Federal Officials Say NYPD Foreign Meddling is Wasteful and Monstrous

The New York Police
Department’s (NYPD)
12-year-old
International Liaison Program, which posts detectives in
foreign cities for counterterrorism work, is a massive waste of
money, according to federal officials.

Recently-retired Chief of Police Raymond Kelly began the program
after 9/11. Also recently-retired David Cohen, formerly of the CIA,
acted as his deputy commissioner of intelligence. Kelly and Cohen,
believing they
couldn’t rely on federal agencies for information, established an
arm of the department that sends personnel to at least 11
international locations, including Canada, Israel, and India, with
the hope that they can trace terrorist threats before they reach
New York.

The problem is, the NYPD has no jurisdiction in these places. As
The American Conservative has previously
addressed, “None of the NYPD liaison officers has any legal
standing for dealing with the local authorities. The detectives
travel on tourist passports, stay in hotels, and do not report to
the U.S. ambassador, nor to the CIA Chief of Station.”

DNAinfo, which covers New York City affairs, spoke to unnamed
federal officials. DNAinfo suggests
that the expensive ($120,000 salaries) and less-than-official
presence of the city police have caused more harm than good:

NYPD detectives are ineffective, often angering and confusing
the foreign law enforcement officials they are trying to work with,
and are usually relegated to the sidelines because they lack
national security clearance.

For example, when bombs exploded at resorts in Bali in 2005,
killing 20 and injuring hundreds, the Indonesian National Police
“were astonished and irritated that the NYPD showed up,” a federal
source explained.

[..]

In the end, a source said, there was “absolutely no nexus”
between the bombing and New York. The attack was the work of the
Indonesia-based organization Jemaah Islamiyah. And any information
obtained by the feds in Bali was transmitted to the Los Angeles and
New York FBI offices and to the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task
Force, which has roughly 120 NYPD detectives along with top police
brass.

Another source said that NYPD detectives showed up at the
funerals of victims of the Madrid rail bombings in 2004, angering
local officials and victims’ families.

“Ray Kelly and David Cohen created a monster,” the source said.
“The NYPD Intelligence Division has absolutely no place in overseas
counter-terrorism — lack of security clearances and diplomatic
immunity, confusion for host country law enforcement and security
services, conflicts with U.S. agencies such as the CIA, FBI, DEA,
U.S. Embassy RSO, etc.” 

CBS New York
lauds the fact that Kelly’s “12-year tenure ends Wednesday
without a major successful terror attack on his watch.” The new
NYPD commissioner, William Bratton,
considers the department to have the “foremost counterterrorism
capability in the world.”

Tim Cushing of Techdirt takes a more skeptical view of the
police force. He
jabs that the NYPD’s International Liaison “casually stomp[s]
on civil liberties and civilian sensibilities in order to chalk up
another zero in the ‘plots prevented’ column.”