Inside the AP’s NYPD lies

The Associated Press’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the NYPD’s supposed “clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities” is rife with inaccuracies. The articles confuse events and policies in ways that are misleading and cast the tale they are telling in the worst possible light.

I know all this to be true, because I worked directly for the deputy commissioner of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division for the last seven years — the last four (today’s my last day) as his director of intelligence analysis, overseeing all the city’s terrorism investigations.

In this limited space, I’ll focus on one set of distortions: the AP’s claim that the NYPD has, without citing any evidence of wrongdoing, engaged in a “human-mapping” program that placed entire Muslim communities under scrutiny.

In 2003, the Intelligence Division created the Demographics Unit to identify “venues of radicalization” or “hot spots” in order to detect and disrupt terrorist plots in their early stages. The unit was also charged with identifying the locations in certain communities where foreign operatives might lie low, as the 9/11 hijackers did in Paterson, NJ.

Officers in the unit were specifically chosen for their language abilities and cultural knowledge, and matched to areas where they’d be best able to distinguish the benign from the threatening. Proud to be Americans and members of the NYPD, the majority of these officers were Muslims.

A Sept. 22, 2011, AP article paints a frightening portrait of the unit’s work: “The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity,” runs the opening paragraph. It depicts “a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses.”

This police-state nightmare bears no resemblance to the unit’s nuanced work.

For this mission, Demographics Unit plainclothes officers went into neighborhoods with big populations from “countries of interest” (the ones that produced the vast majority of conspirators in the three Islamist plots against New York from 1993 to 2001). The officers walked around, bought a cup of coffee, had lunch and observed the individuals in the public establishments they entered.

This is an important point: Only public locations were visited. Doing so was perfectly within the purview of the NYPD; the court-written Handschu Guidelines say: “The NYPD is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”

The officers did not conduct blanket ongoing surveillance of communities. That’s not only an impossible task, it also would’ve had a low likelihood of identifying terrorist plots in their early stages. At its largest, after the July 7, 2005, London attacks, the unit had 16 officers — hardly enough to monitor a neighborhood, much less whole communities.

Officers would take a first pass to familiarize themselves with luncheonettes, stores and other legitimate businesses and record what they saw. They’d be unlikely to return unless there was reason to believe that a location might be a “venue of radicalization.”

The AP’s writers claimed that “the department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as ‘rakers,’ into minority neighborhoods as part of a human-mapping program.”

They were not undercover officers. Undercovers are provided with fake identities and misrepresent who they are; plainclothes officers of the Demographics Unit carried no false ID and didn’t purport to be anyone in particular. This was a blatant error on the AP’s part.

The AP also claimed: “Police have also used informants, known as ‘mosque crawlers,’ to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.” No. As a matter of NYPD policy, undercover officers and confidential informants don’t enter a mosque unless following up on a lead vetted under Handschu. The AP’s description of “mosque crawlers” roving from mosque to mosque without express legal permission to enter is pure fiction.

Why cover social and recreational sites at all? Because a key finding from the 2004 Madrid attack and the 2005 London Underground attack was that the plotters had not radicalized in mosques — but in locales as varied as a barbershop and a gym.

The AP’s claim that the NYPD “kept files on individuals” gathered by the Demographics Unit is another major distortion. Yes, observation reports naturally included the names of store owners and customers with the information gleaned from conversations. But no files about particular individuals were created. The reports and area-familiarization summaries were kept on the shelf: In the event of a fast-moving plot, they’d give the department a head start.

Thus, the Demographics Unit was critical in identifying the Islamic Books and Tapes bookstore in Brooklyn as a venue for radicalization. Information the unit collected about the store helped thwart a 2004 plot against the Herald Square subway station. The unit also played a role in initiating an investigation that led to the 2008 identification ofAbdel Hameed Shehadeh — a New Yorker now facing federal charges for allegedly lying about his plans to travel to Afghanistan to kill US servicemen.

Sadly, the damage the AP inflicted upon the NYPD’s reputation can’t be wholly mitigated by an honest airing of the facts. But letting these false and misleading stories alter local counterterrorism work would be catastrophic.

Preventing another devastating attack from occurring in the city after 2001 was much more than a local necessity. Such an attack would have been devastating to national morale — and it still would be.

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