There is good news and bad news stemming from New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s decision to shut down the department’s division that was responsible for tracking and cataloguing the actions of the city’s Muslim population. From the NY Times:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped (Writer note: plus logged conversations), the department said.

The police also designated entire mosques as suspected “terrorism enterprises,” a label that the police claimed allowed them to collect the license plate numbers of every car in mosque parking lots, videotape worshipers coming and going, and record sermons using informants wearing hidden microphones.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The move comes as the federal government reconsiders and re-evaluates some of its post-9/11 policies, including the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection.

This division was a despicable abuse of the power by law enforcement and a direct violation of the 4th Amendment rights of the targeted individuals. Based on transgressions alone the program should have never been enacted. The unapologetic nature and mindset of the NYPD regarding exactly why this program was abandoned reinforces why we must always keep a watchful eye trained upon the coercive State. Spoiler: the program was not terminated due to rights violations or the Constitution.