Via the AP: Los Angeles police plan to map Muslims

The LAPD’s counterterrorism bureau plans to identify Muslim enclaves in order to determine which might be likely to become isolated and susceptible to “violent, ideologically based extremism,” said Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing on Thursday.

“We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities,” said Downing, who heads the counterterrorism bureau.

Downing said the plan is still in its early stages, but the LAPD wants to work with a Muslim partner and intends to have the data assembled by the University of Southern California’s Center for Risk and Economic Analysis.

Somehow this doesn’t sound like “outreach” but rather like singling out specific communities as potentially suspicious based solely on their ethnic/cultural background. It seems to me that such actions have the chance to alienate these communities, rather than helping to integrate them into US society.

We seem to continue not to understand that we want these people to get to the point where they think of themselves as Americans. If we are going to treat them with suspicion and as somehow on the outside, we may end encouraging exactly the opposite of what we need to happen.

According to the LAT, the city is standing by its guns: L.A. officials defend mapping of Muslim areas:

At a press conference about police recruitment in Elysian Park, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Police Chief William Bratton and Councilman Jack Weiss said they stood behind Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing’s decision to gather extensive intelligence about local Muslim communities.

“Chief Downing has good intentions here,” said Villaraigosa, who added that he had only learned of the new program through newspaper articles and at a short briefing.

The Police Department respects “the civil and human rights of Muslims in Los Angeles,” Villaraigosa said.

All that makes me think of is the old adage that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Indeed, it is unclear to me what the goal is, save for identifying where these people are:

“We want to map the locations of these closed, vulnerable communities, and in partnership with these communities . . . help [weave] these enclaves into the fabric of the larger society,” Downing said in testimony about the program before Congress on Oct. 30.

At the hearing, Downing said his intentions were to “mitigate radicalization,” and that law enforcement agencies everywhere faced “a vicious, amorphous and unfamiliar adversary on our land.”