Following the deadly terror attacks in Brussels on Tuesday, Ted Cruz declared, “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” The NYPD’s director of communications responded to this horrifying proposal with a snappy tweet.

“Are our nearly 1k Muslim officers a ‘threat’ too?” J. Peter Donald asked Cruz. “It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary, foolish statement.” This was very well received by a certain kind of person.

Brian Beutler is a senior editor at the New Republic. Bradd Jaffy is a senior editor at NBC. Zeke Miller is a political reporter at Time.

Presumably, all of them—including Donald, of course, but in fairness he’s more or less paid to forget these kinds of things—ought to know that the NYPD spent more than a decade spying on Muslims in New York and beyond, generating precisely zero counter-terrorism leads but providing many police officers the opportunity to learn the rules of cricket.

In fact, it was only in January that the city agreed to appoint an independent civilian monitor to oversee the NYPD’s counterterrorism strategies, as part of a settlement agreement in a pair of lawsuits filed over the invasive and unlawful security practices. (Even after the notorious Demographics Unit was disbanded, many in the Muslim and Arab-American community feared that the surveillance apparatus remained intact, under a different name.)

“If this adds transparency and a level of public trust that we’re continuing to keep the city safe, but in a lawful way, we welcome and embrace that,” Lawrence Byrne, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of legal matters, said. “We have nothing to hide.”