NEW YORK — The players in the New York Police Department's under-19 cricket league refer to one of its oldest supervising officers as "Shabash"("Bravo" in Urdu). They call him that because he uses the term so often and so indiscriminately. It is the only Urdu word he has picked up in his six years of working with the predominantly South Asian and Caribbean teams.
Officer "Shabash" is perhaps a fitting metaphor for the cosmetic level of engagement between the NYPD and the first-generation immigrants who play in the police-run league, begun in 2008 as a way to connect with South Asian Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11. The league was modeled on the success of the police's soccer league, NYPD United, started in May of that year to reach out to Arab youth.
"You're going to be able to counter radicalization, counter extremism," league supervisor and NYPD Deputy Inspector Amin Kosseim said in
a 2011 interview about the outreach efforts. "You want (community members) to come to you with information, and that's not going to happen unless you have that rapport."
NYPD Cricket has grown each year since its inception; this year it was oversubscribed, and six teams had to be turned away. But the 2011 revelations of two Associated Press reporters, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, have cast a dark cloud over what seemed to be a positive example of community engagement by a beleaguered police department. Their explosive series showed that the NYPD was engaged in intensive surveillance of Muslim communities within the city. Last month they published a book based on their investigation, "Enemies Within," which explores the unprecedented scope of the force's intelligence gathering activities — which extended to the field of sport.
