Combatting Suspicion, Creating Trust: Interface of Muslim Communities and Law Enforcement in the Post-9/11 United States Abstract This article analyzes the interface between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies in the post-9/11 United States. The article assesses the significance of the trust and cooperation approaches for effective counterterrorism policing in Southern California. Based on interviews with key law enforcement officials and Muslim community leaders, alongside analysis of legal cases, reports, and media coverage, we argue that the trust and cooperation approaches have failed due to three main reasons. First, the conjoining of community outreach and intelligence gathering by law enforcement agencies, and the extensive coordination between local and federal agencies in the name of efficiency have led to hostility and distrust with the Muslim communities. Second, the trust and cooperation approaches failed to overcome the generalized suspicion of Muslims in law enforcement practices. Finally, dissident values from the Muslim communities found little space within the trust and cooperation forums thereby requiring them to challenge unfair practices from outside. Keywords: Community Policing, Muslims, Trust and Cooperation, Surveillance, Counterterrorism, Counter-insurgency. In March 2011, U.S. Representative for New York’s 2nd congressional district Peter King conducted hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and the Community’s Response.” Mary Slosson. “Law Enforcement and Muslim Communities in LA: A Lesson for Rep. King?” Huff Post , May 25, 2011. Civil liberty groups and Muslim organizations criticized the hearings for singling out Muslim communities. At this hearing, Sheriff Baca from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) touted successful efforts in creating trust and cooperation with their local Muslim communities. Indeed, the LA Sheriff’s office along with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) liaison section received a major award titled the 2012 “IACP and Booz Allen Hamilton Outstanding Achievement in the Prevention of Terrorism.” Award Application for IACP and Booz Allen Hamilton Outstanding Achievement in the Prevention of Terrorism, 2011. (On File with Authors). (henceforth Award Application) However, Southern California also witnessed Muslim community organizations filing several law suits against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the LAPD for surveillance of the community and the use of informants in their mosques even while community leaders participated in many law enforcement initiated outreach forums. This article analyzes the interface between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies in Southern California in the post-9/11 period to provide insights into the effectiveness of trust and cooperation approaches in the arena of counterterrorism policing. The article focuses on the paradox emerging from the attempts of law enforcements agencies to build trust and cooperation with the community on the one hand and the use of informants and surveillance of the Muslim communities on the other. Policing often requires some intelligence gathering and even more so in counterterrorism policing, and consequently, an inherent tension always exists between the need for intelligence and an expectation of cooperation. However, we argue that the experience of Southern California shows that the post-9/11 trust and cooperation approaches failed due to a set of reasons that went beyond this inherent tension. The article argues that trust and cooperation approaches in counterterrorism policing failed due to three main reasons- first, there was an inability to separate intelligence gathering from outreach which was further exacerbated by the fusion of local and federal policing. Second, the law enforcement agencies in Southern California failed to gain the trust of Muslims as they were unable to avoid constructing the entire community as suspicious. Consequently, third, the forums created for trust and cooperation could not maintain a space for dialogue and dissident voices such that the dissenting voices came primarily from outside these forums rather than from within. EMERGENCE OF THE TRUST AND COOPERATION APPROACHES IN THE POST-9/11 CONTEXT The racialization and targeting of Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 period was preceded by a longer history of stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs. In his 2006 book Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen showed that Hollywood depicts Arabs as “brute murderers, sleazy rapists, religious fanatics, oil-rich dimwits and abusers of women.” Jack Shaheen. 2006. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Olive Branch Press, p 8 Shaheen’s research documented well over 1000 films depicting Arabs and Muslims and subsequently found that 932 films depict them in a stereotypical or negative light. Ibid. Following the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the subsequent end of Cold War, terrorism-specifically Islamic terrorism- became an important issue in U.S. foreign policy. Edward Said described how by the late 1980s, Islam called up “images of bearded clerics and mad suicide bombers, of unrelenting Iranian mullahs, fanatical fundamentalists, and kidnappers, remorseless turbaned crowds who chant hatred of the U.S.” Edward Said. 1988. “Identity, Negotiation, and Violence.” New Left Review,171, 47. Thus, there is a long history of representation of Muslims as terrorists and as threats to the nation. Recent Political Science literature, drawing upon survey data in the post-9/11 period, has also shown that Muslim Americans are seen very unfavorably- often worse than any other racial, ethnic, and religious group. Nazita Lajevardi. 2017. A Comprehensive Study of Muslim American Discrimination by Legislators, the Media, and the Masses. Doctoral Dissertation. University of California, San Diego; Also see Nazita Lajevardi and Kassra AR Oskooii. 2018. “Old-Fashioned Racism, Contemporary Islamophobia, and the Isolation of Muslim Americans in the Age of Trump.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. 3(1): 112–152; Michael Tesler. 2018. “Islamophobia in the 2016 Election.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics (2018): 1–3. The cultural and religious values of Muslim Americans have been portrayed as violent, misogynistic, anti-American, and perpetually foreign. Dana K. Oskooii, K., and Barreto, M. “Beyond Generalized Ethnocentrism: Islam-Specific Beliefs and Prejudice toward Muslim Americans.” Politics, Groups, and Identities. (FirstView) Saher Salod. 2015. “ Citizenship Denied: The Racialization of Muslim American Men and Women Post-9/11.” Critical Sociology 41(1): 77-95. John Sides and Kimberly Gross argue that the perception of Muslims as violent and untrustworthy leads to a greater support for several aspects of war on terror among Americans. John Sides and Kimberly Gross. 2013. “Stereotypes of Muslims and Support for War on Terror.” Journal of Politics 75 (3): 583-98 Racialization of American Muslims as violent, untrustworthy, foreigner, and misogynistic was accompanied by a domestic war on terror in the post-9/11 period leading to profiling, targeting, detention, and large scale surveillance of American Muslims. Susan Akram and Martiza Karmley. 2005. “Immigration and Constitutional Consequences of Post-9/11 Policies Involving Arabs and Muslims in the United States: Is Alienage a Distinction without Difference.” U.C. Davis Law Review, 38. Muzzafer Chisti et.al.2003. America’s Challenge Domestic Security, Civil Liberties, and National Unity after September 11. Migration Policy Institute. Moustafa Bayoumi. 2015. This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. NYU Press. Khaled Beyodun.2018. American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear. Counter-insurgency scholars also remind us that due to an inability to distinguish between a threat and non-threat, there is often a tendency in policing to target an entire community as “suspicious.” Rizwann Sabir. 2017. “Blurred lines and false dichotomies: Integrating counterinsurgency into the UK's domestic "war on terror'.” Critical Social Policy 37 (2): 202-224. The law enforcement agencies and U.S. officials gradually began to recognize the dangers of such a hostile approach that critics had been pointing to. Scholars and civil rights activists such as David Harris had long argued that racial and religious profiling of Muslims-premised on the idea of guilt by association- was not only ethically wrong but also an ineffective law enforcement strategy. David Harris, among others, suggested partnership with the community as critical to the goals that law enforcement agencies seek to achieve in their pursuit against domestic terrorism, namely gathering of intelligence. He argued: The first priority in our struggle against terrorism remains the gathering of intelligence. It is important, therefore, to take note of the wide agreement among officials about the effectiveness, importance, and centrality of one particular method of intelligence gathering: the creation and cultivation of strong relationships and partnerships between law enforcement agencies and Muslim communities, in order that intelligence flows from these communities to law enforcement as easily as possible. David Harris. “2010. Law Enforcement and Intelligence Gathering in Muslim and Immigrant Communities After 9/11.” NYU Review of Law and Social Change, 34,123-190, 132. Deborah Ramirez and Stephanie Woldenberg also critiqued profiling of Muslims and termed it dangerous for counterterrorism policing. They argued: While racial profiling is both damaging and ineffective as a counterterrorism tool, we cannot ignore that the September 11th terrorists were linked to the Arab and Muslim communities in several important ways… For this reason, law enforcement must shift the focus of its attention on the Arab and Muslim communities from one of suspicion to one of partnership. Law enforcement should pursue an open dialogue with members of the Arab, Muslim, and Sikh communities to utilize the specific knowledge that could help it narrow its search. These voluntary partnership initiatives are essential for three reasons: (1) they can help to prevent and protect the community from hate crimes and hate incidents; (2) they can help prevent future terrorist attacks; and (3) they can prevent further exploitation of these communities by Al-Qaeda operatives. Deborah Ramirez and Stephanie Woldenberg. 2004-05. “Balancing Security and Liberty in a Post-September 11th World: The Search for Common Sense in Domestic Counterterrorism Policy.” Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, 14. 495-515, 502. A RAND corporation report, drawing upon global counterterrorism experiences, argued that terrorism is primarily a policing problem, not a military matter, thus requiring a close relationship of trust and cooperation with the community where terrorists hide and recruit people. Seth G. Jones & Martin C. Libicki.2008. How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons For Countering Al Qa’ida 27, Rand Corporation. Even the FBI started strongly advocating for building a partnership with Muslim communities. Robert Muller, Director of the FBI at the time, emphasized in 2006 that if the United States wished to prevent future attacks, a close cooperation between law enforcement and Muslim communities in the United States would become absolutely vital. Robert S. Mueller.2006. Speech, June 23. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/speeches/the-threat-of-homegrown-terrorism Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, stated, “We must build a new level of confidence and trust among American Muslim community, who are critical partners in protecting our community.” “Homeland Security: The Next 5 Years: Hearing Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 109th Cong.” 64 (2006) (statement of Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security). http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/testimony/testimony_1158336548990.shtm. Consequently, the FBI initiated Multicultural Advisory Committees (MCAC) in Muslim communities across its different jurisdictions in the post-9/11 period. In Southern California, the LA Sheriff’s Department created the Muslim Community Affairs (MCA) Unit and the LAPD constituted the Muslim Forum embodying this goal of building trust and cooperation with the Muslim communities. TRUST AND COOPERATION APPROACHES: INSIGHTS FROM COMMUNITY POLICING The trust and cooperation approaches are broadly inspired by the Community Policing framework in terms of its emphasis on trust. As a 1994 Bureau of Justice Assistance on Understanding Community Policing report put it: Trust is the value that underlies and links the components of community partnership and problem solving. A foundation of trust will allow police to form close relationships with the community that will produce solid achievements. Without trust between police and citizens, effective policing is impossible. Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action. Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, 1994. Scholars working on counterterrorism policing point to the benefits of incorporating community policing tools in counterterrorism policing. P. Daniel Silk, Basia Spalek, and Mary O’ Rawe, “The Role of Communities and Police in Preventing Ideological Violence: Considering the Literarture, Policies, And, Potential,” in Preventing Ideological Violence : Communities, Police, And Case Studies of “Success,” ed. P.Daniel Silk, Basia Spalek, and Mary O’( Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15-32. While the community policing literature is vast, our focus is on those efforts that are related to creation of trust with community members such as forums of participation and dissent. Community policing considered gaining the confidence of the community as a critical tool for effective policing. Community policing, which emerged in the context of the limits of the professional law enforcement model in dealing with racial disparity and urban unrest in the 1950s and 1960s, is based on the premise that a partnership between the police and the community is most effective for crime reduction. It also emerged as an attempt to democratize policing in the United States. Mark Harrison Moore, “ Problem-Solving and Community Policing.”Crime and Justice, 15(1992): Modern Policing, 99-158,123. David Sklansky, explaining the second wave of police professionalizing, argued that modernization of police forces led to an emphasis on a scientific approach, rational bureaucracy, and proper hierarchy of command control but it failed to fully address the issue of police arbitrariness, particularly its high handed approach towards racial minorities. The first phase of police reforms was led by civic and religious groups who aimed at getting officers out of the hands of ward bosses and politically influential figures. See David Alan Sklansky, “Police and Democracy,” Michigan Law Review, 103 (2005):1699-1830 The strategies that emerged as a result of this realization included Team Policing (with more systematic interaction between police lieutenants in particular geographical areas), Community Relations Units, and Community Crime Prevention Programs. From 1980s onwards, use of foot patrols as a way to reduce fear among minorities became more common- inspired in part by the Broken Windows Theory articulated by James Wilson and George Kelling- that considered the problems of everyday living equally important as serious crime. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety.” Atlantic Magazine, March 1982 . http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/ According to Lerman and Weaver, the Broken Windows Theory became an excuse for over policing and targeting of Black and Latino communities leading to excessive use of force and mass incarceration. See Amy E. Lerman & Vesla M. Weaver, Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). As David Thacher explains, it meant that the police chiefs would tell their officers that a bag of garbage (similar to a broken window) in a neighborhood suggested disorder and had to be addressed. David Thacher, “Conflicting Values in Community Policing.” Law & Society Review 35.4 (2001): 765-798, 778. Therefore, community policing tried to connect “order maintenance” or soft crime such as “loud boom boxes, public drinking, illegal parking” with crime control.” Ibid. 777-78 If the police worked in partnership with the community to address soft crime, it would both gain the trust of the community as well as deter serious crime. The “experience and local knowledge” in the community could thus be tapped for problem solving. Eck and Rosenbaum quoted in William Lyons, The Politics of Community Policing. Rearranging the Power to Punish. (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999) . See pages 35-44 that gives a good overview of the shifts in policing. However, some community policing scholars argue that it has never been easy for police to tap into the local knowledge due to reasons including distrust of the police, a thin line between informants and community representatives, and community being a contentious category. Community policing in general employed an idealized notion of community that presumed a unity of interests among the members of a community. Scholars pointed out that heterogeneity within a community makes community policing challenging: the interests of shopkeepers are not necessarily the interests of homeless; African Americans in an inner city may have different interests than Latinos. Reenah L. Kim, Legitimizing Community Consent to Local Policing: The Need for Democratically Negotiated Community Representation on Civilian Advisory Councils, 36 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 461(2001): 482-88. Other scholars have tried to sidestep the issue of divergence within communities by considering possibilities of spaces that allow for expression of dissident values in relation to law enforcement, which would lead to a creation of trust. For instance, David Thacher describes community policing as an effort to reduce the “institutional segregation” of police departments by opening new channels of communications and cooperation with a variety of outside groups, both governmental and non-governmental and giving space for diverging opinions. Thacher argues that community policing can democratize policing and make it responsive to the constituents by making space for “dissident values” from the community. Thacher quoted in David Alan Sklansky, “Police and Democracy,” Michigan Law Review, 103 (2005):1699-1830 Recent works by Political Science scholars have also evaluated ways of engaging with “dissident values” to create trust and cooperation that is at the core of the community policing debate. Rachel Wahl and Stephen K. White have focused on deliberative forums in a mid sized Southern city. Rachel Wahl & Stephen K. White. “Deliberation, Accountability, and Legitimacy:A Case Study of Police-Community Forums.” Polity, 49: 4 (October 2017): 489–517. Deliberative forums are those where “ideas and proposals could be freely discussed and criticized with the hope that this process could lead to agreements concerning improvements in the practice and policies of the police.” Ibid, 490. Wahl and White suggest that the deliberative forums, while limited because of the unequal power of the participants, can lead to deliberative democratic legitimacy. The conception of trust that consequently emerges is built over time- either by change preceding or change following trust- but had to be secondary to the creation of legitimacy through a formation and continuation of deliberative forums. Ibid,502. Rosa Squillacote and Leonard Feldman come out against the usefulness of deliberation in this context. The police, they suggest, could be both biased and discriminatory and the judicial process has primarily failed in intervening in police reforms. Rosa Squillacote and Leonard Feldman. “Police Abuse and Democratic Accountability: Agonistic Surveillance of the Administrative State,” in Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies, eds. Guillermina Seri Michelle D. Bonner, Mary Rose Kubal and Michael Kempa(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017):135-164.    There was an urgency thus in determining engagements with police as an administrative agency and for “agonistic surveillance” on the part of non-state actors- a form of signaling back from citizens towards the democratic administrative state. Ibid.,139. Here the traditional deliberative forums for police reform are found inadequate due to the inequality inherent in the forums and a tendency to homogenize the community. Rejecting traditional methods of police reform such as body cameras, they suggest the need to adopt practices where the citizens themselves are involved in surveillance of the police actions. They give the examples of copwatch-“ a national movement rooted in local organizers training people who live in communities where police misconduct is prevalent to film the police.” Ibid., 150. Thus, efforts for dissidence would emerge from outside the deliberative forums. Tom Tyler and other scholars underline the importance of procedural justice in securing public cooperation by law enforcement agencies. Acknowledging the significance of community’s cooperation in dealing with crime, Tyler argues that when people judge legal institutions as making their decisions fairly, they are likely to view those authorities as more legitimate and more willing to defer to and cooperate with them in their everyday legal behavior. Tom R. Tyler. 2003. Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and Effective Rule of law. Crime and Justice: Review of Research 30, 283-358. In this framework, the quality of decision-making depends on whether decisions are made in neutral and unbiased ways, which do not involve prejudice and personal biases. Another important element of procedural justice is the quality of interpersonal treatment that people experience when dealing with law enforcement agencies. He elaborates, “this includes treatment with dignity and respect, acknowledgement of one’s rights and concerns, and a general awareness of the importance of recognizing people’s personal status and identity and treating those with respect…” Ibid, 350. One factor that indicates respect, he argues, is allowing people to voice their concern, something that other scholars of community policing have also underlined. The framework of procedural justice and its relationship to cooperation with law enforcement in routine context is extremely relevant for counterterrorism policing. Based on a survey conducted of Muslim Americans in New York City, Schulhofer, Tyler, and Huq reported that factors such as religiosity, political belief, cultural difference, and their views on American policy in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel do not determine their willingness to cooperate with police. Instead, as in the case of conventional law enforcement, they found a strong association between willingness to cooperate with counterterrorism policing and perceptions of procedural justice. Stephen Schulhofer, Tom Tyler, Aziz Huq. 2011. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101(2): 335-374. Kasra Oskooii (2016) in another survey based work suggests that the perception of political discrimination- laws and institutions not treating Muslims fairly- has a major impact on how they engage with the political process. Such perception pushes them to come out and challenge existing policies. K. Oskooii, 2016. “How Discrimination Impacts Sociopolitical Behavior: A Multidimensional Perspective.” Political Psychology, 37(5): 613-640. The framework of procedural justice in the context of counterterrorism thus puts limelight on the tensions that law enforcement agencies face when they try to balance between information gathering (focused on intelligence) and outreach (focused on building trust). The issues of perceived procedural fairness and respectable treatment becomes critical when communities evaluate their relationship with law enforcement agencies and we see this playing out in Southern California. Some of the critiques of community policing such as power imbalance, inability to deal with multiple voices within the community, suspicion of minority communities, thin line between informant and community representative, and lack of space for actual deliberation and dissidence became serious concerns in the trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California. WHY SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA? Even though the trust and cooperation approaches in counterterrorism policing have been introduced in several cities in the United States, we focus on Southern California because it has been presented as the best model to the U.S. Congress and different cities of the world. Award Application Indeed, some of the Muslim community groups in LA – including one that maintains critical distance (Council of American Islamic Relations) and another that works closely with law enforcement agencies (Muslim Public Affairs Council) – acknowledged the difference of the LA model from other cities in terms of community outreach. Interview with authors. In addition to receiving awards, the LA law enforcement agencies are highlighted as success stories in the media. In March 2015, the New York Times approvingly mentioned the joint appearance of a Muslim community organization leader and LAPD officer at a White House conference on a new federal initiative titled “Confronting Violent Extremism,” a program that later became highly controversial. The same officer Deputy Chief Michael Downing was honored in 2014 by the community organization MPAC for his outstanding work. Samuel Freedman,“Los Angeles Police Leader Makes Outreach to Muslims His Mission,” The New York Times, March 6, 2015. Southern California is also an ideal setting to study the interface between Muslim communities and law enforcement agencies since it has an estimated number of 500,000 Muslims, rendering it one of the largest Muslim concentrations in the United States. There are varying estimates of Muslim population because of the lack of census data on religious groups. The Islamic Shura Council of Southern California puts the number of Muslims in Southern Califonia closer to 5000,000. ( See their publication “20 year History of Muslims in So Cal.” Available at http://www.shuracouncil.org/Shura/Events/2015/ISCSC_History_FINAL.pdf) The area also has the second highest number of mosques in the United States. According to a study conducted by Ihsan Bagby, there are 120 mosques in Southern California that ranks second highest in the nation after the New York Metropolitan area which has 192 mosques. Ihsan Bagby, “The American Mosque 2011,” 2011. Available at http://faithcommunitiestoday.org/sites/faithcommunitiestoday.org/files/The%20American%20Mosque%202011%20web.pdf Southern California is an important site to study since it has not only witnessed moments of close cooperation between law enforcement agencies and Muslim communities but also witnessed prolonged and high-profile legal battles between them. In this article, law enforcement is broadly defined to include local, state and federal agencies since in the post-9/11 period there has been an explicit attempt to coordinate efforts among different agencies for counterterrorism policing. The trust and cooperation approaches are analyzed both in terms of the vision of the law enforcement officials and the responsiveness of Muslim communities to this approach. Official documents reflect the vision alongside the interviews we conducted in 2011-12 with key officials from LAPD and LASD. We were unable to get access to the local FBI officials but closely followed the trials involving the agency. 2011-2012 was a crucial period when the LA model was both being touted as a success by the law enforcement agencies and two legal cases challenging their tactics appeared in the courts. We conducted an extensive interview with the deputy chief, counterterrorism, LAPD, who was a department liaison with the Muslim community. We also interviewed the counterterrorism in charge of LASD, who had extensive interaction with Muslims groups in the area. These two law enforcement officials were most widely known, both locally and nationally, for their work with Muslim communities in Los Angeles while coordinating the counterterrorism work of their respective departments. These interviews yield insights into the operations of LAPD and LASD, their cooperation with other federal and local law enforcement agencies, their relationship with Muslim groups, and how officials evaluated the trajectory of their relationship with the local Muslim community. We also conducted multiple interviews with representatives from several Muslim organizations as well as civil rights groups from the area and in some cases we conducted follow up interviews. The organizations interviewed for this project included the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California (Shura Council), CAIR, MPAC, South Asian Network (SAN), Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Council of Pakistani American Affairs (COPAA), and a coalition of local Bangladeshi organizations. We were able to conduct interviews with people in the leadership position in these organizations, particularly those dealing with law enforcement agencies and legal issues. The interviews with community leaders reveal their institutional interactions with law enforcement agencies, their engagement with the Muslim community, and the relationship among the groups themselves. We were also able to attend multiple town hall meetings organized by these community groups at different points. This time period was important since this was not in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that was marked by profiling and targeting of Muslims, but a period in which law enforcement was engaged in intentional outreach to the Muslim community to develop a relationship of trust and cooperation. The two legal cases that we draw extensively upon are Islamic Shura Council v. FBI (2006) and FBI v. Fazaga (2011). The first case, Islamic Shura Council v. FBI, was a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by local Muslim organizations to force the government to reveal information about systematic surveillance of several prominent Muslim leaders and organizations in the area. Multiple rulings in the case provide a window into a sharp deterioration of relationship between law enforcement and Muslim communities in Southern California. Fazaga v. FBI was another prominent case against the FBI for illegally spying on the Muslim community in Orange County, Southern California. Even though we focus on Southern California, the relationship between local and federal law enforcement agencies in the context of counterterrorism policing and its impact on the relationship between law enforcement and Muslim communities is significant more broadly. The law enforcement agencies in most jurisdictions in the U.S., with a sizable Muslim population, have struggled with outreach to the community and the issue of distinction between local and federal policing has been a common theme. Veena Dhobal in her work on the San Fransisco Police Department shows that federal agencies such as the FBI and the DHS pushed particular kinds of policing approach on local police resulting in an antagonistic relationship between Muslim communities and law enforcement agencies. Dhobal argues that increased coordination between federal and local police has undermined the gains of nearly three decades of local community policing reform. See Veena Dhobal,“The Demise of Community Policing? The Impact of Post-9/11 Federal Surveillance Programs on Local law Enforcement.” Asian American Law Journal ( 2012)19: 35-59. Law Enforcement Initiatives in Southern California Southern California was one of the few places in the United States that witnessed a number of federal as well as local initiatives in the post-9/11 period to build trust and cooperation between law enforcement agencies and Muslim communities. In 2004, the FBI restructured an existing Multicultural Advisory Committee (MCAC) in Southern California with almost an exclusive focus on reaching out to Muslim communities. Multicultural Advisory Committees at the FBI are aimed at maintaining lines of communication between the FBI and diverse communities, based on mutual understanding, respect, tolerance, and trust. This forum allows FBI to reach out to minority communities and make a systematic efforts to build relationships with these communities. The framework for this approach with the FBI is informed by tenets of community policing. See FBI publication “Community Outreach in Field Offices:Corporate Policy Directive and Policy Implementation Guide,”(FBI, 2013). https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/blog/FBI%202013%20Community%20Outreach%20Guidelines%20combined%20w.o%20redactions.pdf Muslim organizations such as CAIR, Shura Council, MPAC, and COPAA joined this initiative alongside other prominent individuals from the local Muslim community. Following the FBI’s initiative in reaching out to the Muslim communities in the area, the LASD created a Muslim Outreach Program under “Public Trust Policing” in 2005. The website defines “Public trust policing is the use of police resources in a manner that includes the public’s participation in the mission of public safety.” http://www.lasdhq.org/sites/muslimoutreach_new/about.html Muslim American Homeland Security Congress, composed of a number of community organizations mentioned above, was also created as a part of this program. In 2007, the Sheriff Department’s outreach program took the form of the MCA Unit. Two prominent names associated with the program were Deputy Sheriff Morsi and Sergeant Mike Abdeen. The LAPD Liaison Section under the leadership of its chief counterterrorism official, Michael Downing also undertook a similar initiative called the Muslim Forum. The LAPD and LASD together created a “Community Engagement and Outreach” (henceforth CEO) program. Award Application. One of the counterterrorism officers associated with LAPD in an interview with the authors elaborated on the rationale behind Muslim community outreach efforts: The approach of counterterrorism division- particularly community outreach part of it – is to move away from the security perspective (securitized) and develop a trust, outreach, and engagement approach. We want to reach out to communities which were isolated earlier. We want them to be a part of different civic bodies, for instance, chamber of commerce, help them in city services, put them on police advisory boards etc. Many of these communities are not organized and they are not mature politically, so we want to help them develop resilience and resistance. Interview with the authors The attempts at including Muslim community voices at various levels of law enforcement were prioritized in this period. The law enforcement agencies hoped that these initiatives would end the alienation of Muslim communities from law enforcement agencies and would elicit the kind of cooperation that the police considered critical for effective counterterrorism. One of the counterterrorism officers of LASD contextualized the need for outreach and engagement with the Muslim community by referring to the initial reactions of the government and law enforcement agencies to the 9/11 attacks. He said: The situation immediately after September 11, 2001 was very different… lot of money was put into counterterrorism… lot of money was put into traditional policing. It became a war zone. We alienated a large part of the Muslim community. All investigations were geared towards Muslims and mosques- complete antagonism towards Muslims. FBI’s surveillance and informant program further exacerbated the situation and we realized that the Muslim community was not cooperating. With this situation in mind, the Sheriff called a meeting of prominent Muslims and Muslim organizations. Interview with the authors. In an award application that highlighted their own achievements, the local law enforcement officials (the LAPD and LASD) mention four targeted areas: Engagement, Training, Youth and Social Media, and Coordination. Engagement, for example, is linked to gaining “credibility” in the community through a variety of activities ranging from the creation of the Muslim Forum, going to festivals such as the Iranian New Year, countering Islamophobia, and building relationships with Islamic centers. In terms of training, they had counterterrorism workshops alongside challenging any anti-Muslim rhetoric in the LAPD and LASD’s own training programs. In our conversations with law enforcement officials, they emphasized how no such training was available when they joined the forces. They told us about existing biases among the trainees- for instance, assuming extremism to be linked only to Muslim communities. Interview with the authors. Recruitment and foregrounding of Muslim police officers in Los Angeles was also prioritized to reduce the distrust between the community and the police and also create resources for cultural training of other police officers. The CEO program explicitly recruited Muslim officers to counter distrust within law enforcement agencies about Muslims and to build a trustworthy relationship with Muslim communities. During the Peter King Congressional hearings, the role of Muslim officers was highlighted as central to community outreach. As Sheriff Baca said in a Congressional hearing in February 2011, “…Our biggest concern in L.A. was that we did not want the Muslim Americans in our society to feel like they were being held responsible for terrorist attacks.” Slosson, 2011. One Muslim LAPD Officer Chand Syed, who immigrated from Pakistan when he was 5, prominently gave interviews: “We’re not spies. If we were spies, we wouldn’t be passing out cards and wearing an LAPD pin on our lapels.” Ibid. At least three of the officers out of the seven members of the LAPS liasion unit were Muslims. Chief Downing reportedly called Chand Syed his “secret weapon” in counterterrorism efforts. Miles Shuper. 2011. “L.A. Deputy Chief: ‘Home Grown’ Terrorists Pose Major Threat to U.S.” Valley Voice Newspaper http://www.valleyvoicenewspaper.com/vv/stories/2011/vv_terrorists_1000.htm Muslim identity of the officers is also emphasized in other writings and interviews. For instance, Deputy Morsi is quoted as saying, “We are from the community…We understand the issues that matter to the community, and we provide a voice for the community.” “Muslim Outreach Operation Underway,” American Police Beat, March 2010. In a piece written by him titled “Mingling with Muslims in Your Community,” Morsi identifies his identity as essential in making contacts with the communities and notes the imperative to counter the Islamophobia that inhibits cooperation from the Muslim community. “Mingling with Muslims in Your Community.”2010. Deputy and Court Officer, 2: 49-53. For instance, he explains the possible biases in the law enforcement officials: At 4:00am, you see a young male walking down the street. He has a beard, a kufi (skullcap) on his head, is dressed in “middle-eastern clothing,” and carrying a Quran. You conduct a pedestrian stop and investigate. The young man tells you he’s on his way to the Mosque to pray. Possible Terrorist? “Come on,” you think to yourself, “Who walks to ‘church’ to pray at 4:00am?” This kid must be lying to me. You request backup then grab the Quran and toss it on the hood of your car as you search him, but it slides off and falls on the ground. You handcuff him, place him in the back seat, and start asking him terrorism-related questions …You search his wallet and find a “suspicious” piece of paper written in Arabic and question him about it… He overhears you and your partner making jokes about him probably being a terrorist. After 45 minutes, you’re convinced he wasn’t involved in any criminal activity and release him.What you didn’t know is that he has information about an unsolved murder in your area. But now, he won’t share it because he’s convinced that law enforcement can’t be trusted. Ibid. Morsi emphasizes how unfamiliarity with the other can lead to the unintentional alienation of the Muslim communities from the law enforcement officers and, in turn, would inhibit their joint role in crime prevention. Ibid. Therefore, recruitment from the Muslim communities co-existed with the importance of training law enforcement officials about Muslims. Another Muslim officer shared that even though he recognizes that this is not a perfect world and there are challenges to being a Muslim, it is better here than anywhere else in the world and he strives to create a balance between safety and civil rights. Interview with the authors An overall narrative built by these local law enforcement officials is that of a considerable success of the trust and cooperation approaches in the context of Southern California. The official narrative emphasized an overall positive relationship being constructed with the Muslim communities and reference to Los Angeles as a model case. However, the Southern California experience produced crisis moments that revealed the failures of trust and cooperation approaches. In the next section, we discuss two legal cases which exemplify a breakdown between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies. Melding of Trust and Cooperation with Surveillance Two major legal cases regarding surveillance and the use of informants in Muslim communities illustrate how institutional platforms created to build a relationship of trust and cooperation with the Muslim communities in Southern California could not achieve the outcome that they intended. Ironically, community outreach forums such as MCAC- the sites for deliberation and cooperation- themselves were transformed into occasions for targeting. The first case, Islamic Shura Council v. FBI, involved the secret surveillance of community activists by the FBI. The FOIA request was initiated in 2006 and the case went to court in 2008. See Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI. (2011) 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 118046 for a good overview of all the different aspects of the case. The case revealed that the FBI initiated MCAC in Los Angeles was allegedly doubling as a surveillance mechanism. Documents subsequently disclosed in the court pointed to possible role of these committees in surveillance of the members of the Muslim community. The case involving Islamic Shura Council points to the complexity of community outreach by law enforcement agencies while creating a network of intelligence gathering from within the community. The initial phase of post-9/11 period was marked by multiple attempts by the Muslim community groups and leaders to cooperate with law enforcement agencies as reflected in the interviews that we conducted with Muslim community leaders. Many of the leaders from different Muslim groups recalled that the community was very eager to cooperate with law enforcement agencies after September 11 attacks. In our interview, the representative for CAIR, Southern California, said, “right after 9/11, the community had felt very apologetic and wanted to demonstrate its credentials as a peace-loving community and very keen to cooperate with the law enforcement agencies.” She qualified the statement by referring to the subsequent tensions between the law enforcement agencies and the local Muslim community, “…but things have changed now.” Interview with the authors. A leader of Shura Council provided a more detailed picture of community’s engagement with law enforcement agencies. He recalled: Local police departments did not care much about the Muslim community in the initial years after 9/11 attacks and there was not much outreach to the Muslim community…However, Justice Department and the FBI started reaching out to the local police departments and asking them to know the Muslim community and do outreach. The FBI itself sent out blasts of memos to the community starting mid-2004…Muslims in large numbers were interested in reaching out to law enforcement officials… This would not have been possible in pre-2001 period. Interview with the authors. The FBI initiated MCAC saw a large participation from community members and organizations. As multiple interviewees confirmed, almost all local Muslim organizations in Southern California were a part of this forum. This was a moment when a relationship of cooperation and trust started building between the community and the law enforcement agencies. However, this forum of trust building experienced a sharp break very soon when Muslim leaders of MCAC started reporting surveillance by the FBI and realized that the process of mutual consultation and deliberation had possibly become a tool of surveillance. Islamic Shura Council of Southern California v. FBI et al was the outcome of a FOIA request by five individuals and six organizations in 2006 requesting documents regarding any surveillance or information regarding them. The plaintiffs in this case were Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, Council on American Islamic, Relations -- California (“CAIR”), Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley, Islamic Center of Hawthorne, West Coast, Islamic Center, Human Assistance and Development International, Inc., Dr. Muzzammil Siddiqi, Shakeel Syed, Hussam Ayloush, Mohammed Abdul Aleem, and Rafe Husain. Many of these organizations and individuals were a part of the Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee set up by the FBI. A year later, the government responded by initially denying the presence of any such documents, and then released four heavily redacted pages. The community members challenged the FBI in court after which the government released 120 pages. The community members claimed that the information was either inadequate or questioned the government’s decision to heavily redact the documents as “outside the scope” of the query. In 2009, the district court asked for an in camera review and found that the government had actually lied to the court about having no additional documents and by stating that many of these documents were “non responsive” or “irrelevant” to the request. The judge disagreed with the government’s claim that they could lie to the court in the context of national security. In fact, the district court was so offended that it initially asked for all the documents to be made public until the Ninth Circuit Court stepped in and stated that such a public act may harm national security. Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI. (2011) 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 118046. Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI. (2011) 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 6481. The district court really took offense to the government’s withholding of the information from the court (and to some extent from the plaintiffs). This is further seen in a subsequent case in November 2011 asking for damages (Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) regarding deliberate misleading of the court, which the government opposed as misunderstanding not lying. The district court rejected the government’s position and said that even though they may not have worked in bad faith they did deliberately misled the court and gave misinformation and asked for reasonable attorney fees to be given the plaintiffs. The judge noted, “The Government’s submission of false information to the Court is factually and legally untenable under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The Court therefore imposes monetary sanctions in the amount of reasonable attorneys’ fees to Plaintiffs for bringing the instant motion.” Islamic Shura Council of S. Cal. v. FBI. (2011) 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 134123 While it is true that the plaintiffs did not end up getting much information as a result of these cases, it did confirm the suspicion of the community leaders that some amount of surveillance was taking place. Even the highly redacted documents that emerged afterwards showed evidence that the community leaders were indeed targeted due to their political views or for advising community members of their constitutional rights. Moreover, Southern California was not an isolated case for this kind of surveillance and the pattern was observed in other jurisdictions such as Northern California. The ACLU filed a FOIA request in Northern California on surveillance practices among Muslims and also got a number of redacted documents about 50000 pages. See https://www.aclunc.org/blog/fbi-ordered-disclose-its-surveillance-tactics-communities In fact, the documents obtained by the ACLU in Northern California through FOIA requests showed that the FBI used its community outreach programs in the area to obtain intelligence on Muslim communities. Many plaintiffs in the Shura Council case were actually those who had enthusiastically participated with the initial outreach efforts of the FBI. The community groups initially agreed to cooperate with the law enforcement agencies despite misgivings about the sincerity of these efforts. However, their apprehension of being targets of surveillance began exactly at these MCAC meetings. Interview with the authors A community leader from Shura Council recalled: “we were being surveilled while we were in these meeting. The Multicultural Advisory Committee itself became the site of surveillance.” Interview with the authors. He narrated how his car was actually searched inside the FBI premises when he, along with others, was attending one of the MCAC meetings. He and others had an inkling that searches were taking place because they would find that their things had shifted in the car while they were inside the FBI headquarters attending meetings. They started to deliberately keep things in a particular way to notice the shifts. Interview with the authors. The community leaders noted unmarked law enforcement vehicles outside their homes monitoring their activities and following them, and suspected that their phones were being tapped as well. One plaintiff in the Shura Council case said that he stopped attending the MCAC meetings because of repeated complaints by community members that they were being questioned about their political views, sermons, and other activities. Gabe Freedman, “Lawsuit Against FBI May Set Tone: Muslim Americans Say the Agency is Hiding Documents without Good Cause.” Daily Journal, August 27, 2010. The Shura Council case epitomized the breakdown of trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California as Muslim community leaders found themselves to be in a relationship of hostility with law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI. The second case, FBI v. Fazaga involved the use of an informant by the FBI in an Orange County Mosque. This case was filed in 2011. The distrust between the community and the FBI in Southern California erupted more intensely when it turned out that in the midst of these trust building efforts, the FBI agents had sent in an informant to a mosque in 2006 to randomly gather intelligence on the community. Ironically, the Muslim community itself became suspicious of this informant and reported him to the FBI. This was the basis of the case filed by Sheikh Fazaga, the Imam of the Orange County Islamic Foundation (OCIF) and community members Malik and Abdulrehim. FBI v. Fazaga, Complaint Filed in 2011. Fazaga, Malik and Abdulrehim are the plaintiffs who filed this suit against the FBI. Sheikh Fazaga is a well-reputed Islamic scholar who served as the Imam of the Orange County Islamic Foundation (OCIF). Malik and AbdelRahim used to attend the mosque. In the case, they argued that the FBI conducted surveillance of thousands of Muslims in the Southern California area with the help of a paid agent provocateur, Craig Monteilh, an ex-convict. In July 2006, Monteilh approached the Imam at the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI) and converted to Islam claiming a French/Syrian ancestry and started becoming a part of the community that welcomed him by giving him books, talking to him, and inviting him to their homes. Malik was asked by the Imam to initiate Monteilh into Islam. Malik tried to do so until he started becoming uncomfortable with Monteilh’s questions especially on violent jihad and started avoiding the new member. Another person who tried to befriend Monteilh was AbdelRahim. Monteilh went to AbdulRahim’s house a lot and asked him and his friends’ questions that eventually led to their avoiding the informant as well. While Monteilh mostly went to the ICOI, he also went to the other mosques in the area. He was paid between 6000-11000 dollars per month and his work was to get files on the community members and leaders of these mosques and to record their conversations with hidden audio and video equipment. All these activities were part of a dragnet approach followed by the FBI where the informant generally collected information on individuals indiscriminately and more significantly instigated them to converse on violent jihad and political matters. Trevor Arronson. 2011. “The Informants.” Mother Jones, September/October. The surveillance program was referred to as Operation Flex since the informant was a gym instructor. The FBI explicitly told him, “Islam was a threat to America’s National Security,” and that while warrants are required for domestic criminal investigations, “National Security is different, Kevin (local FBI officer) is God.” Ibid. The FBI got an approval to open a Muslim gym to further expand the informant’s activities. The FBI instructed him to ask community members about violent jihad and to express his own willingness to participate in such activities and record those conversations and others with audio and video equipment including key fobs (recording devices which looked like remote controls for car keys) and a hidden camera. The members reported these comments to the community leaders and a restraining order was taken from the court to stop Monteilh from entering the ICOI. Subsequently, in a different case, the FBI admitted in court that Monteilh was their informant. This revelation, understandably, was a major source of shock for the community members. Ibid. The documents in this case suggests that the reasons given by the FBI for surveilling a person was often just for their political beliefs. For instance, Fazaga was focused because he was on the board of “in focus news” a Muslim newspaper that was critical of discriminatory practices of the U.S. government against Muslims. He was subject to much scrutiny during travel and his congregants were nervous about meeting in the mosque and talking. Malik was under suspicion because he was a part of Muslim Students Union and had traveled to Yemen for school and had a particular way that he groomed his beard. And he was questioned and often had delayed entry at airports. Subsequent to this episode, he changed how he looks (trimmed his beard and doesn’t wear a skull cap), comes to the mosque less and is suspicious of any new person in the community and is in constant fear of surveillance. The case demonstrates how ordinary behaviors and interpretations of religious doctrine and participation in community forums become the basis of suspicion and had the tendency of enveloping each and every member of the community. FBI v. Fazaga (2011), Complaint. The class action claims that there is a violation of First Amendment rights- Free Exercise Clause, Establishment Clause and the Equal Protection clause of the Fifth Amendment apart from the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The demand was the destruction of the information gained through surveillance and compensation paid for the damages caused. On August 14, 2012, the Fazaga case was dismissed by the district court in favor of the argument filed by the Attorney General evoking the state secrets privilege. Public Declaration by Eric Holder. In the dismissal order, the judge did admit FBI’s recognition that Montelilh was a paid informant. Order Granting Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss based on the States Secrets Privilege, FBI v. Fazaga. Case No.: 8:11-cv-00301-CJC(VBKx), 3. The case, however, was revived by the Ninth Circuit Court in a ruling delivered in February 2019 saying that the district court was wrong in using state secret privilege to dismiss the case. Maura Dolan. “9th Circuit Revives Muslims’ Lawsuit Charging FBI with Spying at Mosques.” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2019. Regardless of its eventual legal outcome, what this episode showed was a complete breakdown of trust between the community and law enforcement agencies. The revelation about use of an informant precisely at a time when there were attempts to build cooperation and trust suggested to the community a complete lack of credibility of the process. EVALUATING THE TRUST AND COOPERATION APPROACHES In this section, we evaluate the trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California and identify three main reasons for the failure of these approaches. First, one of the primary issues with the trust and cooperation approaches was that the separation between community outreach and intelligence gathering became nonexistent to the extent that they often melded into one. In addition, the lack of demarcation between the local and the federal law enforcements agencies in the name of effective counterterrorism also made it difficult to separate outreach and intelligence gathering. Second, the law enforcement agencies failed to gain the trust of Muslims as agencies were unable to break away from the suspicious community framework. Third, an ability to make space for “dissident values” that has been an important element of creating trust with a community was possible only outside the forums created by the law enforcement agencies. The MCAC created by the FBI and the subsequent legal case- Shura Council v. FBI- demonstrate how community outreach and intelligence gathering were brought together into one creating a crisis for the trust and cooperation approaches adopted by different law enforcement agencies in Southern California. This lack of separation was not only a feature of how the FBI conducted its community outreach but also a part of how local law enforcement agencies operated in relation to Muslim communities. For instance, the Muslim outreach unit in LASD was formally placed within the counterterrorism unit. Interview with the authors. LASD attempted to keep counterterrorism and outreach work separate by placing them in distinct locations but the command structure remained the same. Interview with the authors. Similarly, the Muslim outreach unit of the LAPD was headed by the counterterrorism in charge Mike Downing. One LAPD official acknowledged the obvious limitation of his department in this context: One of the challenges is to maintain a wall between outreach/engagement, and intelligence gathering. If you mix the two, you lose your legitimacy… This is the way to build trust…. Ideally there should have been a public relations unit in the chief’s office, which reached out to the community and built relationships but right now it is under my jurisdiction and I do both the things-intelligence and outreach. But we realize with Muslim community you need more finesse. Interview with the authors. The LAPD official told us that he tried to keep the outreach and counterterrorism teams separate although he did acknowledge that both teams reported back to him. Interviews with the authors. Officials from both these departments suggested that the placement of community outreach was mostly linked to funding although the LAPD official did admit that this unit was created because of the unique nature of the Muslim community (indirectly suggesting that counterterrorism and Muslim outreach are inseparable at this point). The Sherriff’s department pointed out, “this program (outreach) does not have a budget…we do not have money set aside for outreach but we have two full time deputies. LAPD also does not have a budget but they tap into private sources. The way we work is to reach out to other agencies and pool resources.” Interview with the authors. The symbolic as well as practical implication of the location of the community outreach unit is that relations with Muslim communities come within the purview of “emergency preparedness” (a term used by community member) since Muslims are not approached through the community relations unit used for other communities. Muslim community leaders were deeply aware of this meshing of Muslim outreach and counterterrorism work making a sustained relationship difficult. The primary mode of police interaction with the Muslim community is also conducted through the counterterrorism unit. For instance, when the LAPD was involved in a routine car chase concerning a Pakistani person, it was counterterrorism chief Mike Downing who came and spoke to the community. While earlier the community relations unit would be responsible for interaction with the community, now it is the counterterrorism liaison unit that interacts with them making it a fraught relationship. Interview with the authors. The difficulty in distinguishing between counterterrorism and outreach is captured in a statement by Officer Matullah (from Egypt who immigrated when he was 18): “yes, it is counterterrorism work. But we’re not here to spy on people. We do outreach, and that’s our major tool.” Slosson, 2011. The merging of community outreach and intelligence has been further magnified by the development of very close coordination between the federal infrastructure on counterterrorism and local policing through efforts such as Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and fusion centers. Mechanisms such as fusion centers and JTTF under the leadership of the FBI and the DHS brought in policing practices that circumvented regular and local policing oversights. The fusion centers created in the post-9/11 period involved government and private sector entities to share information between different local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. In the process, these centres emerged as structures of efficiency and technical modes of information sharing and actually hindered the separation between outreach from counterterrorism work and made it difficult to demarcate jurisdictions of different agencies. Naomi Murakawa, in her historical analysis of mass incarceration, points to similar processes of police efficiency and professionalizing that contributed immensely to increased incarceration of people of color. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford University Press, 2014). Fusion centers emerged as a law enforcement mechanism aimed at efficient information sharing that sharply enhanced the possibilities of Muslim surveillance and targeting by bringing different level of law enforcement together. It was thus not surprising that the Muslim community organizations, alongside civil liberty organizations, turned against fusion structures for improper dissemination of information without necessary oversight. “What are Fusion Centers?” Muslim Public Affairs Council, May 18 2009. https://www.mpac.org/programs/government-relations/what-are-fusion-centers.php “ACLU Calls for Internal DHS Investigations on Fusion Centers.” ACLU, April , 2009. https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-calls-internal-dhs-investigations-fusion-centers Recruitment of local law enforcement officials by the JTTF under the leadership of the FBI further diluted the distinctions between the local and the federal agencies. In San Francisco, civil rights attorneys reported dozens of innocent Americans being approached by local law enforcement officers, deputized to the FBI’s JTTF, without any suspicion of criminal activities only to enquire into lawful religious and political activities. Jerry Markon, “FBI accused of spying on Muslims at community outreach forums, ACLU says,” Washington Post, Dec. 1, 2011 The lack of accountability and oversight over JTTF, an important element of local policing structure, raised concerns in several jurisdictions due to heightened powers. Officers from local police departments assigned to JTTF follow permissive rules for domestic investigation, otherwise disallowed to them, that are cloaked in layers of secrecy evading traditional oversight mechanisms. See Center for Democracy & Technology, Investigative Guidelines Cement FBI Roles as Domestic Intelligence Agency, Raising New Privacy Challenges, October 29, 2008. http://www.cdt.org/policy/investigative-guidelinescement-fbi-role-domestic-intelligence-agency-raisingnew-privacy-cha In fact, San Francisco Police Department pulled out of JTTF in 2017 over the concerns expressed by local community groups about the lack of oversight and the increasing tensions between the local police and the minority communities. Jonah Owen Lamb. “Police withdraw from controversial FBI anti-terrorrism task force.” San Francisco Examiner, Feb. 1 2017 Portland, Oregon was the second city to withdraw from the JTTF citing similar concerns including issues raised by groups working to protect undocumented populations in the city. Amelia Tempelton. “Portland withdraws from federal joint terrorism task force, again.” Oregon Public Broadcasting, Feb. 13 2019. This issue has emerged in Detroit, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis among other places. The Los Angeles conversation on the relationship between federal agencies and the local police departments manifested in the context of mobilization against another well known federal program called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). CVE was an Obama administration program that was defined “as a community-driven initiative to tackle terrorism and militant recruitment by preventing radicalization from taking root.” Tami Abdollah & Philip Marcelo, “Where US sees terror prevention, some Muslims see profiling,” /Where-US-sees-terror-prevention-some-Muslims-see- AP News, April 20, 2015. http://ktar.com/23/1827029profiling This program– proposed in 2015 to be piloted in Los Angeles (alongside Boston and Minneapolis) - explicitly connected the U.S. attorneys’ offices, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the local law enforcement agencies, and community groups. The city of Los Angeles was granted $425,000 from the federal CVE program with the expectation that local agencies- both law enforcement and others- would work with federal agencies to develop a local counterterrorism program with a focus on Muslim communities. This proposal reignited tensions between Muslim community groups and law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles. Amna Akbar has critiqued the initiatives undertaken by the federal agencies in relation to Muslim communities across the United States. She discusses the community outreach programs launched by the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security that try to foreground the community policing while using the counterterrorism tools simultaneously. She argues that the White House initiative Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) is extremely controversial primarily because of its reliance on preventive counterterrorism that draws heavily upon the theory of Muslim radicalization that criminalizes ordinary acts of faith and community interactions. For details, see Amna Akbar. “National Security’s Broken Window,” UCLA Law Review. 62, 2015:834-907. The Muslim community groups considered the CVE as an attempt to target their community members in the name of fighting extremism. Southern California Muslim community groups aligned with civil liberties groups to mobilize against this initiative. The mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, decided in August 2018 to reject the grant from the Department of Homeland Security in face of opposition from the Muslim community alongside major Asian American organizations. Deepa Bharath. “LA Mayor Turns Down $425 K in Federal Funding to Counter Violent Extremism after Opposition from Civil Rights Groups Stalls Process,” Los Angeles Daily News, August 16, 2018 In this case, community groups succeeded in persuading the local political actors not to proceed with a program that they perceived as hostile to Muslims. The mobilization by civil rights organizations and Muslim community groups in Los Angeles against CVE program was thus a rejection of the confluence of federal agencies and local police departments in counterterrorism work and in the process highlighted the problems in this merging of local and federal law enforcement initiatives. Close coordination between local and federal agencies has created problems with community and law enforcement relationship in other jurisdictions too. David Thacher’s work on Dearborn, Michigan shows how the involvement of local police in interviewing a sizable of number of local and Arab and Muslim residents on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI put a severe strain on the relationship between local police department and Arab and Muslim communities. See David Thacher, “ The Local Role in Homeland Security.” Law and Society Review 39:3 (2005) : 635-76. The local law enforcement officials in Los Angeles area were aware of the tension that emerged in bringing together the local and federal initiatives and occasionally attempted to distance themselves from the federal initiatives. The officials from the LAPD and Sheriff’s office we interviewed agreed that the Monteilh episode- the placing of an FBI informant in an Orange County mosque- was a huge mistake. But local officials mostly considered these mistakes at the level of federal law enforcement agencies. They distinguished their own Muslim outreach efforts in terms of the CEO program- which was planned and executed by the local agencies such as LAPD and LASD- as much more trust inducing and successful. They indignantly claimed that their relationships with the community were for the long run unlike the federal agencies and therefore they have more at stake in terms of building a more trustworthy relationship with the Muslim communities. Interview with the authors. Both LAPD and LASD have tried to put distance from the FBI’s work even while a close coordination seems to be the reality of how federal and local law enforcement operate. Commenting on the FBI vs. Islamic Shura Council case involving surveillance of Muslim community leaders, the LAPD counterterrorism official said in an interview with us, “we did not work with the FBI on intelligence gathering. We feel that the FBI initiated MCAC’s failure was dependent on whether the FBI was more interested in doing intelligence gathering in comparison to outreach. If it was former then there is a problem but we try to keep the two separate.” Interview with the authors. The LASD’s counterterrorism in charge also expressed his skepticism about the FBI’s approach: FBI’s approach is very different. They rely much more on surveillance and informants and in the process they made mistakes. The Islamic Shura Council case and the Orange County mosque case (Fazaga v. FBI) are examples of such mistakes. I am a Muslim and I understand that it is not a perfect situation…. However, we still need to do our job, we have to fight extremism, we have to fight threats. Interview with the authors. Notwithstanding the claims by the local law enforcement officials, LAPD and LASD’s distinction from federal agencies was difficult to sustain in the light of close structural and operational coordination between local and federal police which is part of a larger trend in counterterrorism policing. In LA, the LAPD and not the FBI initiated one of the major acts of intrusive surveillance –the Muslim Mapping Project. The LAPD had proposed an ambitious plan in 2007 to map (gather systematic and detailed information on) Muslim communities in terms of their residential patterns, places of worship, and other important places of their everyday lives. When the information leaked during a U.S. Senate hearing on Muslim radicalization, the local Muslim community saw it as another evidence of the desire of local police to collect information for surveillance. The LAPD eventually decided to withdraw the plan given both legal and political mobilization by Muslim and the local civil liberty groups. MacFARQUHAR, Neil. “ Los Angeles Police Scrap Mapping Plan, Elating Muslims.” New York Times, Nov. 16, 2007. Kandel, Jason. “ LAPD sued for Witholding Records about ‘Muslim Mapping’ Plan.” NBC Los Angeles, July 27, 2016. Interestingly, the LAPD later claimed that the withdrawal was a reflection of a better relationship with the community as compared to the NYPD-which had a parallel mapping program- because in LA they attempted the community mapping in a transparent manner. The merging of the outreach and intelligence work and the melding of the local and federal initiatives in counterterrorism policing in the name of efficiency has structurally created continual tensions between the law enforcement officials and the Muslim communities in Southern California and elsewhere. The trust and cooperation approaches adopted in Southern California in the context of counterterrorism policing have thus also failed to develop a relationship of trust with the community. As we noted earlier, the literature on community policing suggests that the fear of surveillance had always been a concern of communities even in the context of regular policing. Although the relationship with law enforcement is meant to be a partnership, there is always a fear about the access it would give the police into minority communities. As William Lyons explained in his study of community policing in Seattle (1988-94), democratizing elements of partnership existed alongside a disciplinary impulse of normalizing surveillance in these communities. Indeed for Lyons, there is a “dialectic of discipline and democracy because the same capacities supported either form of power, depending on the degree to which these were embedded within more or less reciprocal relational contexts.” Lyons, 1999, 9. In most instances, the potential for democratization existed and worked where there was scope of “reciprocal relational networks.” Ibid., 103. However, eventually the disciplinary tended to dominate especially by excluding those who were critical of these initiatives. Ibid., 173-175. Thus, the unequal nature of the interaction conceptually tends to favor the requirements of law enforcement agencies. As Goldsmith notes, “Police officers are, by function, training and experience, suspicious. It goes with the territory of police work” and certain communities experienced this distrust more often than others. A. Goldsmith, “Police Reform and the Problem of Trust.” Theoretical Criminology 9:4(2005): 443-470, 453. Studies on community policing have in particular mentioned its failure in areas dominated by minorities who had a tense relationship with the police. Lyons notes a pro white business community bias in community policing that excluded black, minority, and the poor from the process. Ibid. Similarly, Thacher notes the difficulties in Knoxville to reach out to blacks and other minority communities to persuade them to take an active part in the community advisory committee due to a long history of distrust, harassment, and use of excessive force. Thatcher, 2001, 783-785. Spalek even suggests that while community policing adopted a problem solving decentralized approach, it never explicitly mentioned the building of trust let alone specifying the need to create trust especially with minorities. Spalek, 2010. If one combines the impact of a long history of distrust that minorities experience generally and explicit targeting that Muslims faced particularly in the pre and post-9/11 period, the challenges for the trust and cooperation approaches become enormous. Even as the local law enforcement agencies in Southern California voiced criticism of the federal agencies- the FBI in particular- instituting “war zone” policies targeting the entire Muslim communities by sending informants and surveillance, they did not sufficiently recognize the critical importance of distancing themselves from such policies. After all, one of the primary casualties of these targeting policies and public hostility worldwide has been precisely the loss of trust in society and the government on the part of the Muslim communities. As Mikkel Rytter and Marianne Holm Pedersen write about the impact of a decade of suspicion in post-9/11 Denmark: “The reconstruction of Muslim immigrants as a potential enemy within became an almost permanent, naturalized condition. However, the risk is that this condition stimulates an erosion of the mutual trust, reciprocity and solidarity on which the welfare society rests.” Rytter and Pederson, 2013, 7. The permanent naturalized condition of suspicion has also been reflected in the “hypervisibility” that Muslims (and others appearing Muslim) generally feel in society. Rytter and Pederson draw upon the work of psychologist Iram Khawaja who points to the ways in which Muslim youth in Copenhagen felt the gaze of the majority, the media and the state on them. This in turn has the effect of Muslims wanting to withdraw from the public sphere or experiencing a “silencing developing.” Ibid, 13. In Southern California, the surveillance in the law enforcement forums and the informant episode had a similar impact in terms of the entire community experiencing the gaze of suspicion. After the Fazaga (the FBI informant) case, community leaders reported that Muslims actually started dressing differently, becoming less vocal and more wary of welcoming new members. Interview with the authors. Thus, even though the trust and cooperation approaches are premised on an attempt to counter bias and create explicit partnerships with community members, in such an embroiled context, the mere articulation of a break from targeting policies by the local law enforcement agencies and a formal adoption of trust and cooperation approaches was not adequate. Indeed, the community leaders from CAIR and the American Muslim Task force on Civil Rights and Elections (among others) asked the Muslim communities not to participate in any cooperating efforts after the case of the informant was exposed. “U.S. Muslim Coalition Considers Suspending Relations with FBI,” CAIR, March 17, 2009. http://ca.cair.com/losangeles/news/u.s._muslim_coalition_considers_suspending_relations_with_fbi Their skepticism is reflected in the following comment: “Good intentions won’t have much effect as long as law enforcement agencies engage and view the American Muslim community exclusively through the prism of national security and counterterrorism,” said Hussam Ayloush, the CAIR chapter’s executive director. “Such a framework is demeaning and harmful because it unfairly singles out and stigmatizes our community.” Samuel Freedman, “Los Angeles Police Leader Makes Outreach to Muslims His Mission,” The New York Times, March 6, 2015. The trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California thus failed to actually address the feeling of being a suspect community that enveloped the Muslim communities. Law enforcement agencies have often claimed that an outreach to the community and a relationship of trust can help them develop intelligence information to identify violent actors while keeping the larger Muslim community safe from intrusive counterterrorism policing. There appears to be commonalities with a mode of engagement that emerged out of counter-insurgency experiences both historically and in contemporary times. Counter-insurgency has a longer history in the context of colonial regimes where colonial powers used it against anti-colonial guerilla movements in the 19th and 20th century. Counter-insurgency, in this context, was a combination of violent military response (kinetic) to insurgents and an effort to win the “hearts and minds” (non- kinetic) of the local population from which the insurgents came. Rizwann Sabir. 2017. “Blurred lines and false dichotomies: Integrating counterinsurgency into the UK's domestic "war on terror'.” Critical Social Policy 37 (2): 202-224. The trust and cooperation approaches in counterterrorism policing do have some similarities with the counter-insurgency approach to native populations. In both counter-insurgency and counterterrorism, there is supposed to be a synergy between violence and non-violence, between hard power and soft power. While in the case of counterinsurgency, the military approaches represent hard power, in the case of counterterrorism, the hard power is represented by actions such as detention, deportation, search and seizure, and shooting. Soft power in counter insurgency is about building a relationship of trust with the native populations by winning hearts and minds whereas soft power in counterterrorism is more about developing rapport and sustained relationship with the population in order to develop intelligence as well as build support. It may be important to recall that counter-insurgency has been historically critiqued for presuming a neat distinction between violent action against insurgents and an approach of persuasion- winning the “hearts and minds”- toward the larger population where insurgents come from. Paul Dixon (2009) argues that colonial counter-insurgency has been traditionally presented as using minimal violence with a focus on winning the “hearts and minds” of people but the phrase disguised the reality of high level of violence and alienation of local population caused as a result of counter-insurgency. Paul Dixon. 2009. ‘“Hearts and Minds”? British Counter-Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq.’ Journal of Strategic Studies 32(3): 353–381. Eqbal Ahmad, for instance, describes the constant use of violence and torture against the civilians suspected of aiding guerillas. At the same time, the logic of counter-insurgency demands, Ahmad argues, to treat civilian populations in a friendly manner with kindness and consideration. “In practice, however, distinguishing between friendly and hostile villagers is impossible,” suggests Ahmad. Eqbal Ahmad. 1971. “Revolutionary War and Counter-Insurgency.” Journal of International Affairs 25(1): 1-47, 18. Recent scholarship on counterterrorism, particularly in the post-9/11 British context where Prevent program was part of a combination of hard power (targeting terrorists) and soft power (aimed at the larger domestic Muslim population), points to highly intrusive policing where Muslim community came under excessive surveillance for any signs of radicalization which included quotidian religious practices. Arun Kundnani.2014. The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. Verso. The high level of surveillance of domestic Muslim population that became a part of counterterrorism strategy in Britain- conceived as engagement with Muslim population- is a part of coercive infrastructure that cannot be neatly delineated from the hard power component of the strategy. The surveillance and mapping program in New York City by the NYPD, which came to light through a series of reports by the Associated Press, is a prime example of this trend in the United States. Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzo. “NYPD: Muslim Spying Led to No Leads, Terror Cases.” Associated Press, August 12, 2012. Available at http://www.ap.org/Content/AP-In-The-News/2012/NYPD-Muslim-spying-led-to-no-leads-terror-cases As Christina Pantazis and Simon Pemberton write in the context of Britain, “it is difficult to see how such skillful, yet ultimately fragile, ‘soft approaches’ can thrive, when the full weight of state suspicion and the brutality of ‘hard’ methods have fallen on these communities.” Pantazis & Pemberton, 2009, 660. Thus, the trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California (and elsewhere) in initiating the surveillance and use of informants end up targeting the entire Muslim communities as suspicious. Finally, the question of how the law enforcement community deals with the “dissident voices” becomes an important part of evaluating the trust and cooperation approach. As we indicated earlier, Political Scientists have recently noted the need to create forums or opportunities for dissident voices to really allow for trust to emerge between law enforcement and minority communities. Given the controversy over the FBI surveillance and Muslim mapping, the approach of LAPD and LASD toward Muslim organizations pointed to a crisis viz-a-viz engagement with the Muslim community. Their approach relied on pushing back against the most active Muslim organizations that have been critical of both the local police as well federal law enforcement agencies. They preferred to engage with organizations that have not been very critical of law enforcement agencies. The counterterrorism official from LAPD put it very plainly in an interview with us: There are some organizations which serve as barriers… particularly CAIR and Shura council… they try to create resentments. The organizations which work with us are MPAC, Sikh American Legal Defense Fund, Muslim Public Forum… we have focused on Muslim women, particularly the questions of domestic violence. We do not necessarily work with any one organization but more directly with the community… Interview with the authors. The LAPD’s discomfort with dissenting voices from Muslim community is clearly evident here. The local police worked towards delegitimizing these voices and maintained that these organizations did not represent the community. LASD representative was more forthcoming on this issue in our conversation with him: We have a great relationship with the Muslim community…. Grassroots is more trustworthy but leaders create problems…they want to create resentment … some of the community organizations (referred to Shura council and CAIR) felt that we tried to undermine their authority… they wanted us to approach them if we reached out to Muslim community… we can not do that … we do not need their permission… we have to do law enforcement job.. so we started going around them.. and creating a direct relationship with the community. Interview with the authors. The LASD representative also mentioned that the FBI gets its approach to CAIR from Washington, D.C. where people feel that CAIR is an unindicted party in the Holy Land case that was a major terrorism case. Holy Land Foundation case was brought against the Holy Land Foundation charity based in Texas that provided humanitarian relief in Palestine. In December 2001, the U.S. government designated HLF a terrorist organization, seized its assets, and closed the organization after many years of surveillance. In 2004, a federal grand jury in Dallas, Texas charged HLF and five former officers and employees with providing material support to Hamas and related offenses. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the cases and the FBI adopted a very unfriendly and hostile approach to CAIR based on this case. https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2013/e0707r-summary.pdfThe organizations mentioned by both LAPD and LASD representatives - CAIR and Shura Council- for creating resentment among local Muslims are the same organizations that filed lawsuits against the FBI and also mobilized against the Muslim Mapping project. The quotes above point to the complications of trust and cooperation approaches where the local law enforcement agencies are claiming to engage with the community but they feel strongly about not engaging with dissenting voices within the community. Instead, we find that any attempts to pushback against the discriminatory federal or local initiatives such as surveillance, use of informant, CVE or the Muslim Mapping Project emerge from outside the forums created under the trust and cooperation approaches. The Southern California experience thus points to a particular form of layered counterterrorism policing that relied on bringing together the local and the federal in a manner that made the trust and cooperation approaches difficult to work. The suspicion of the community became an integral part of the counterterrorism policing and even the local police was unable to move away from this framework. SARS program was a major point of contention in Los Angeles and some changes were made to the program due to the negotiation between civil rights groups and LAPD. Matthew Harwood, “LAPD Agrees to Suspicious Activity Reporting Reforms,” Security Management, May 18, 2012 http://www.securitymanagement.com/print/9873 Finally, it is important to reiterate that while there is an inherent tension within policing, especially in terms of gathering information, the Muslim community organizations were willing to enter that relationship and work through questions of trust and cooperation. Here it is also important to note that as works of Schulhofer, Tyler, and Huq point out, creating a legitimate procedure also contributes towards creating a longstanding relationship with the community. Our interviews showed that the fact that the precise forums created for trust and cooperation ended up being utilized for surveillance seriously delegitimized the efforts of the law enforcement agencies. Conclusion The article focuses on the evolution and eventual failure of trust and cooperation approaches in Southern California. Immediately after 9/11 while use of hostile policies such as detention and deportation marked the relationship of the law enforcement with the Muslim communities, there was an attempt to gradually rethink that approach and create opportunities for trust and cooperation. Forums were created for participation and deliberation and initiatives for outreach and recruitment of officers from the community marked these efforts. Community leaders appeared to welcome the initiatives and participated in these efforts. However, an analysis of the initiatives and legal cases, revealing surveillance and use of informants, reflects some of the serious shortcomings of the counterterrorism policing approaches in their inability to build a relationship of trust with the Muslim communities. The law enforcement agencies failed to recognize how the layering of policing that conflates local and federal ends up erasing spaces for dialogue and dissent and creates a gaze of suspicion impacting the entire Muslim communities. 1