The New York Police Department has no intention of scrapping a policy of trying to recruit Muslim arrestees and arrestees from Muslim countries as informants, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton told the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
"Not at all, this is an essential element of policing. I created this policy back in 1994, in New York City last time I was commissioner where very person arrested was interviewed by detectives about not necessarily the crime they committed but do they have information about other crimes and is there an ability to develop these people into confidential informants," Bratton said, when asked if there was any intention to suspend or scale back the program in the wake of a New York Times article this week detailing the extent of the "Citywide Debriefing Team".
The article was based in part on the content of two dozen reports the Times said were generated by the team in early 2009. Citing police officials, the Times said that just in the first quarter of 2014 the team has conducted 220 such interviews. The article says that Citywide Debriefing Team "sought to recruit Muslims regardless of what they know" and that arrestees were not asked about the charges they were arrested for, rather "about where they went to mosque and what their prayer habits were."
Following the report, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the Department of Justice to investigate the policy, saying it could potentially be unconstitutional.
Sitting with Bratton, John Miller, deputy commissioner in charge of the NYPD's Intelligence Division, said "we have to get back to the planet Earth for a minute…we can't have this conversation in some sort of vacuum", adding that the questioning is done because "we live in a certain reality" where men from Muslim countries of origin are targets of recruitment by extremists and can be sources of intelligence for the NYPD.
He said that from a police standpoint "if you don’t talk to people you don’t get good intelligence" and that the NYPD only knows the men's country of origin not their religion, saying "we don’t know who's a Muslim. There's no box on the arrest form that says what your religion is."
When asked if they understood the controversy stirred by the program, Miller said "I understand that the controversy is driven by how the program is characterized. I don’t think that if you look at it based on what it really is you can have much argument on it. I think the basic tenant of policing is that when you take people into custody you try to get information from them, this is how we take guns, this is how we seize narcotics this is how we solve murders every single day. In the area of counter-terrorism this is how you are going to gain insight and visibility where you would otherwise have very little."
He added that while the article focused on arrestees from Muslim countries, the NYPD also does such questioning for arrestees from other countries and places of interest that are not connected to the War on Terror or known to be hotbeds of Islamic extremism, in order to gain intelligence for possible investigations.
In April the NYPD abandoned a confidential program called the "Demographics Unit" that spied on Muslims, sending detectives into Muslim communities to gather intelligence and build personal files on Muslims. The program drew criticism from civil rights groups and Muslims.
Bratton and Miller are in Israel to attend the first ever National Conference on Personal Security held in Jerusalem, where Bratton spoke on Tuesday. He said that while in Israel he has also met with his counterpart from the Israel Police, Commissioner Yochanan Danino, as well as the head of the Shin Bet General Security Service Yoram Cohen.