RadicalizationNYPD’s radicalization report criticized
In a Sunday morning interview on 970 AM The Answer, New York Police Department(NYPD) deputy commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller criticized a 7-year old report on Islamic radicalization in New York City. The report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” published by the NYPD Intelligence Division under former police commissioner Ray Kelly, came under fire after a series of articlesdetailed some of the division’s counterterrorism operations, including the monitoring of prominent Muslims and Muslim communities in New York City. Those articles contributed to the closure of the unit, which conducted the NYPD’s surveillance operations on New York’s Muslim communities.
In a Sunday morning interview on 970 AM The Answer, New York Police Department (NYPD) deputy commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller criticized a 7-year old report on Islamic radicalization in New York City. The report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, published by the NYPD Intelligence Division under former police commissioner Ray Kelly, came under fire after a series of articles detailed some of the division’s counterterrorism operations, including the monitoring of prominent Muslims and Muslim communities in New York City.
Those articles, written by Associated Press writers Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, contributed to the closure of the unit, which conducted the NYPD’s surveillance operations on New York’s Muslim communities. The unit and its operations are now the subject of a lawsuit against the City of New York filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility project. The plaintiffs include three religious and community leaders, two mosques, and one charitable organization, all of which have been monitored under the NYPD’s surveillance program.
The report on radicalization remains on the NYPD’s Web site, but many counterterrorism officials have called for its removal. “It’s been downloaded, I think, a total of thirty times since it’s been up there,” Miller said. “The process of radicalization has changed so dramatically in so many different ways over a period of seven years,” and it therefore might not be optimal “to rely on a document that hasn’t been updated in all that time.”
Two months after the report was published, former CIA official Larry Sanchez, who was sent to work with the NYPD after the 9/11 attacks, told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and GovernmentalAffairs, “Rather than just protecting New York City citizens from terrorists … the New York Police Department believes part of its mission is to protect New York City citizens from turning into terrorists.”
Capital New York reports that the report on radicalization was a key piece of Kelly’s anti-terrorism efforts, which were led by David Cohen, then-head of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. According to the book Enemies Within, written by Apuzzo and Goldman, the FBI “focused on spotting terrorists, and then putting agents on them to make cases.” Apuzzo and Goldman add:
Cohen charted a new course… one that preemptively investigated neighborhoods, ethnic groups, organizations, mosques, and business. The NYPD named it ‘zone defense,’ after the sports strategy in which a player guards a portion of the field rather than a specific man. To pull it off, the NYPD wanted to identify terrorists early. Not just before they launched an attack… (but) before they picked targets, before they bought weapons, and ideally, before a toxic ideology took root. Cohen wanted to know whether you were going to be a terrorist before you knew yourself.
