Muslims and the Police New York City ignores the lessons of its antiterror success.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/muslims-and-the-police-1452297874
Terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have shown the danger of homegrown Islamist radicals. Naturally, then, progressives want to shame and punish the police who first warned about the threat.
That’s the essence of the settlement disclosed this week between New York City and the American Civil Liberties Union over the police department’s Muslim intelligence program. The deal confirms that the cops have been right all along in saying they did nothing wrong. But it nonetheless embarrasses the cops with a new civilian monitor and castigates them for being right about radicalization.
The settlement proposes changes to the Handschu Guidelines on surveillance that police have followed since they were laid out in a 1986 settlement of a federal lawsuit. In 2003 a judge modified the guidelines to give police the greater investigative freedom to meet the threat from Islamist terrorism.
As part of this effort, the police set out to identify places in New York where a terrorist might turn for shelter, a job, a meal, access to an Internet cafe and so on. Such intelligence might have come in handy, for example, if the Tsarnaev brothers had succeeded in their plan to make New York their next target after they exploded their pressure-cooker bombs at the 2013 Boston marathon.
Enter the Associated Press, which portrayed these tactics as illegal, followed by new Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned by portraying police as the city’s enemy. Mr. de Blasio is close to the activists who sued and—unlike predecessor Mike Bloomberg—seems incapable of standing up for cops. Mr. de Blasio’s police commissioner, Bill Bratton, has already killed the Muslim mapping program.
The settlement also includes two telling provisions. First, another independent monitor will be imposed to second-guess police decisions. This will surely have an inhibiting effect on antiterror practices. Second, the department will take down from its website a 2007 report called “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.”
Together these amount to a huge victory for political correctness. As an ACLU spokesman crowed, “this agreement with the country’s largest police force sends a forceful message that bias-based policing is unlawful, harmful, and unnecessary.”
In other words, the settlement reinforces false claims that a bigoted New York police force was engaged in wholesale spying on Muslims. This is the same police force that under Commissioner Ray Kelly drove the murder rate to record lows and saved countless lives by helping to break up multiple terrorist plots after 9/11. Preventing attacks helps law-abiding Muslims, who could become scapegoats if there are more jihadist attacks.
As for the now-censored 2007 report on radicalization: The authors deserve an award for prescience. This week a 30-year old man confessed he ambushed and shot a Philadelphia police officer in the name of Islamic State. The alleged gunman, Edward Archer, is from a Philly suburb, not Syria. Meanwhile, authorities this week arrested an Iraqi refugee in Sacramento and another in Texas on terror-related charges. Far from removing the 2007 report, the city should update it with what we’ve learned about Islamic State’s radicalization tactics.
Mr. Bratton and his intelligence chief, John Miller, insist they retain the tools they need to prevent terrorism. We hope so, because otherwise this settlement will come back to haunt them and the American people.
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