Of all the canards used to impugn the police surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, at the top is this one: that the cops themselves admit it hasn’t produced any results.
So we weren’t surprised to see the claim in the first paragraph of a new report issued by activists with the help of CUNY law school. It reads as follows: “The Chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division, Lt. Paul Galati, admitted during sworn testimony that in the six years of his tenure, the unit tasked with monitoring American Muslim life had not yielded a single criminal lead.”
But the program isn’t supposed to generate criminal leads. It’s supposed to help police gain a deeper knowledge of local Muslim communities, on the not unlikely assumption that this is where a wanted or would-be terrorist might go.
If you ask whether this has yielded results, you will get a very different answer.
Yesterday, for example, an Algerian man, Ahmed Ferhani, was sentenced in state court to 10 years for plotting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue. He was uncovered by the NYPD Intelligence Division.
So was Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, the Staten Island native who goes on trial Monday in Brooklyn federal court on charges of lying about plans to become a Taliban jihadi in Pakistan (and whose lawyer tried to get Jews excluded from the jury).
Then there’s Raees Alam Qazi, a Pakistani arrested last December for planning to blow up New York landmarks to avenge Muslims killed by drones. The NYPD Intelligence Division located and nabbed him after Florida officials lost track.
In short, this is not a program to “spy” on law-abiding Muslims. It’s an effort to map out where a terrorist might look for help. To condemn the NYPD Intelligence Division for not providing criminal leads here is like blaming the star defensive player on the Jets for not scoring more touchdowns.