It appears that the Chicago Police chief, Garry McCarthy, has decided to align with the Muslim community against his New York City brethren when it comes to the issue of legal surveillance. While speaking at CAIR Chicago’s annual banquet, McCarthy essentially demonized the NYPD by assuring CAIR that he would never do what his colleagues to the east did.

Via Fox Chicago:

For the first time in public, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy promised his department will never conduct blanket surveillance of Muslims like the New York Police Department did in Newark, N.J., when he was chief there.

McCarthy addressed hundreds of Muslims on Saturday at the annual banquet of the Council on American-Muslim Relations-Chicago, a civil rights organization. He said police would follow leads in criminal cases, but the department “does not and will not conduct blanket surveillance and profiling of any community in the city of Chicago.”

“We are deeply committed to respecting the civil rights of all Chicagoans,” McCarthy said.

Believe it or not, that’s not the most amazing part. McCarthy is actually a 9/11 survivor who lost personal NYPD friends that day:

McCarthy wrapped up his remarks by saying he is a 9/11 survivor, who was in a command post near the World Trade Center until the towers fell. He told the audience that 13 of the 23 officers lost by the NYPD were personal friends.

“And I want to tell you this,” he said. “In the 10-plus years since that horrific event, which has affected me to my core, I have never once thought ill of the religion of Islam.”

There is absolutely no way that McCarthy doesn’t know that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in the history of the United States. There is also absolutely no way that he doesn’t know about their ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Perhaps reading up on Philippe Pétain might be helpful in understanding a dynamic that could cause McCarthy to do such a thing after being a 9/11 hero.

h/t GMBDR