Finally, after weeks of innuendo, half-truths and distortions that have depicted the NYPD as spying on the city’s Muslim communities, an elected official has spoken the truth.
There’s no there there, said Sen. Chuck Schumer of reports that the department’s Intelligence Division invasively monitored New Yorkers based on their religious beliefs.
Excavated endlessly by The Associated Press in a series built on the false premise that to gather preventive information is to violate rights, the division’s work has amounted, for the most part, to checking out facts that are in the public record.
For example, where in the city particular nationalities are clustered, according to the Census.
For example, the locations and descriptions of community institutions like mosques, schools and social gathering places.
For example, what’s written on publicly accessible websites of Muslim student associations.
Schumer perceptively divined that which should have been obvious to all of the city’s elected leaders: Checking out information in the public domain tramples on no one’s rights or privacy.
More important, the NYPD needs to have the facts on hand in order to know where to go and to whom to speak in the event that the CIA passes on a tip that a suspected terrorist from, say, Pakistan is somewhere in the city.
Referring to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Schumer said: “I don’t think he has a bigoted bone in his body.”
He added: “There is nothing wrong with the NYPD collecting and assessing publicly available information from New York, New Jersey, the other 48 states or around the world in the effort to prevent another terror attack like 9/11. In fact, it is widely understood that the NYPD’s actions have kept us safer. Looking at public information and following leads is perfectly acceptable as long as any one group, in its entirety, is not targeted based only on its religious or ethnic affiliation.”
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn followed Schumer’s lead — but hedging all the way.
“Unless we know that laws were broken or someone’s civil liberties were violated, I do not think the NYPD should stop the practice,” she said, leaving open a specter of wrongdoing for which there is zero evidence.
Quinn’s expected rivals for the mayoralty, city Controller John Liu, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and former Controller Bill Thompson, were even more qualified in backing the NYPD. They praised the cops in the abstract, while professing concerns about the anti-terrorism effort. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has ducked the issue entirely.
They don’t get what Kelly and New Yorkers understand. There’s nothing abstract about terror, and there’s no way for a mayor to duck the fight.