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| How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right | |
| 2011-09-04 | |
By the AP's lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture -- just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple's ethnic goulash -- Kelly has kept the world's No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts -- and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources. The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the "civil-rights community"). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a "community service" exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," Obama's recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as "terrorism" -- a term that, as the Blind Sheikh inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Mohammedans, "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them"). Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates -- just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly's experience indicates -- that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears -- meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Mohammedans. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Mohammedans who do not want sharia enclaves, Mohammedans who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known. Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton -- a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as "the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century." In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols. This is not martial law, and it is not "domestic spying." Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity -- people are not targeted just because they are Mohammedans. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them. | |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #3 oooh, the 12C is a great tool. bought one way back when. both my sons have used it in the last year. |
| Posted by: abu do you love 2011-09-04 18:47 |
| #2 If my HP-12C doesn't fail me, this being the 10th anniversary means the 15th should be two months before the 2016 election. That should be interesting. |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2011-09-04 18:12 |
| #1 culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. That's going to be a sticking point for CAIR, et al. Of course, they'll find another way to spin that statement - "Investigation must be sensitive to all cultures" - even those that prohibit speaking to investigators without your guardian male present. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2011-09-04 15:29 |