Coming to Your Town: the NYPD
Bureaucracies love to overstep their bounds. They always want more jurisdiction. The more jurisdiction they have, the more employees they can hire. The more employees on the payroll, the easier it is to get a promotion for managers. They have more to manage.
This has been a well-known law of bureaucracy ever since the publication in The Economist in 1955 of Parkinson’s Law.
The New York City Police has decided to run spying operations out of state. It is after terrorists. But you never know where terrorists may live. Maybe in New Jersey. So, the NYPD set up a surveillance center in an apartment in New Brunswick, not far from Rutgers University.
Then, true to form, the NYPD forgot about it. (To understand how this can happen, view the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
The local apartment house had a five-year inspection program. In notifying all tenants of the visit, it posted a notice on the door of an apartment. No response. Inside, the building inspector found computers, two beds, one suit, and NYPD radios.
It looked like a terrorist cell to him! So, he contacted local police. That was in 2009.
For three years, the NYPD tried to keep anyone from getting access to the computer file of that call.
It turns out that the NYPD has been setting up these surveillance operations for a decade.
The CIA has been using the NYPD to do its work for it. Of course, the CIA is not allowed to do this inside the USA. But what’s that to the CIA?
The Associated Press reported a year ago on this spy room, but it did not have a copy of the call. The New Brunswick police have finally released it. It took a legal challenge by the AP to pry it away from the local police, which was cooperating with the NYPD.
The call had resulted in the NBPD and the FBI sending agents to the apartment. They figured it was a terrorist operation.
The NYPD had not bothered to alert the two agencies to its out-of-state operation.
In February, NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, Andrew Schaffer, told reporters that detectives can operate outside New York because they aren’t conducting official police duties.“They’re not acting as police officers in other jurisdictions,” Schaffer said.
In trying to keep the 911 tape under wraps, however, the NYPD made no mention of the fact that its officers were not acting as police. In fact, Lt. Cmdr. William McGroarty and Assistant Chief Thomas Galati argued that releasing the recording would jeopardize investigations and endanger the people and buildings.
The apartment had been rented by an NYPD officer who used a fake name.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the police department’s right to go anywhere in the country in search of terrorists without telling local police.
To understand what is going on, watch this.
For more information, click here.
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Published on July 30, 2012. The original is here.