As the controversy deepens over the New York Police Department’s efforts to monitor and map local Muslim communities, a majority of New York City voters say that the police have been effective in combating terrorism, and reject the notion that the department’s counterterrorism program has unfairly focused on Muslims, according to a poll released on Tuesday.
According to the poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University, 58 percent of voters said the department acted appropriately in its efforts to fight terrorism and did not unfairly target Muslims; 29 percent disagreed. The department’s efforts drew greater support from Republicans than Democrats, and from whites than blacks or Hispanics. But in all those cases, a plurality supported the department’s efforts.
“New Yorkers brush aside the gripes about police surveillance of the Muslim community,” the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, Maurice Carroll, said in a statement.
As a series of recent articles by The Associated Press has examined the department’s surveillance of Muslims around the region, the tactics have come under increasing scrutiny, drawing criticism not only from civil rights lawyers, but also from the head of the Newark office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie. Among the disclosures by The A.P. are details about the police’s efforts to map Muslim neighborhoods from Newark to Long Island, and to monitor Muslim student organizations at universities.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has largely dismissed the criticism, saying this month that “for some, the very act of gathering intelligence seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism.”
Voters remained satisfied with Mr. Kelly; 64 percent approved of the job he was doing, compared with 25 percent who disapproved.
Stop-and-frisk, another police tactic that has been questioned by some public officials, was more divisive an issue. Forty-six percent approved of the practice, while 49 percent disapproved.
The poll also indicated that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has rebounded from poor approval ratings that had bedeviled his third term.
A year ago, with voters voicing displeasure over his handling of a Christmas snowstorm and his selection of Cathleen P. Black as schools chancellor, only 39 percent of New Yorkers approved of Mr. Bloomberg’s performance, in contrast to 51 percent who disapproved. But in the newest poll, the numbers were reversed, with 54 percent saying that they approved, and only 35 percent saying they disapproved.
At the same time, voters who were polled said that they approved of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies by a 53 percent to 40 percent margin; one month ago, that ratio was essentially a tie, 46 to 44 percent.
The poll also had good news for Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and not so good news for John C. Liu, the city comptroller, whose campaign finances are under federal investigation. A record-high 59 percent of respondents approved of Ms. Quinn’s job performance, versus 20 percent who disapproved. Meanwhile, a record-high 37 percent of respondents disapproved of Mr. Liu’s job performance, in contrast to 40 percent who approved.
The poll is based on the responses of 964 voters who were surveyed between March 6 and March 11; the margin of sampling error for a sample of this size is plus or minus three percentage points.