Republican Rep. Peter King says the Paris terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo proves the New York City Police Department was right to spy on Muslim residents of New York City.
"This obviously, with so many people involved, with so much precision, this makes it clear that you can't have enough cops to protect every soft target, certainly in big cities you can't and what all is going to stop it is intelligence," said King. "That is getting information ahead of time by having a informers, by being on the ground, by being in the communities where the threat is going to come from, and that is going to be the Muslim community," King said on the John Gambling Show on AM 970 The Answer.
The Long Island Republican cited the attack as proof the NYPD under Ray Kelly was right to spy on Muslim communities.
"That's where the threat is going to come from and we have to put the New York Times aside, we have to put the Associated Press aside and all the bleeding heart politically correct people who say we can't be emphasizing one community over the other. The fact is it's coming from the Muslim community and it shows that the NYPD and Ray Kelly were right for so many years when they were really saturating areas where they thought the threat was coming from."
Following Sept. 11, the NYPD used undercover police officers and paid informants they called "rakers" and "mosques crawlers" to compile data and trawl through Muslim neighborhoods. The Rakers would hang out in local businesses and write reports on goings-on.
The NYPD's spying did not produce a single lead or terrorism case, the Associated Press has previously reported.
King previously said the shootings in the Canadian parliament in October was cause for "all out" surveillance on Muslims.