NEW YORK — The grainy photographs could have come from any undercover police file: a man in jeans talking on his cellphone; another in a windbreaker walking past people at a coffee shop; a car parked outside a grocery store.
But the surveillance was not part of any criminal case. The photos were snapped as part of a secret New York Police Department intelligence program that focused on people and businesses based on their ethnicity.
Police documents obtained by The Associated Press show how the city’s rich heritage as a place where immigrants can blend in and build their lives now clashes with today’s New York, where police see blending in as one of the first priorities for would-be terrorists. The documents describe in extraordinary detail an NYPD program to build a database of daily life, cataloging where people ate, worked and prayed. It started with one group, Moroccans, but the documents show police intended to build intelligence files on other ethnicities. U.S. citizens were among those subjected to surveillance.
Undercover officers snapped photos of restaurants frequented by Moroccans and documented where Moroccans bought groceries, which hotels they visited and where they prayed.
“A lot of these locations were innocent,” said an official involved in the effort, who, like many others interviewed by AP, spoke only on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive police operations. “They just happened to be in the community.”
It was called the Moroccan Initiative, and the documents undercut the NYPD’s claim that its officers followed leads only when investigating terrorism. The goal, officials said, was a database so complete that if police ever received a tip about a Moroccan terrorist, officers looking for him would have the entire community at their fingertips.
AP previously revealed the secret operations of the NYPD intelligence division as it mapped the Muslim community in and around New York. The Moroccan Initiative was one of the division’s projects.
Such programs began with help from the CIA under President George W. Bush and have continued with at least the tacit support of President Barack Obama, whose administration repeatedly has sidestepped questions about them. It is unclear whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw the programs. He has refused to comment directly about them.
In response to AP’s earlier stories, the CIA’s inspector general is investigating whether its unusually close relationship with the NYPD was unlawful.
