The New York Police Department (NYPD) reportedly forces Muslim immigrants, charged with committing low level crimes, to work as spies for them.
These immigrants are asked to spy at mosques and other community gathering places in order to avoid punishment for the petty crimes that they are charged with.
New York Post reports that detectives with the Citywide Debriefing Team scour city jails looking for Muslim immigrants they could squeeze to become informants, according to documents and interviews cited by the New York Times on Sunday.
An unnamed law enforcement source, quoted by the Post, said that they're basically trying to flip them, get information from what they know or what they can know by working as an informant.
Earlier, the New York Police Department had announced that it was ending a decade old controversial secret surveillance program, which was started to identify potential terrorism threats.
The team was under constant criticism from civil rights group and had been slapped with two federal lawsuits in the past.
The office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote in a statement that this reform is a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve, so that both cops and the citizens can help one another go after the real bad guys.