This Cop Made It His Mission to Fight Islamophobia. Then His Family Was Targeted.

Officer Humayun Kabir builds bridges between Bangladeshi-Americans and the NYPD. When his aunt was murdered in cold blood, the struggle hit home.

Photos by Melissa Spitz

Humayun Kabir, a transit officer with the New York Police Department, is sitting in the driver’s seat of his SUV in Jamaica, Queens, watching a video on his cellphone over and over. A man strides into the frame of the video, time-stamped August 31, 2016 9:11:33 PM. He’s wearing ghost-white sneakers and carrying a paper bag in one hand. His face isn’t visible, but his right hand appears to be fisted. In seven seconds, he walks into one end of the frame and out of the other.

The clip was recorded by a surveillance camera down the street from where Kabir now sits, and later released by the police in connection with the murder of Nazma Khanam. Kabir’s aunt and a retired schoolteacher, Khanam would have been sixty this month, but she was stabbed to death minutes after the video was recorded.