Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Keith Ellison (D-MN) disagreed Sunday over whether law enforcement should closely monitor Muslim communities in the United States following the Boston Marathon bombing, which King called for earlier this week.
“In previous times, when certain elements in a community are the ones responsible for crime, the police focus on it,” King said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “For instance, in Boston, the F.B.I. never spoke to the Boston police about the older brother. And afterwards, there were no intelligence files in Boston on these type of people, these people inclined to terrorism. The F.B.I. never even got to examining him.”
Ellison warned against profiling Muslim Americans.
“I think it’s ineffective law enforcement to go after a particular community,” Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, said on the show. “Once you start saying, ‘We’re going to dragnet or surveil a community,’ what you do is you ignore dangerous threats that are not in that community and you go after people who don’t have anything to do with it.”
“And remember, we went after a community in World War II, and the Japanese internment is a national stain on our country, and we are still apologizing for it,” Ellison added.
