Posting Of NYPD Officers Around The World Found To Be A Waste, Embarrassment
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | January 10, 2014
As we mentioned recently, NYPD Chief Ray Kelly took a shot at the FBI on his way out of office, claiming the agency was unable to protect New York (and presumably lesser cities) from terrorist attacks. The problem, according to Kelly, is that the agency failed to share intelligence with his department, at least not enough to satisfy his counterterrorism officers. To that end, he formed the so-called Demographics Unit to violate the rights of surveil Muslims, mosques and anything else deemed potentially “terrorist-related” and placed it under the command of a former CIA official.
Not only that, but Ray Kelly figured his department could beat the FBI at its own intelligence-gathering game overseas. It sent out NYPD officers as uninvited guests to cities around the world. Again, this was done to fight the good fight against global terrorism. In reality, it was a waste of money that failed to produce useful intelligence, and the officers stationed overseas spent a lot of their time treading on the toes of the locals.
[F]ormer federal officials who served overseas told “On The Inside” the NYPD detectives are ineffective, often angering and confusing the foreign law enforcement officials they are trying to work with, and are usually relegated to the sidelines because they lack national security clearance.
For example, when bombs exploded at resorts in Bali in 2005, killing 20 and injuring hundreds, the Indonesian National Police “were astonished and irritated that the NYPD showed up,” a federal source explained.
Yes, even on an international scale, there’s never an NYPD officer around when you need one — just plenty of “help” no one asked for. (Presumably, the Bali police informed the bumptious interlopers that no one’s rights needed violating at the moment… ) Not only did the NYPD’s ad hoc diplomats show up at the worst possible time, but they weren’t even in their (very loosely defined) “jurisdiction.”
That’s because those NYPD Intelligence Division detectives were based in Singapore, and were sent into a chaotic terrorism scene where they had no previous relationship with local law enforcement.
And even in Singapore, those detectives had no security clearance and no standing with the Singapore Internal Security Department, which is the agency tasked with combating terrorism.
The end result of all this bumbling? The NYPD’s overseas officers declared that the Bali bombing had “no nexus” with the bombing in New York — something US federal agents had already determined and passed along to other agencies in the pipeline, including the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force.
But the bumbling wasn’t limited to offending Bali police or Singapore security forces.
Another source said that NYPD detectives showed up at the funerals of victims of the Madrid rail bombings in 2004, angering local officials and victims’ families.
So, in addition to further damaging international relations, the NYPD’s forcible insertion of itself into tragedies occurring in other nations failed to produce anything useful in the way of terrorist plots disrupted. This falls directly in line with its domestic efforts — casually stomping on civil liberties and civilian sensibilities in order to chalk up another zero in the “plots prevented” column.
Remember, the impetus for this program was Kelly’s belief the FBI didn’t share enough info with the department… or share it fast enough. But FBI agents who worked with the NYPD task force remember this a bit differently.
The NYPD already has more than 100 detectives on the FBI-Joint Terrorist Task Force with access to all the cutting-edge terror data available to the intelligence community. But apparently that’s not enough.
“The police brass always complained we were holding back information,” a top FBI official complained to me. “It bothered the s— out of me. We shared everything and never held back. Sometimes, they thought we were. But sometimes, we just did not know!”
Kelly trusted his own men more than he trusted the feds. There’s nothing specifically wrong with having confidence in your underlings. But when it results in the baffling decision to place NYPD eyes and ears around the world without seeking the permission or cooperation of local officials, it’s a problem. Kelly’s time at the helm of the NYPD has been marked by an insularity verging on paranoia.
Now that he’s leaving, it will be up to Commissioner Bill Bratton to decide whether the program, as useless (and expensive — $100k per officer per year) as it is, is allowed to continue. And, unfortunately, Bratton seems to believe the NYPD’s attempt to out-think the feds still has some merit.
He said he “understands Commissioner Kelly was very strongly supportive of it” and “I’ve heard nothing negative about it, quite frankly.”
That’s hardly a shocker. Maybe Bratton should consider asking someone not so heavily invested in obstinately pursuing useless programs to futile ends.
NYPD a ‘quasi-military organization,’ according to outgoing top-cop Ray Kelly
RT | December 31, 2013
During the last few hours of a lengthy tenure atop the New York Police Department tainted by both scandal and success, outgoing-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly echoed soon-to-be-ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg with big words about the city’s boys in blue.
Bloomberg provoked a fair share of criticism from Big Apple residents in late 2011 when he said, “I have my own army in the NYPD . . . the seventh biggest army in the world.”
Two years later and new comments from Commissioner Kelly might make the same sort of splash.
The increased militarization of the NYPD and other big city police agencies had already caused concern among many by the mayor’s remarks that November, but both Bloomberg and Kelly’s handling of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in Lower Manhattan that autumn and into the winter attracted previously unmatched opposition. Within just a few short months the city had arrested hundreds of peaceful protesters, and tales from Occupiers about being pepper-sprayed by the police became routine over social media.
Two years later, the NYPD’s reputation has not been repaired: the agency’s stop-and-frisk policy remains as controversial as ever, and an award-winning Associated Press report exposed a secretive intelligence-gathering wing of the force that singled out area Muslims for warrantless surveillance.
Now as he throws in the towel after serving as the civilian administrator of the NYPD for 14 of the last 24 years, Kelly has said something that doesn’t shy away from accusations he helped use his police force to make a police-state.
The New York Times was questioning what they called Kelly’s “tight control of the department” when he reportedly looked “pained” and told them, “You can’t win.”
“Obviously, in a quasi-military organization, you need an ultimate decision maker,” he said.
Ominous words about the world’s seventh-biggest army, or an actualization of what the NYPD has become under his command? The New York City blog Politicker was quick to throw Kelly’s quote into a headline for a post they published on Tuesday, and one of the most widely-subscribed Twitter accounts used by Occupy Wall Street linked followers to the Times article by way of Kelly’s quip.
“Oh, so he doesn’t know what ‘quasi’ means,” one Twitter user remarked back.
Rania Khalek, an independent journalist who watched the NYPD evolve under Kelly, weighed in on the comment as well.
“I was surprised by his candidness, but my first thought was, at least’s being honest,” she told RT on Tuesday. “The role of the NYPD, like most city police departments around the country, is indistinguishable from that of the military, especially in poor communities of color where police serve as occupying armies for the most part.”
And as the AP’s investigation has shown, ethnic minorities in the greater New York region have indeed been forced to endure specialized scrutiny under Kelly and Bloomberg by way of the NYPD’s so-called Demographics Unit: a faction of the force dedicated to collecting intelligence on Muslims by seemingly any means necessary.
“Investigations of any community which are not based upon indications of crime create fear and erode the confidence of a community in the power of a legal system to protect it,” New York University law professor Paul Chevigny told Newsday earlier this year.
Combined with an “army” of 35,000 or so police officers, it’s easy to see how that fear has made Kelly a person that many New Yorkers have grown to despise during his tenure. Additionally, retired NYPC Captain John A. Eterno told the Times this week that the way in which the commissioner has operated his organization in recent years has been cloaked in secrecy to a point of contention.
“He’s done very well with technology and made many innovations,” Eterno told the Times, “But lack of transparency is going to be his legacy.”
“He’s simply hidden things over and over that are harmful to democratic policing,” he said.
In a 1995 study, Victor Kappeler wrote in his abstract that the quasi-military structure that Kelly claims to have enforced cannot breed a “truly professional” police force. The “need to balance internal discipline with police-citizen interactions results in pressure on the individual officer to produce results,” he wrote, is accomplished in militarized units “often by relying on various degrees of misconduct.”
Between 2011 and 2012, misconduct within the ranks of the NYPD raised 22 percent, Controller John Liu confirmed back in June, causing a reported 229 NYPD officers to be disciplined last year.
At the same time, however, statistics suggest that the NYPD’s actual ability to fight crime could be on the up as well. The Times reported on Tuesday that the city is expect to log only 330 murders for this year — a record low.
“And these record-breaking successes are all due in great part to the professionalism and skill of the NYPD,” Bloomberg said during a ceremony earlier this month.
Others, however, had not so nice things to say. To commemorate Kelly’s last day as commissioner of NYPD, a few dozen New Yorkers gathered downtown for a “Good Riddance, Ray Kelly” party advertised on Facebook.
“We’re celebrating because we survived this asshole,” activist Cyrus McGoldrick told the New York Daily News from Tuesday’s demonstration.
As RT reported previously, Kelly will soon join the Council on Foreign Relations — a dominant international policy think-tank — where he will still be able to stay close to his fellow New Yorkers. Even in his post-NYPD career, Kelly will receive a taxpayer-funded ten-man security detail that is reported to cost NYC residents around $1.5 million a year.
NY Police Chief Kelly Taking $1.5 Million Worth Of Publicly-Funded Bodyguards With Him When He Retires
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | December 10, 2013
New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly has spent years defending the harassment of minorities via the PD’s stop-and-frisk program. Kelly (and Mayor Bloomberg) have constantly pointed to the decline in violent crime stats as evidence the program works (and as justification for its unconstitutional aspects).
But the city must not be safe enough. Ray Kelly’s retiring, but he won’t be doing it unaccompanied. According to police sources, Kelly will be taking a small battalion of personal bodyguards with him wherever he goes, post-employment.
The NYPD’s Intelligence Division — with Kelly’s input — is recommending that Kelly take with him a 10-officer complement of taxpayer-funded bodyguards, up from the six-officer detail the commissioner had wanted last month.
The detail will now include a lieutenant, three sergeants and six detectives to chauffeur and protect Kelly and his family around-the-clock in the Big Apple and even out of town after he ends his 12-year run atop Police Headquarters — at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million a year, sources estimate.
This does seem excessive, especially considering Kelly will be retiring far from the mean streets, not heading to prison. In fact, he doesn’t personally put people behind bars, so it’s not as though he’d be much more than a symbolic target in the big house.
On the other hand, spending a decade deploying (and championing) a questionable program that gives NYPD officers the right to stop anyone (almost exclusively minorities) for any reason didn’t exactly make Kelly a whole lot of friends. If an investigator was to ask whether anyone had a motive for doing something horrible to ex-Chief Kelly, the list of suspects would probably rival the New York City phone book.
But that’s also an abstraction. The streets won’t be less safe once Kelly steps down. They’ll be roughly the same as they are now. Unless Kelly’s already traveling with an armed entourage, there’s really no reason he’d be less safe once retired. If anything, no longer being the figurehead of the NYPD should make him safer.
Supposedly, the Intelligence Division has some solid reasoning backing up this decision. According to information dug up by Matt Sledge at HuffPo, Ray Kelly has every reason to fear for his life.
[T]his May 17 declaration from Deputy Commissioner David Cohen in one of the NYPD surveillance lawsuits may provide some insight on the perceived threats to Kelly’s safety.
After the officers who shot Sean Bell were acquitted, Cohen wrote, surveillance was ramped up citywide “in response to the possibility of unlawful activity and allowed for informed decision-making on the likelihood of violence or other unlawful activity, as well as resource deployment decisions.”
“The shooting and subsequent trial sparked demonstrations across New York City and widespread threats of violence against members of the NYPD, including Police Commissioner Kelly, who was the target of a murder plot motivated by the Sean Bell matter,” Cohen wrote.
Frightening, except for the fact that Kelly’s stalking death threat came in the form of a person not much suited for stalking/death-dealing. (Nor was he in the position to front the $65,000 needed to send a more able-bodied person to do the job.)
Sounds pretty serious. Until you learn who was behind the 2007 “plot”: a 400-pound, imprisoned, impoverished wheelchair-bound “mentally ill” man with a rap sheet the length of your arm.
As it stands now, Kelly will leave office with more bodyguards than any previous police chief since Howard Safir’s retirement in 2000. Safir took 12 bodyguards with him, citing “vague threats.” (Presumably, the same “vague threats” law enforcement and security agencies have used to weaken policies and expand power over the past decade-plus…) Not only that, but he’ll be one of the few allowing the city to pick up the tab for post-career protective services.
True, this $1.5 million will be a drop in the bucket considering the size of NYC’s budget, but considering the fact that Ray Kelly seems intent on making himself the sort of example other police chiefs shouldn’t follow post-retirement, this should probably be opposed on sheer principle. Or, at the very least, his request should be trimmed down to a more reasonable number of bodyguards.
If Kelly’s made an enemy of the people, there’s really no one else he can point the finger at. If this means he’ll be living in fear for the rest of his retirement, maybe he’ll develop a bit of empathy for the thousands of minority citizens who have been harassed repeatedly over the last decade under the color of law.
Judge: NYPD stop-and-frisk tactic violates rights
Press TV – August 12, 2013
In a blow to New York City mayor’s claims regarding the effectiveness of stop-and-frisk practices by the NYC police, a federal judge ruled that the so-called crime-stopping tactic violates the constitutional rights of minorities.
U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled Monday that by targeting racially targeted groups of citizens, the police had adopted an “indirect racial profiling” policy, that resulted in discriminatory stopping of tens of thousands of blacks and Hispanics, according to Reuters.
The judge ruled that the Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, police commissioner and other city officials had “turned a blind eye” toward the injustice on city’s minorities.
“No one should live in fear of being stopped whenever he leaves his home to go about the activities of daily life,” Scheindlin wrote in her opinion.
The judge wrote in her 105-page decision that police personnel were under pressure to raise the number of stops by Mayor Bloomberg since he took office in 2002 and designated Raymond Kelly to be NYPD Commissioner.
As a result, officers stopped and searched young minority men without any reasons in violation of their constitutional Fourth Amendment rights that protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The New York Civil Liberties Union demonstrated in a 2012 report that there had been a sharp increase in number of police stops over the period of Bloomberg’s three terms in office.
The number of searches rose from 160,851 stops in 2003 to 685,724 in 2011, while half of the 2011 searches included physical searches.
Scheindlin ordered the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee compliance with other remedies she ordered, including adopting written policy guideline specifying circumstances where stops are authorized. She also authorized to adopt a trial program requiring the use of body-worn cameras in one precinct in each of the city’s five boroughs; and to set up a community-based remedial process under a court-appointed facilitator.
Related article
- New York’s stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional, judge rules (theguardian.com)
Debunked NYPD Radicalization Report Just Won’t Die
By Mike German | ACLU | February 11, 2013
Like a villain in a horror movie, the widely debunked concept of terrorist “radicalization” is once again raised from the grave by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in its 2013 report, “American Jihadist Terrorism: Combating a Complex Threat.” CRS is an influential legislative branch agency charged with providing objective policy analysis for members of Congress, which makes its continued reliance on the “radicalization” model promoted in a now-discredited 2007 New York Police Department report, “Radicalization in the West,” particularly troublesome.
The NYPD report purported to describe the process that drives previously “unremarkable” people to become terrorists. According to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s preface, the document was intended to “to assist policymakers and law enforcement officials, both in Washington and throughout the country by providing a thorough understanding of the kind of threat we face domestically.” It theorized a simple four-step process starting with the adoption of a particular set of beliefs to becoming a terrorist, though it strangely conceded that not all terrorists need to go through all, or any of these steps, and that people who did go through the steps would not necessarily become terrorists – though that didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. Confused? It gets worse.
The report only examined terrorist acts committed by Muslims, and essentially suggested that all Muslims were potential terrorists that needed to be watched, stating that “[e]nclaves of ethnic populations that are largely Muslim often serve as ‘ideological sanctuaries’ for the seeds of radical thought.” It posited a profile of potential terrorist “candidates” so broad that it’s no profile at all: within these “Muslim enclaves,” potential terrorists could range from members of middle class families to “successful college students, the unemployed, the second and third generation, new immigrants, petty criminals, and prison parolees.” In other words: anyone and everyone. It identified “radicalization incubators,” including mosques, as well as “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, nongovernmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and book stores.” In other words: any place and every place. Commonplace activities for Muslim-Americans, like wearing Islamic clothing, growing a beard, abstaining from alcohol and joining advocacy organizations or community groups were all listed as potential indicators of radicalization. In other words: any kind of behavior and all kinds of behavior.
If it sounds like the report’s description of potential terrorists is so overbroad it could include entire Muslim-American communities, this does not appear to be accidental. Indeed, the report provided the ideological foundation for the NYPD Intelligence Division’s program of mass surveillance of Muslim communities throughout the Northeast. Not surprisingly, this poorly focused program “never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation,” according to the Associated Press, which received a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the NYPD’s program.
The NYPD radicalization report was quickly denounced by advocacy and academic organizations for its overstated and flawed facts and serious methodological errors. The NYPD responded by inserting a “Statement of Clarification” in 2009 that made this remarkable claim:
“…this report was not intended to be policy prescriptive for law enforcement. In all of its dealings with Federal, State and Local authorities, the NYPD continues to underscore this important point.”
What? In addition to completely contradicting its own preface, the disclaimer refutes the entire purpose of the report. If a police terrorist study isn’t intended to impact police counterterrorism policy, what is it for? Is it just a thought experiment?
Yet, despite all we know of the admitted shortcomings of the NYPD report, the CRS continues to cling to its model of radicalization, suggesting that individuals can become terrorists “by radicalizing and then adopting violence as a tactic.” This concept, that the adoption of a particular belief set is a precursor to violent action is refuted in empirical studies of actual terrorists, like one from RAND, which concludes that an individual’s decision to engage in terrorist violence is a complex one involving a matrix of different environmental and individual factors, no one element of which is necessary nor sufficient in every case (see its “Factor Tree for Root Causes of Terrorism” above, which looks a whole lot more complex than the NYPD’s four-step process).
In addition to being factually wrong, this radicalization concept is also dangerous, because, as the CRS report points out, adopting beliefs and associating with like-minded people is First Amendment-protected activity. But if counterterrorism officials believe that adopting radical beliefs are a necessary first stage to terrorism, they will obviously target belief communities and activists with their enforcement measures, as they often do. The CRS report highlights the NYPD radicalization theory, and while it acknowledges the criticism of the NYPD report it continues to hew closely to the model of radicalization it promotes. This is particularly true in its discussion of the appropriate law enforcement response to radicalization, in which it describes the “major challenge” as determining “how quickly and at what point individuals move from radicalized beliefs to violence.” The faulty assumption that radical thoughts lead to violence drives many of the inappropriate law enforcement actions against Muslim-American communities and political activists that, like the NYPD surveillance program, violate civil rights but don’t actually improve security.
It is long past time to euthanize this erroneous and dangerous theory, as many terrorism researches are already suggesting. Moreover, a more recent study from the Triangle Center of North Carolina suggests that recent data reflects a small and declining threat from Muslim-American terrorists, not the “uptick” that CRS reports. And West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center issued a revealing study indicating that far-right extremists have engaged in more comparatively violent activity over the last twenty years, which the FBI and policy makers have failed to recognize. Effective counterterrorism policies can’t be made from flawed theories and analysis. It is time that CRS heeds the NYPD’s recommendation that its radicalization report not be used to drive policy.
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Book Launch
Launch of “A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs”
By Gilbert Doctorow | November 24, 2019
I am pleased to announce the publication of my latest collection of essays. The capsule description of the book carried on the pages of internet booksellers is as follows
“The essays in this book deal with major political, social and cultural events primarily in Europe and Russia during the period 2017 – 2019 in which the author was a participant or eyewitness and has personal impressions to share. Several of the essays are drawn from other genres including travel notes, public lectures and reviews of particularly insightful books on key issues of our times like immigration, Liberalism and war with Russia that have not received the broad public exposure they merit.”
However, there is much more to the story that has relevance to its potential readers set out in the Foreword shown below, starting with the several layers of nuance in the title itself. … continue
Aletho News Original Content
Three Mile Island, Global Warming and the CIA
By Aletho News | January 9, 2012
This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue
~
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