Cross your fingers, New York: Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD are scrapping a vital anti-terror program meant to gather information in Muslim communities. With less info, the city’s efforts to thwart terrorist attacks will now only be more difficult.
Worst of all, the move seems motivated by political concerns: “This reform is a critical step forward in easing tensions between the police and the communities they serve,” the mayor said Tuesday.
But the program was always 100 percent legal — and court-approved. And ending it could prove deadly.
Clearly, the program proved valuable during Ray Kelly’s tenure as police commissioner under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. During that time, terrorists hatched no fewer than 14 plots to attack the city.
Not one succeeded.
“Learning about the demographics of the metropolitan area is part and parcel of the police department’s work,” Kelly said last year, explaining the rationale behind the program. “It is an important aspect of our counterterrorism program.”
Kelly noted that at least six of the 9/11 hijackers chose to live in Paterson, NJ, because, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, “there was an Arabic-speaking community there.” The department, he said, “believed it would be prudent to gain a better idea of where individuals who had been sent here to do us harm might try to conceal themselves.” That sounds obvious.
Even the Obama Justice Department seems to agree: It’s expected to issue new rules for the FBI that will bless the NYPD program. It will implicitly acknowledge the importance of using nationality to identify places where jihadi terrorists might hide.
The move by Kelly successor Bill Bratton and de Blasio to end the program came on the very day thousands stood in the rain to mark the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, which left three dead and more than 250 injured. And last month, a congressional report on those bombings faulted officials for missing opportunities to thwart the attack.
Now New Yorkers will have to hope that de Blasio and Bratton can avert disaster with even less information.