Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Since the police force was first called on to respond to the attacks on 9/11, the NYPD has developed its own form of an in-house intelligence agency, with enhanced capabilities.
Buried inside the New York Police Department headquarters in downtown Manhattan is a sprawling high-tech complex, the nerve center for a Frankenstein surveillance agency forged from beat cops, FBI counterterrorism agents, foreign attachés, and the lingering scent of the CIA. This is the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau, a supercharged counterterrorism and crime-fighting organization that is closer in mandate and temperament to a spy agency than a city police station.
Since the police force was first called on to respond to the attacks on 9/11, the NYPD has developed its own form of an in-house intelligence agency, with enhanced capabilities and intelligence officers stationed at over a dozen locations overseas, collecting information intended to safeguard the city.
The Intelligence Bureau—charged with not only preventing terrorist attacks but also overseeing surveillance-intensive criminal investigations—is not subject to oversight by the City Council, and relies on a single civilian representative to monitor investigations that could trample on city residents’ political rights. In an unnoticed court hearing last November, the civilian watchdog for the bureau alluded to serious concerns about the NYPD’s relationship with the FBI.
The delicate oversight arrangement that monitors the Intelligence Bureau was born through an ongoing legal process more than 50 years in the making, which began when Barbara Handschu and a number of other political activists, including Black Panthers, peace activists, and religious organizations, joined together to sue the NYPD for illegal surveillance, entrapment, and coercion.
The activists won their lawsuit, and in 1985 a Manhattan judge rendered a consent decree forcing the NYPD to confine any investigations with a political valence to the Intelligence Bureau, where a civilian representative would evaluate the merits of these cases alongside senior officials from the police force. In an effort to bolster this representative, a judge reviews their findings to this day.
In the wake of 9/11, fear of another attack paved the way for the NYPD to successfully achieve a rollback of the Handschu oversight requirements. With restored powers and little oversight, the NYPD pursued an illegal mass surveillance campaign of Muslims while recruiting informants, infiltrating mosques, and terrorizing neighborhoods, violating both the New York state and U.S. constitutions.
The revelations of these actions, first documented by the Associated Press, led to a reinstallment of the guidelines for political investigations, and the eventual placement of a New Yorker, currently Patterson Belknap litigator Muhammad Faridi, as the civilian liaison. But with Donald Trump in office, a quiet warning issued by Faridi in the annual Handschu hearing underscores the evolving threat that the NYPD Intelligence Bureau now poses to civil liberties, and the fact that we may be on the precipice of another major leap backwards in the constitutional rights afforded to Empire State residents.
IN ADDITION TO THE QUID PRO QUO between New York Mayor Eric Adams and Donald Trump secured last month, the federal government also has another back door into governing New York City streets: the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). As Faridi described in his November testimony before Judge Lewis J. Liman, who now presides over the Handschu case, “While most Americans probably do not know of the acronym ‘JTTF’ or what it stands for, unfortunately, JTTF is a household term in many Muslim households across America.”
The Joint Terrorism Task Force is a partnership between the FBI, the lead federal agency, and numerous federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies that investigate terrorism cases. Civil liberties and Muslim organizations have repeatedly criticized the JTTF, Faridi pointed out, saying that it “operates with minimal oversight and scant accountability, and has a long history of wrongly targeting activists and communities of color, often associating protest with ‘terrorism,’ without evidence of wrongdoing.”
When Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, ordered surveillance of activists protesting the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, it was the JTTF that was activated to perform this task. When federal agents intercept information about animal rights, pro-Palestine, or environmental activists, it is through a JTTF that they transfer that surveillance to local police, and vice versa.
But information-sharing is not where the JTTF’s power ends. In addition to providing intelligence to the NYPD, the JTTF can also deputize NYPD officers into the oversight of the federal agency, chiefly the FBI, thus freeing them from the already limited Handschu provisions, and investing in them the powers of the federal government.
“It is the NYPD’s position that officers deputized to JTTF follow the United States Attorney General’s guidelines, and are not bound by the Handschu guidelines,” Faridi said. But with Trump loyalist Pam Bondi as attorney general and FBI director Kash Patel, it is all but certain that the Justice Department’s instructions for deputized NYPD officers will stray even further from the protections put in place by the Handschu agreement to safeguard New Yorkers’ civil liberties.
“Following our discussions, the NYPD has agreed to provide training on the Handschu guidelines to officers who are deputized to JTTF so that these officers are aware of the spirit of the guidelines and can apply it in their work where appropriate,” Faridi added. “Whether this will have any impact remains to be seen.”
In 2013, revelations in a CIA inspector general report disclosed that, among other concerns, four CIA officers had been embedded inside the NYPD, one of whom conducted surveillance operations on U.S. soil, while others were given unrestricted access to NYPD police files. David Cohen, a long-serving CIA officer, helped build out the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau and served for over a decade as the department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence.
While Cohen has long since departed, two sources tell The American Prospect that a new assistant chief has taken over at the Intelligence Bureau, someone who previously worked for the FBI on the New York JTTF. The NYPD did not respond to the Prospect’s request for the name of the new chief. However, the former intelligence assistant chief, John Hart, lists on LinkedIn that he is “Retired!”
The federal support of the Intelligence Bureau and other federal-state counterterrorism and surveillance initiatives has been largely ignored by the Trump administration as it sets about destroying the rest of the administrative state. Most of the executive orders directing the dubiously legal large-scale firings of federal employees and cancellation of federal contracts have a national-security exemption. Meanwhile, spying and potential violations of civil liberties are a larger and larger part of what our government actually pays for, and one of the only areas safeguarded from Elon Musk’s scalpel. And it manifests in places like 1 Police Plaza in New York.
Despite the warnings of Faridi and others, Mike German, a former FBI agent and current fellow at the Brennan Center, says that while the NYPD is a police force unique among American cities, structural friction between state and federal law enforcement could create problems for a Trump-aligned Department of Justice eager to insert itself into a city that has consistently voted blue.
“The relationship between the FBI and NYPD has often been competitive if not hostile,” German said. “I believe the leak of NYPD materials around their Muslim mapping program was likely from a disagreement over who was in charge of that activity. And it’s also important to know that the FBI has brought charges against police officials, so that is an underlying friction in any relationship with the police.”
