A group of seven Senate Democrats are calling on Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to investigate the New York City Police Department for his wide-ranging counterintelligence program.

Sens. Kevin Parker, along with Bill Perkins, Ruth Hassell-Thompson, Shirley Huntley, Liz Krueger, Velmanette Montgomery and Gustavo Rivera write in the letter that the surveillance program of the city’s Muslim community, as first described by the Associated Press in August.

The AP found the surveillance program being conducted by the NYPD operates with little oversight from the City Council and rivals the CIA in its ability to track suspects in terrorism investigations.

The department has been in particular targeting mosques suspected of ties to terrorist organizations.

“There need not be any evidence of criminality or wrongdoing nor any jurisdictional limit. This dangerous precendent undermines one of the most basic tenets of our nation, religious liberty,” the senators write.

Parker has been particularly outspoken on the issue of targeting the city’s Muslim community. He blasted Sen. Greg Ball’s hearings on “radical” Islam’s influence in New York as discriminatory, a charge the Hudson Valley Republican denied.

And Parker versus the NYPD is anything particularly new, of course. The Brooklyn Democrat was arrested in 2009 after a tussle with a New York Post photographer. He was found guilty of a misdemeanor last December.

Schneiderman NYPD Investigation Letter

Share|