Didarul Islam’s 7-year-old son walked a few careful steps behind his father’s casket, one hand gripping his mother’s arm. She was late in her pregnancy — her belly a pronounced curve beneath the folds of her black burqa. He kept her steady, serving as a small, solemn anchor in the thick summer heat.
On July 28, 2025, when 27-year-old Shane Tamura, a Las Vegas resident, opened fire inside a midtown Manhattan office building, firing 47 rounds from a high-powered rifle, four people were killed, including Islam. The 36-year-old police officer was working as an off-duty security detail — a side job police officers often take to supplement their salaries — for the investment giant Blackstone, which had its office in the building. Later, Tamura took his own life.
Islam, a resident of the Bronx, immigrated to New York from Bangladesh at the age of 20 and had been working for the New York Police Department (NYPD) for over three years. He lived with his parents, wife and their two young sons, aged 5 and 7. Last month, his wife gave birth to their third son.
Three days after the shooting, Islam’s funeral at a mosque in the Bronx drew hundreds, spilling into the city streets. Thousands of officers lined the route, their navy uniforms forming a sea of blue. Interspersed among them were mourners from the Bangladeshi community, many dressed in traditional white clothing and skullcaps, the traditional garb of Muslim funerals. The juxtaposition was striking to anyone familiar with the NYPD’s troubled relationship with minority groups, especially the city’s Muslims since 9/11.
The story was prominently featured the next day in newspapers, and photos from the funeral circulated widely on social media, painting Islam as a hero. At Islam’s funeral, Mayor Eric Adams said, “He could have gone into any other occupation he wanted, but he wanted to put on that uniform and he wanted to protect fellow New Yorkers. And he wanted to let us know that he believed in what the city and what this country stood for.”
But the praise and valorization of Islam in his death have reopened old wounds within his own community. “This is the first time I’ve seen a Bangladeshi Muslim man treated as a hero instead of a criminal, an outsider,” a 35-year-old Bangladeshi-American tech worker, who grew up in Brooklyn, told New Lines. He asked to withhold his name to protect his privacy at his workplace.
Only a few thousand Bangladeshis lived in the United States in 1980. Today, an estimated 300,000 people of Bangladeshi origin live in the country, nearly a third of them in New York City — the largest Bangladeshi diaspora community in the U.S. However, they are among the more economically disadvantaged groups in the city, with many families working multiple jobs just to get by. Employment in the public sector, like the police force, promises a pathway to economic stability.
But the heroism with which Islam’s death is being treated overlooks a sadness and a sense of lingering injustice felt deeply by the Bangladeshi community, and many feel they suffer in silence. Indeed, Islam’s tragedy has spotlighted the growing presence of Bangladeshi Americans in the NYPD, a result of recruitment drives in immigrant communities. But it has also exposed divisions: For some, his service is a source of pride, while others remain wary of a department long mistrusted by minorities.
This mistrust has been sharpened by recent incidents, including the fatal police shooting of a Bangladeshi teenager last year, and is rooted in the NYPD’s post-9/11 surveillance of Muslim communities. Younger generations, shaped both by that surveillance era and the Black Lives Matter movement, tend to view law enforcement with greater skepticism than their parents.
In March 2024, 19-year-old Win Rozario, a Bangladeshi man dealing with mental health issues, called 911 for help. When officers arrived, Rozario panicked, holding scissors, and was fatally shot. His death shook the community. Vigils were held, and his family stood at City Hall demanding that the officers involved be prosecuted. Under pressure, the NYPD released body-camera footage that contradicted its initial account that suggested that Rozario had acted aggressively or dangerously in a way that justified the shooting, intensifying outrage.
For many, Rozario’s killing marked a turning point, pushing a community often focused on survival into public protest and raising their political voice. A year and a half later, the Rozario family is still seeking answers and accountability from the NYPD.
At the time, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and Laal Morich, both social justice organizations, had noted that the Bangladeshi American Police Association (BAPA) was silent on Rozario’s killing. “It’s a sad situation. I’m not going to speak about particular cases,” said Sgt. Ershadur Siddiqui, who co-founded BAPA in 2015. “I’m not the investigative officer. But generally, if someone’s holding a knife 20 feet away and you have a gun, that person can kill you before you even pull out your gun.”
Rozario’s death remains a painful flashpoint, highlighting the complex relationship between community loyalty and institutional accountability. “A GoFundMe campaign raised nearly $500,000 in a week from the community for Didarul Islam, but Rozario’s family could barely raise $20,000 to seek justice for his death. The family still lives in the same apartment where Win was shot, unable to move out because of financial reasons,” Fahd Ahmed, the executive director of DRUM, said.
Hence, many in the community are asking: Whose interests do police officers represent when they are from the community?
BAPA, founded in 2015 and officially recognized by the NYPD fraternity in 2017, was created partly to address this concern. “Part of the response was, if they join the police, then they can represent our interests or communities on the inside,” explained Ahmed. “But over the years, whenever entrapment cases happened, it was always someone from our community involved, and they weren’t speaking out.”
Entrapment cases have often targeted young Muslim men, including those with mental illness or developmental challenges, supplying them with fake weapons or goading them into extremist rhetoric to plot attacks before arresting them. Other controversial tactics that have been used by law enforcement, including the FBI, involved coercing members of the Muslim community to help entrap and spy on their fellow worshippers. NYPD informants in the Bangladeshi-American community have shared their experiences in media interviews, describing how officers told them to “create and capture” conversations about jihad or terrorism.
The contradictions in Bangladeshi Americans’ relationship with the NYPD reflect a community grappling with hard-won progress that has nevertheless come at significant cost. For officers like 26-year-old Ishmam Chowdhury, who graduated from the academy in May and is expecting a child soon — much like Islam was — the changes within the department are undeniable.
“A senior officer once told me that 15-20 years ago, after 9/11, someone didn’t believe he was a cop because his last name was Islam,” Chowdhury told New Lines. “That has definitely changed. We have Bengali and Muslim officers who are commanding officers of NYPD precincts and working in higher positions at NYPD headquarters.”
This institutional acceptance has come with painful trade-offs that expose uncomfortable truths about who becomes a hero and why. “We can grieve a community member’s death, but I don’t think he died in honor — he didn’t die protecting kids in a school shooting, he died protecting Blackstone, which has caused harm in our communities,” said 32-year-old social worker Maliha Fairooz, who often conducts mental health training for the NYPD. Blackstone, the investment giant, has been criticized for its role in the ongoing housing crisis, which has harmed working-class communities.
“I’ve observed their training culture — senior officers bullying trainees, breaking their spirits, even before they hit the streets as cops,” Fairooz said. “No one joins the NYPD because they love it — it’s purely financial. Unemployment and economic hardship push people, especially Black and brown youth, toward these jobs.”
Islam’s death also exposes broader tensions about how immigrant communities are asked to prove their worth through sacrifice. Fairooz argues that if more social safety nets existed, the appeal of joining the NYPD would be a lot weaker. “We need to look at the system itself — why are Black and brown folks disproportionately recruited into front-line policing roles, putting their lives on the line? What does it do to a community that has been heavily policed and surveilled since 9/11?” asked Kashfin Huda, a 31-year-old tech consultant.
The relationship between the Bangladeshi community and the NYPD has been deeply complicated by the department’s post-9/11 surveillance program. The NYPD’s monitoring of Bangladeshi and other Muslim communities is well documented. A secretive program known first as the Demographics Unit, and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit, mapped and surveilled neighborhoods with large Muslim populations, including Bangladeshi enclaves in Queens and Brooklyn.
The unit created detailed profiles without any criminal leads, relying solely on religion and ethnicity. Investigators sent undercover officers and “mosque crawlers” to attend prayers, record sermons and report on behaviors often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Dozens of Bangladeshi businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants and newsstands, were labeled “locations of concern.”
The surveillance fostered fear and mistrust, chilling civic and religious participation. “People didn’t know who was watching, who was reporting,” Ahmed, of DRUM, told New Lines. “The psychological impact is generational. You don’t know who’s been converted to a spy. It breeds paranoia and fractures community trust — exactly what these policies intended.”
After public outcry and lawsuits, the NYPD disbanded this unit in 2014. But the trauma still echoes today, with studies and testimonies showing increased mental health strain and feelings of being treated as permanent outsiders, especially among young people who grew up after 9/11.
In a conversation with New Lines, journalist and professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, creator of the podcast series “Empire City,” explained that the NYPD has a long history of exclusion and conditional inclusion, with communities from Black New Yorkers to European immigrants like the Irish and Italians often being met with suspicion and systemic barriers, kept out of the force or relegated to the margins. However, what has been striking, Kumanyika noted, has been how the department often flipped the narrative about inclusion.
“The department celebrates individual ‘success stories’ while ignoring the structural discrimination that made their entry so difficult in the first place,” he said. “It’s not just about numbers or diversity — it’s about understanding that the institution has been designed historically to maintain certain power structures. Inclusion in the NYPD doesn’t automatically translate to equity or justice for these communities.”
This dynamic sheds light on the NYPD’s current outreach to Bangladeshi and other immigrant communities, which actively recruits from these groups but within a framework shaped by a legacy of policing that often pits officers against their own neighborhoods.
That’s why younger generations, especially those born here, have more critical views of law enforcement shaped by both the post-9/11 surveillance era and the Black Lives Matter movement. The killing of George Floyd in 2020 crystallized divides within the Bangladeshi-American community as young Bangladeshis joined coalitions with Black and Latino activists, demanding police accountability and justice.
“There’s a class and generational divide,” Huda told New Lines. “Older immigrants may see police jobs as stability. Younger folks understand the systemic harm policing causes.”
For Bangladeshi Americans, the protests illuminated overlapping struggles against racialized policing. “We saw parallels between the NYPD’s treatment of Black communities and how immigrant communities, including Bangladeshis, have been policed and surveilled,” Huda said. “The protests connected local struggles with global calls for justice.”
In recent years, New York City’s universities have become hubs for political activism, including widespread student protests in support of Palestinian rights, which frequently face heavy police presence and repression. “The Palestinian struggle resonates deeply with diasporic communities who understand occupation, displacement and state violence,” said members of Laal Morich, a Bangladeshi diaspora organization focused on grassroots organizing and political education, in a statement to New Lines.
“The NYPD’s presence at demonstrations — sometimes violent and disruptive — underscores how policing is used to suppress dissent,” they said. “For Bangladeshi youth involved, it’s another reminder of the system’s contradictions.”
For many, this conflict between pride and pain is a daily reality. For instance, 31-year-old software engineer Shoumik Chowdhury, who immigrated to the United States in 2009, was appalled seeing his cousin’s spouse being celebrated for being a police officer within his own family. “I’ve seen Bangladeshi officers at student protests. How can they just stand there and do nothing?” he asked.
The pattern reflects what Moroccan-American writer and academic Laila Lalami calls “conditional citizenship” — the way marginalized communities are offered acceptance and recognition only when their stories can be folded into dominant narratives about heroism, sacrifice and loyalty to American institutions. “What’s heartbreaking is that this tragedy brought a kind of pride — this person risked his life and received a dignified send-off. Our community got national attention, but it came at a cost. Minority communities often have to sacrifice to be seen,” Huda said.
This raises fundamental questions about what representation means in practice. “The Bangladeshi community should be very wary of how they’re being used by the NYPD,” Kumanyika said. “You can have relatives in the force who are good people and still recognize that the institution has a long history of using communities for its own image. The real question is: Where are they when it comes to hard questions, like accountability, misconduct and investing in community support?”
As the Bangladeshi-American community continues to grow and establish itself within New York’s complex social fabric, these questions about representation, accountability and justice will only become more pressing. The shadow of the badge looms large over a community still defining what it means to belong. “We can honor Didarul Islam as a father, son and community member while still holding space for the pain rooted in past injustices and systemic failures,” Huda said. “That’s a difficult balance.”
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