According to the AP, the NYPD's Demographic's Unit has spent more than six years "spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques" and has "never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation." Ackerman wants to close down the unit:
Logic dictates dismantling the program. Politics dictates continuing it. There remains no organized constituency in the United States that elects and pressures politicians to dismantle the post-9/11 security apparatus. There is, instead, a potent disincentive: the politician who proposes doing so, particularly at the national level, lives in fear of being demagogued, and especially in fear of being blamed for another attack. Combine that with a rising and ugly climate of suspicion of American Muslims, and citizens of the United States get treated like enemies of the United States, with minimal hope of democratic redress.
Samuel Goldman is on the same page:
The legality of the program is in currently in litigation. But the failure to produce useful intelligence removes its practical justification. Threats of political violence may justify expansions of government powers. When the applications of those powers shows that those threats are exaggerated or non-existent, however, they should by removed or restricted. In short, I can understand why the NYPD and city officials once thought the Demographic Unit was necessary. Now the time has come to shut it down.
The Dish 