Results to Be Discussed at Community Forum Tonight in Los Angeles

Washington, DC – Today, Muslim Advocates released the results of years-long records litigation against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) revealing that the agency misrepresented the origins, intent, and lifespan of its Muslim community mapping program that began in 2007. The results of the litigation will be discussed at a community forum tonight entitled “From Community Mapping to ‘Countering Violent Extremism’: Racial and Religious Profiling By the LAPD.”

As the 574 pages of documents (available here, and summarized here) reveal, the LAPD initially designed the program to target Los Angeles’ American Muslim population, so that it could “identify [Muslim] communities…which may be susceptible to violent ideologically based extremism.”

According to Juvaria Khan, staff attorney for Muslim Advocates, “These documents prove what we’ve long suspected: that despite the LAPD’s protestations otherwise, the community mapping program was improperly targeting the Muslim community through a lens of religious bias. Given the LAPD’s long history of discriminatory policies targeting racial and religious minorities, we must continue to stand strong in the struggle for transparency.”

In December 2013, Muslim Advocates submitted a request under the California Public Records Act to obtain information concerning the community mapping program and any other policies or practices targeting Muslim, Arab, and/or South Asian communities. For nearly two years, the department largely maintained that no records pertaining to the program existed. In October 2015, the LAPD finally acknowledged that it identified 4,500 potentially responsive emails in the post-2010 period alone. Of those, the LAPD produced only five.

After protracted litigation, the LAPD recently produced 574 pages of documents pertaining to the program.

Resources

• Read Muslim Advocates’ fact sheet on the LAPD community mapping program here.
• Read the 574 pages of documents here.

Muslim Advocates is a national legal advocacy and educational organization that works on the frontlines of civil rights to guarantee freedom and justice for Americans of all faiths.

###