Just when it seemed that The Associated Press was done tarring the NYPD, along comes another disingenuous hit on the department’s efforts to keep the city safe from terrorism.
Testimony from the chief of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division about its work over the past several years was unsealed last week — leading to another AP whopper.
Here’s the news agency’s latest smear: “In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”
It’s hard to unpack all the distortions in that paragraph, but we’ll try.
First, the AP falsely accuses an NYPD unit of spying. Then, it says the unit’s cops made terrible spies. But the tiny Demographics Unit isn’t a “spy” agency, so it never tried to do what the AP says it was so bad at doing. It’s like accusing the Yankees of being bad at basketball.
To understand just how misleading the AP report is, it helps to understand why the Demographics Unit was created at all.
Just a handful of nations have produced most of the world’s terrorist plots of the last few decades. So, rather than focus on Scottish grannies as potential terrorists, many government agencies instead track “countries of concern” — regions that are hospitable to radicalism and terror.
The TSA, for instance, pays special attention to nationals of 14 particular countries, especially when they travel to the United States. This is called a risk-basis model, and the NYPD employed it with its Demographics Unit.
That unit was created in 2003 to map pieces of the city in the aftermath of 9/11 — a kind of “census” operation, in the words of NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.
“It basically surveys the terrain,” said Browne, identifying which neighborhoods, cafes and other businesses are frequented by folks from countries of interest.
And it serves a purpose: “If we have information that terrorists may be coming into the area,” the demographic data on countries of concern will tell “where he is likely to feel comfortable, where he can use a foreign-language Internet cafe, where can he get a job off the books,” Browne said.
At its largest, the Demographics Unit had 16 officers. Right now, it’s down to eight — one for every million residents in New York.
It’s never been a spy agency, nor was it created to dig up dirt in coffee shops, despite the AP’s lunatic assertions.
This small unit has the AP all in a lather — but for all its efforts over the past year, the agency hasn’t found one example of a clear-cut violation of anyone’s civil rights.
That’s because the work is perfectly legal.
Formal investigations are handled by other parts of the Intel Division, which employ undercover officers and informants.
The Demographics Unit’s plainclothes cops just go around in public — be it in a cafe, bookstore or elsewhere — and keep their ears open.
That’s OK even under the strict regime cooked up by a federal judge called the Handschu agreement, which governs the NYPD’s actions in this sphere.
No other police department in the country faces such restrictions — only the NYPD. And again, these rules specifically allow cops “to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”
So the AP’s charges of spying are BS.
There are further nits to be picked.
Under Handschu, the NYPD can only keep reports of what it hears during these trips into the public sphere if it “relates to potential unlawful or terrorist activity.”
But the department has kept some records of its forays into public areas, including perhaps some seemingly irrelevant details. And that’s put the AP into a swivet.
Why keep such notes? The NYPD says that even “minutiae” like the particular dialects being spoken can give cops a sense of where terrorists seeking to blend in might be most comfortable.
Thus the “minutiae” are important and relate to the NYPD’s overall sense of where potential terrorists would look for haven.
That seems entirely reasonable.
Nevertheless, the AP seems to think it represents a wholesale violation of the Handschu guidelines. Thus its incessant smears.
One would almost think that the AP wants to run the NYPD. If so, somebody at the agency should run for mayor.
As it is, the news agency is laboring mightily, and producing mice.