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A newly released audiotape revealed that the NYPD was spying on New Jersey residents, as a building superintendent at an apartment complex just off the Rutgers University campus called the New Brunswick Police 911 line in June 2009 to report suspicious behavior.

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The suspicious behavior uncovered was a safe house, a place where undercover officers working well outside the department’s jurisdiction could lay low and coordinate surveillance.

As reported by the Associated Press:

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NYPD, with training and guidance from the CIA, has monitored the activities of Muslims in New York and far beyond. Detectives infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and kept tabs on Muslim student groups, including at Rutgers.

The NYPD kept files on innocent sermons, recorded the names of political organizers in police documents and built databases of where Muslims lived and shopped, even where they were likely to gather to watch sports. Out-of-state operations, like the one in New Brunswick, were one aspect of this larger intelligence-gathering effort.

 The Associated Press previously described the discovery of the NYPD inside the New Jersey apartment, but police now have released the tape of the 911 call and other materials after a legal fight.

In the dispatch calls you can hear the caller, Salil Sheth, explaining what he was seeing:

“What’s suspicious?” the dispatcher asked.

“Suspicious in the sense that the apartment has about – has no furniture except two beds, has no clothing, has New York City Police Department radios.”

“Really?” the dispatcher asked, her voice rising with surprise.

“There’s computer hardware, software, you know, just laying around,” the caller continued. “There’s pictures of terrorists. There’s pictures of our neighboring building that they have.”

“In New Brunswick?” the dispatcher asked, sounding as confused as the caller.

This is nothing new to the NYPD, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has always defended the police department’s right to go anywhere in the country in search of terrorists without telling local police.

Muslim groups, however, don’t feel the same way. They feel targeted and have sued to shut down the NYPD programs. 

SOURCE: AP