Tremendous amount of unemployment, hunger, suffering. Even starvation in New York at this time.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And police leaders are starting to realize that. Surprise, surprise. Beating these groups up and arresting them has actually making them more distrusting of cops and more insular. And if the police really want control, they need to get up close and become a part of these groups. The New York Times gets right to the point. If you really want to study what it calls the extreme types with all of their national characteristics, one must invade their communities. Invade is a telling word choice because it takes an American invasion. Not in New York, but in the islands of the Philippines to solve this American problem. And the man who leads this charge is future NYPD Police Commissioner Francis Vinton Greene.

Matt Guariglia: Francis Vinton Greene is from a very old kind of New England Protestant family that goes back to the, you know, the colonial period. A military family. Very importantly.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Greene grows up in the era of Manifest Destiny when the US decides it has the God given right to conquer and spread the American way of life from the Western U.S. to colonies across the globe. In 1898 when he’s a colonel in the National Guard, Greene gets sent on a 10,000 mile trip to one of the United States newest theaters of war, the Philippine Islands. He lands in Manila in the middle of July. And it’s probably fair to say it’s a place unlike anything he’s ever seen before.

Albert Samaha: Beautiful land with with lush jungle mountains overlooking these turquoise bays and seas and oceans. You know, it’s a place filled with the sort of undeveloped beauty, the sort of natural beauty that you don’t find in a lot of places.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist whose family grew up in the Philippines. He’s done extensive research into the story of both his family and American involvement in the islands. And he says that in addition to the gorgeous, fertile physical landscape, anybody coming to the Philippines would be immediately confronted by the oppressive relationships between people.

Albert Samaha: You would find this intensely stratified hierarchy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: At the bottom there, native Filipinos living in impoverished villages barely making enough to eat.

Albert Samaha: Then above them, you have the mestizos, mixed bloods, people that have Spanish blood, the people that have indigenous blood. This is my family. This is kind of the upwardly mobile people that live kind of in nicer houses, work kind of more institutional jobs, civil servants, things like that.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: At the top of the hierarchy, Greene would have seen the Spanish occupiers fighting to keep control of their sprawling or neat mansions. In other words.

Albert Samaha: You would have seen the dying vestiges of an old empire.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Now, of course, Filipinos rebel against that empire. One of the Samaha’s ancestors is a freedom fighter named Emilio Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo and other revolutionaries like Clemencia López work to free the Philippines from its colonizers and keep their people safe, and when the Americans arrive, they promise to help them. And after less than a year of fighting, American forces and Filipino revolutionaries declare victory against the Spanish. But then Francis Vinton Greene sends a memo to Washington basically saying, look, I know we promised these folks we were going to let them keep their land, but maybe we should slow down a little bit.

: The Filipinos are not capable of governing themselves. They are unfit. Our sense of equity and justice seems not fully developed.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And then another memo. He goes further.

: If the United States evacuates these islands, anarchy and civil war will immediately ensue.

Albert Samaha: What ends up happening is US breaks the promises and actually we want to take over this whole land and make this a territory for us.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: If you know America like I know America, you know, this was probably the plan all along. The Philippines becomes the first U.S. colony outside of the American continent. But U.S. President William McKinley doesn’t talk about taking over the Philippines it’s just another day expanding the American empire. He frames it as an act of Christian charity.

Matt Guariglia: He talks about benevolent assimilation of of bringing democracy to the Philippines.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The U.S. basically says, I know this looks shady, but trust us, we won’t do what your former colonizers did. In other words.

Albert Samaha: It would not conquer these lands, extract the resources and ignore the plight of the people. It would try to turn Filipinos into Americans was this idea.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Turning Filipinos into Americans doesn’t sound like my idea of empowerment. What was even worse was there was no plan to make Filipino citizens with the rights they’re entitled to in a democracy. Instead, they’d be more like colonial subjects of America. But the plan does provide the Philippines with some resources.

Albert Samaha: By the time my grandmother was born in 1926, all of the schools had teachers from America. They had roads that had been built by America. They had penicillin and other medicines. Sewage systems that had been built by Americans.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: By building roads, bridges, hospitals and schools. The U.S. military is able to get some native Filipinos on board. I mean, who doesn’t want those things? But all of this is still part of the colonizing strategy.

Matt Guariglia: All of this was supposedly a gift to the Filipinos, but it was also a way of making Filipino geography and society more navigable and more surveyable to the US occupying force there. Francis Vinton Greene says this himself that that he could he could get these people to buy into their own subordination by making them buy into a way of reorganizing society that the US military could have more sway over. The occupation of the Philippines is unbelievably brutal and very violent.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: That violence is used to shut down any Moorish indigenous and even Catholicized Filipinos that are trying to resist their new occupier because they see what’s really going on.

Matt Guariglia: It is assimilation at gunpoint under the guise of benevolence.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Greene is struggling to beat the Filipino resistance with forced assimilation and violent repression. As long as white occupying soldiers are the face of the U.S.. Filipinos are going to push back. So he needs to figure out how to get the Filipinos to keep themselves in line with they need is a police department.

Matt Guariglia: They create the Philippine constabulary, which is an incredibly important part of the story, which recruits Filipinos to a centralized police department, essentially for maintaining order throughout the colony.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Constabulary is a big word for police force and having police who are actually Filipino as officers gave U.S. military leaders the inside scoop on the language, the customs and the geography of the Philippines. Samaha says that this police force was never intended to protect Filipinos, which is deep to me because one of those new Filipino officers is his great great grandfather, Jose Tiangco.

Albert Samaha: He ended up getting a job as a scout, which is basically a police officer working for the American backed territorial government, resisting revolutionaries, resisting the people that put up a fight. And in exchange for that, for that for that work, he was given a farm that my family owns to this day. It was this massive tract of land deep in the in the mountains of Marawi coconut trees, durian trees, mango trees, a farm that probably belonged to somebody else before then.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: And Samaha’s clear about what that land was payment for.

Albert Samaha: Fighting against the same revolutionaries that his ancestors had had once been a part of.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Being a cop can be a stepping stone. Even if the Stones are your own people. From the American point of view, this tactic of getting Filipinos to police themselves is a resounding success. It becomes the central way. The U.S. maintains their control of the Philippines for more than 40 years of occupation. But Samaha still grapples with the choices his great great grandfather made. He says that his family were just trying to go with the flow, doing what they could to survive a brutal occupation, and that Americans did a really good job of convincing indigenous Filipinos that all that forced assimilation and policing was for their own good.

Albert Samaha: It creates this yearning for assimilation.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: If you want to let people know that you’re a respectable member of your community, one of the good ones, one of the best ways to do that is to keep your eyes on anybody that the people in power identify as bad. And that doesn’t sound so different from how Shamiur got roped into spying on Asada Dandia, on his fellow Muslims.

Albert Samaha: That, I think, is how so much colonial conquest happens, is that the invading force convinces enough people in power enough people with means who are native to that land that their interests are aligned. We are not here to conquer you. We are here to help you.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: We’re not here to conquer you. We’re here to help you. I imagine these words echoing in Francis Vinton Greene’s mind as he returns from the Philippines back to the U.S.. Except this time, he’s no longer invading foreign soil. He’s heading to the Empire City to become the NYPD’s next police commissioner. And now he knows exactly how to solve the American problem. Feeling like you belong is one of the most basic human needs. And at the turn of the century, a lot of immigrants are desperate to find their place in New York City. Joseph  Petrosino was one of them. He’s a style guy with the no bullshit demeanor and he looks a little like the actor John Goodman in the right light. And despite the fact that most police at this time look down on Italians, Petrosino dreams of being a cop. But after he applies over and over again, someone explains to him that he’s just too short and too Italian for the job. So instead of giving a police work, they hand Petrosino a broom. The NYPD runs the sanitation department and they tell Petrosino, Your job is to keep the Tenderloin streets looking spiffy. But even though the police didn’t see Petrosino was cop material, there was one thing about him they thought was useful. He speaks Italian and he starts getting opportunities when Francis Vinton Greene gets back from the Philippines. Greene’s ideas of detective work are very different from the commissioners that came before him.

Matt Guariglia: He really had a keen understanding of, you know, you need to send people in who look and speak. The part that going undercover is, is, you know, not just about taking off your badge and your blue uniform. It’s also about like embodying certain characteristics that people expect to see in the spaces where you send them.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: If you’re not really from the culture or if your vibe is off, it’s pretty easy for people to recognize you as a cop or a snitch. And Greene had learned that in the Philippines. By this time, Petrosino manages to get some low level police work. And once Greene learns about this Italian speaking, respectable police officer, he has ideas about how to use them. One morning in the spring of 1903, a woman is walking down East 11th Street on her way to work when she spots a sugar barrel sitting on the sidewalk. There’s a bit of fabric poking out, so she opens the barrel only to discover a nearly decapitated man stuffed inside. When the police remove the body from the barrel, they find a slip of paper with Italian writing on it. For people who feared Italians. This was all the proof they needed that immigrants were dangerous. But figuring out exactly who committed this crime wasn’t going to be easy.

Matt Guariglia: And after weeks of investigating, nobody can really solve this crime. And because such a a brazen and violent crime has gone unsolved, the American born population is panicking that the NYPD have no idea what they’re doing.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: They call in Petrosino and he notices something that other police didn’t pay much attention to.

Matt Guariglia: The brother of the slain man describes a very unique pocket watch that he always carried.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: That pocket watch was stolen during the murder. And Petrosino figured if he could track down the pocket watch, he could find the murderer. That would mean going deep into Italian neighborhoods. But Petrosino’s from those neighborhoods, and he hits the pavement.

Matt Guariglia: Joseph Petrosino finds this pocket watch in a pawnshop. He uses the ticket from selling the pocket watch to get the barrel murders only conviction. And he is hailed as an absolute hero. It kind of cements his not just national fame, but international fame. There are comic books written about him later on where they call him the Sherlock Holmes of Italy.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The first Italian-American NYPD officer becomes an international legend.

Matt Guariglia: And it’s under Greene’s tenure that you you know, you see in the newspapers of the time that like Greene is sending for Petrosino because there is a case that only he can crack.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But these murders and hype about the mafia make white folks fear ordinary Italian-Americans even more. The all might be connected to the Mafia. Or, as they call it, the Black Hand. So now every Italian-American is even more of a target. And to ramp up that targeting, Francis Vinton Greene tells Petrosino to form his own unit called the Italian squad.

Matt Guariglia: Which is going to be a centralized squad of detectives made up of of people who can speak Italian. And so if we think back to like the Philippine constabulary, we see something kind of similar in the Italian squad. And the Italian squad goes from, I believe, six Italian speaking detectives in 1904 to about 100 Italian speaking detectives in 1909.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: The NYPD goes on to hire its first Chinese-American officer. He’s an informant turned patrolman, and the police beg him to help infiltrate Chinatown, inspired by Greene’s approach. The NYPD also hires a number of German speaking officers. And they form something that’s basically like a German squad.

Matt Guariglia: He starts a trend where, you know, for four decades after this, governing foreign populations becomes a really essential part of the job.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But one group that still can’t break into the NYPD is Black folks. And the success of white ethnic policing doesn’t change that. Even though some Black New Yorkers want Black cops.

Matt Guariglia: People say like literally, the Italians have officers, the Russians have their officers. The Jews have their officers. Where is the Black officer?

Chenjerai Kumanyika: But that doesn’t happen. Not yet.

Matt Guariglia: There is a familiarity to Black crime, a permanence in their mind to Black crime that does not exist when they are considering immigrant neighborhoods. Immigrant neighborhoods are a puzzle, right? There is a way to solve that crime and maybe even there is a way to reshape those communities. But that that does not happen when police are regarding Black neighborhoods.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: In 1906, a former police commissioner wrote in his memoir that urban Black men and women are violent, they’re dangerous, they’re lazy and lascivious. And he wrote that the urban environment exacerbates all of those innate characteristics that he thinks Black people have. He’s not alone. Statisticians had been using so-called scientific studies to prove that it’s in Black people’s nature to become criminals. Decades will go by before any of this shifts. But for now, what you need to know is that even though the New York Police Department is finally getting more comfortable with some immigrant police officers, they still hadn’t solved the American problem. Immigrant New Yorkers are not necessarily comfortable with these new police in their communities who speak their language and know their people. More and more cops on the Italian squad are struggling to do their job because some Italian New Yorkers feel targeted and won’t talk with them. So the Italian squad develops an undercover plainclothes offshoot that can live in the community and blend in with it. And this allows the NYPD to surveil Italians secretly. And over the years as new threats emerge. The strategy of the Italian squad gets used to form the bomb and neutrality squad to target anyone labeled as an anarchist. The Red Squad to fight anyone labeled as a communist and the alien squad for new immigrants. More and more departments across the country start turning to the frontlines of colonialism to implement training programs, intelligence gathering strategies and mapping techniques all borrowed from the colonial frontier. August Vollmer, known as the father of modern police, returns from his military service in the Philippines to become the first police chief of Berkeley, California. State police departments all across the country modeled themselves on the Philippine constabulary. Staffing the force with former soldiers who had fought there. And the first Swat teams were modeled after counterinsurgency units in Vietnam created by veterans of the Vietnam War. Here’s what I want to drive home. All these tactics that the police are now using in your neighborhood were never designed to keep people safe. They’re colonial and military strategies, techniques created for submission or destruction. And they keep circling back into American policing. This symbiotic relationship that local police have with military work overseas is part of something called the imperial boomerang. And the imperial boomerang has never really stopped spinning. On a cloudy morning. Asad Dondia and I headed down to 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan. Asad is now an organizer and a tour guide. And he was about to help me see this Mecca of policing in a whole new light.

Asad Dandia: I mean, look at the structure I like. Take a moment to just take in—

Chenjerai Kumanyika: NYPD headquarters is a 15 story red brick cube towering over the plaza where we’re standing. Hundreds of tinted windows obscure the reality of the lives inside being turned upside down.

Asad Dandia: This is what we call brutalist architecture. It’s not meant to be inviting. Like that’s a deliberate part about the design. It’s not supposed to be a place that’s like comforting to the eyes, comforting to the soul.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I remember sitting in a cell inside that structure elbow to elbow with Palestinian Americans and other protesters feeling deeply unwelcome in this city I call home.

Asad Dandia: It don’t feel like a welcoming place, man. It don’t look like one and don’t feel like one. It feels like it feels like the belly of the beast.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: After 9/11, the NYPD was determined to beef up its ability to spy on Muslims. So they created a secret Muslim surveillance unit called the Demographics Unit. And they brought in a CIA agent named Larry Sanchez to help. And where did he turn to for guidance? The techniques of Israeli military officers who had been monitoring Palestinians in the West Bank since the 1967 Six Day War. Ten years ago, Asad stood in this plaza in a hastily assembled suit surrounded by a crowd of lawyers, activists and other Muslim New Yorkers, and he announced that they were suing the NYPD. This is just one of three lawsuits that all get filed around this time, all alleging unconstitutional surveillance of Muslim communities. What would you tell the younger Asad if you could talk to him? Ten years ago.

Asad Dandia: I would tell that poor, terrified 19 year old baby that one day you will defeat the NYPD. The nightmare is going to end, bro. Trust me. Just hang in there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: After a few years in court, Asad gets a call from his lawyer. It turns out the judge wasn’t satisfied with their demands because he wants them to make stronger demands against the police, which is something you almost never hear from a judge. Thanks to the work of Asad and others, the department disbanded the Demographics Unit that was responsible for the Muslim surveillance program. It was a huge victory.

Asad Dandia: It took me a long time to realize that, you know, New York does not just belong to those guys here, but it belongs to us, too. And I have as much of a right to claim it as mine as they have to claim it as theirs.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Standing near police headquarters with Asad. I think about all the history compressed into the space between us. I’m more than a hundred years ago, a man landed in the lush jungles of the Philippines. And how we’re still feeling his impact. To me it’s meaningful for you and I to be standing here because as if my father was someone who was surveilled and targeted and to some extent provoked even by the NYPD. I tell Asad about my dad, how he was considered a threat just for being a nonviolent organizer here in New York, and how stories like his Asad’s and now my own make me question what it means to call the city home.

Asad Dandia: My permanent residence has always been New York City for all 30 years of my life. But this home betrayed me. Right. The the the institution that dedicated its existence to protect me had betrayed me. Right. And that betrayal, I think it really caused a huge dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, you could say my mind where, like, I really want to love this place, but it’s hard. Sometimes.

Chenjerai Kumanyika: I relate to what Asad is saying because I was born here and it’s where I’m raising my daughter. But the NYPD also betrayed my dad. When I go back and look at all those videos that the NYPD filmed of him and the newspaper articles about his activism. What I see is someone trying to make New York a home for all of us. I don’t think he thought the police were going away, but he at least tried to hold them accountable. And strangely, pushing back on that back then is how the NYPD became almost impossible to reform today. That’s next time on Empire City.