The Associated Press has done some real shoe-leather reporting in the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. It’s a very long article that raises a great many questions. Some of the issues don’t concern me very much. I don’t think the counterterrorism cooperation with the CIA has crossed any meaningful lines, for example, although someone probably ought to codify the payroll issues. I also have no problem with an aggressive program of informant recruitment. I am a little more concerned about jurisdictional issues, but that gets into a broader issue I’ll get to in a moment.
The most obvious problem is the NYPD’s use of mosque-crawlers. It sounds like they have infiltrated every mosque within 100 miles of New York City, and they don’t wait for evidence of a threat. This goes beyond what the FBI feels is legal, and the FBI will not accept leads developed from the NYPD’s mosque-crawlers. The NYPD also uses crawlers in cafes and coffee shops, which strikes me as questionable, but not quite as stark as indiscriminately interfering with Muslims’ First Amendment right to practice their religion.
The second most obvious problem is that no one wants to know what the NYPD is doing. The City Council has never held hearings. Congress gives them a free hand. It appears to me that there is a silent consensus among elected officials that they want the NYPD to do whatever it takes to keep New York City safe, and they do not want the responsibility of holding them to some legal or constitutional standard.
According the the AP’s reporting, the NYPD brought a senior CIA official in to run their Intelligence Division in early 2002, and he set the department up to work like the CIA.
David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department’s first civilian intelligence chief.
Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency’s analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen’s tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation’s top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.
He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn’t looking for a cop.
“Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence,” said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen’s top uniformed officers.
At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA…
…
“It’s like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world,” Cohen said in “Protecting the City,” a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. “What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do.”
This is rather obviously problematic. If we wanted CIA-style tactics used on our own citizens, we wouldn’t ban the CIA from operating domestically. If we wanted the FBI to behave this way, we wouldn’t have the rules and regulations for how FBI operates.
I hope this article isn’t forgotten by the time Congress gets back from its recess. What I think is needed is a real reassessment of how we want to handle domestic security for New York, and for the whole country, too. There are too many blurry lines right now. The NYPD is probably far more capable than the FBI in doing domestic security within the city because of their diverse and indigenous workforce. But maybe the NYPD Intelligence Division’s expertise should be folded into the FBI. The CIA’s role should be defined, too. And Congress needs to provide more specific guidance about what is and is not permissible surveillance.
Protecting New York City is a daunting challenge, and I think we all want to be aggressive. But we can’t have the NYPD running rogue operations with no oversight whatsoever. If it wasn’t a problem, the AP wouldn’t have had so much cooperation in their reporting. After the trauma of 9/11, it’s understandable that the country went a little insane for a while and the people responsible for protecting us went overboard. I think that the 10-year anniversary is a good time to begin cleaning things up organizationally and constitutionally. The Intelligence Committees in Congress should get to work in September on a solution to this mess.
