What’s the best way to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11? By returning to the mindset of Sept. 10, apparently. At least that’s the message delivered by the Associated Press and a chorus of blogs hyperventilating about the NYPD’s antiterror tactics.
I spent what felt like the better part of a day reading the long AP article and the commentary, thinking that surely there must be a scandal in there somewhere.
Nope.
When you’re done, you find that the New York Policy Department is uniquely determined to find terrorists before they strike. To do that, the NYPD is willing to go far outside its borders — to London, to Jerusalem, even to New Jersey.
It partners with counterterror analysts at the CIA. It looks for leads in places where terrorists have been found before — in immigrant communities and in mosques, for example — and it doesn’t give terrorists a haven where they know the cops can’t go. It takes advantage of its diversity by asking its officers to hang out in communities where they blend in. It recruits street sources wherever it can find them. It maps the neighborhoods it’s most concerned about.
Shocked yet?
Me neither.
So what gives? How come we’re getting this story, at this length, at this time?
One possibility is turf. There is plenty of tension between federal agencies in the antiterrorism business — the FBI and the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, where I used to work. But those agencies don’t usually find themselves crowded out by local law enforcement. With one exception.
The NYPD can go toe to toe with any of those agencies in resources and expertise — not to mention the obnoxiously single-minded pursuit of bad guys.
In my experience, the NYPD sometimes shows up at foreign terrorist crime scenes before federal agencies. It second-guesses federal intelligence products, and sometimes produces its own, better analyses. It breaks cases that the feds don’t. It gets way, way out of its lane, in a way that only New Yorkers can.
Sooner or later, there was going to be payback.
And one turf-fighting tactic that the feds have practically patented is the civil-liberties play: If you get better results than federal investigators, don’t be surprised it the feds start complaining that you get better results because you cheat.
You use dubious interrogation techniques. You use racial profiling. You go beyond federal investigative guidelines. You don’t have to deal with all the second-guessing oversight that the feds do.
It’s only a step from complaining about those unfair advantages to leaking a civil-liberties scandal to friendly reporters. Which leads easily to the next step: launching a federal investigation of the scandal once it’s been leaked to the press.
Imagine what Blockbuster would have done if it had the authority to investigate Netflix for unfair competition, and you’ll get the idea.
I have no inside information showing that the AP story was prompted by jealous rivals. But there’s no doubt it brought those jealous rivals out in force. The article features multiple federal “senior officials” sniping at things like the NYPD’s unusual ties to the CIA or its deviation from the guidelines that the FBI follows.
If the AP story was stage two of a turf fight, stage three would be the opening of a federal investigation. And, right on schedule, the Justice Department has announced that it’s looking into the matter.
What a waste. None of this will make us safer.
But it probably won’t stop, at least not until the NYPD decides to show a little more humility in its dealings with Washington.
Which should be, well, never.
Stewart Baker practices law in Washington. He
was Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security from 2005 to 2009.