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.”

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