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PRECINCT

City Police Take on Intelligence Roles Once Reserved for Feds

In defending the public against terrorists, local police forces are assuming an increasingly important role on the national and world scene, doing work that used to be the purview of the FBI and CIA.

Top among them is the New York City Police Department (NYPD). Since the 9/11 attacks six years ago, the NYPD has upset other cities and states by running operations as far away as Virginia and Mississippi, and has raised eyebrows with the expansion of a virtual foreign intelligence arm present in more than a dozen countries.

“We’d love to sit back and let the federal government do it, but I don’t think we can,” NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly told the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in 2004. “We need this information right away. We can’t wait months or years before some federal agency might give it to us.”

The Manhattan Institute is a private foundation. Its Center for Tactical Counterterrorism operates as an adjunct think tank for the NYPD.

Ray Kelly, who led the city’s police force from 1992 to 1994, left the private security business to join the fight against the terrorists after watching from his home as the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11.

He has tapped the private sector for help, and created an analytical unit that rivals the finest teams at the FBI and CIA.

In August, Kelly released an NYPD intelligence report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, that describes a phenomenon potentially worse than al Qaeda: domestic extremists who operate under the radar right here at home.

NYPD Senior Intelligence Analysts Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt studied terrorist plots and attacks around the world and found, according to Kelly, that many of the conspiracies were “conceptualized and planned by local residents/citizens who sought to attack their country of residence. The majority of these individuals began as ‘unremarkable’—they had ‘unremarkable’ jobs, had lived ‘unremarkable’ lives and had little, if any criminal history.”

The police tapped think-tank scholars like Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation to review the report and contribute information and ideas. The result is a strong public document designed to show law enforcement and intelligence services how individuals become radicalized.

“Understanding this trend and the radicalization process in the West that drives ‘unremarkable’ people to become terrorists is vital for developing effective counterstrategies,” Kelly writes in the introduction. “The NYPD places a priority on understanding what drives and defines the radicalization process.”

Unlike unclassified FBI reports that appear to be written so as to give offense, the NYPD report openly states that the Salafi (Wahhabi) sect of Islam is the main ideological recruitment base for extremists in the United States. It points to “radicalization incubators” that include mosques and “cafes, cab driver hangouts, flophouses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah (water pipe) bars, butcher shops and bookstores.” The Internet, according to the report, “is a virtual incubator of its own.”

“NYPD has produced an unclassified product that’s every bit as good if not better than the classified analysis coming out of the CIA,” says Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The New York police understand the extremist mind-set better than most people in the U.S. intelligence community do,” Romerstein tells Serviam. “This report is an excellent piece of work and a valuable tool for law enforcement.”

The report quotes Muslim leaders who have become alarmed at the trend of what is described as an extremist Salafi/Wahhabi “subculture.” New York imam Shamsi Ali says, “There are local preachers who distort our faith and foment hatred of America. There are people who, rather than encouraging young people to build better lives for themselves, irresponsibly egg them on toward an angry and narrow view of the future. I see this danger every day.”

The 90-page report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, is available for download from the NYPD Web site at www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/NYPD_Report-Radicalization_in_the_West.pdf. 

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From the September/October 2007 issue of Serviam.