Once again, the NYPD finds itself under siege. And once again, the attacks emanate from a dysfunctional alliance of traditional cop-haters, federal agencies fighting turf battles and poꦡlitically correct folk who believe police have no business investigating Muslims for any reason.
The latest attacks stem from a new book called “Enemies Within.” But it’s an old story being recycl🏅ed. The authors are the same Associated Press reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for their series on the NYPD’s mapping program of Muslim communities. The suggestion is that the cops were violating civil liberties or indulging in racial profiling, notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that no one’s found any evidence of any illegality.
To sell their book, the authors have come out with a new twist: The NYPD “l♉abeled entire mosques as terrorist organizaܫtions,” meaning that “anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential suspect of an investigation or fair game for surveillance.”
The main problem here is not so much with what the authors say but their complete misunderstanding of the program. This is not about generating criminal leads. As Police 🃏Commissioner Ray Kelly has tried to explain many times, it is about helping cops gain a deeper knowledge of local Muslim communities, if only because they are a logical place for foreign terrorists to hide.
The police know that the vast majority of people in these communities and mosques are law-abiding. And the cops conduct surveillance under precise court-ordered gu🐼idelines. As New Jerseꦿy’s attorney general concluded when his office investigated charges the NYPD was spying on Garden State Muslims and found no “violations of law.”
The work has paid off. In December, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division located a Pakistani man in Florida after officials there lost track of him; he was charged with plotting to blow up New York landmarks. Surveillance also located an🌟 Algerian later convicted of plotting to blow up a Manhattan synagogue.
Kelly has responded with characteristic bluntness: “Our sin is to have the temerity, the chutzpah, to go into the federal government’s territory of counter-terrorism and trying to protect this city . . . We follow leads wherever ꧅they take us. We’re✨ not intimidated as to where that lead takes us.”
So once again, the same people who complain loudest after an attack that law enforcement failed to connect the do♏ts are those fighting hardest to prevent our cops from collecting those dots in the first place.