FBI, NYC Showing Signs of Truce after Anti-Terror Turf Fight

It’s been six years since New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly asked that the city have its own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning the city – ending its reliance on the FBI for classified data. Why did Kelly just get his answer now?

In an article in The Washington Post, Dafna Linzer says the FBI has finally, six years after Kelly’s request in the spring of 2002, decided to approve a classified-information vault at New York police headquarters.

“No other police department in the United States has responded to the threats of terrorism in quite the same way as the New York Police Department — or clashed as sharply with the nation’s primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI,” Linzer says.

However, Linzer points out that about 1,000 NYC officers are assigned full time to operations drawing on traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The FBI, “protective of turf and disdainful of local initiative, froze Kelly’s department out of two New York-related terrorism investigations, officials say. When more than 100 top police detectives joined the FBI’s joint terrorism task force, they were not initially permitted to read the bureau’s case files,” Linzer adds.

“People have information, and they want to control information,” Kelly told Linzer in an interview. “Controlling information is power, and they don’t want to let it go — it is as fundamental as that.”