Sunday, February 01, 2009

Bypassing Bureaucratic Rules--NYPD

The Post's Book World carries a review of a book on the NY Police Department. In an example of entrepreneurship (yes, bureaucrats can be entrepreneurs just as capitalists can), it's set up a counter-intelligence shop:
Freed from the bureaucratic restraints of Washington, Cohen [ex-CIA man heading the shop] set about building his 600-person unit with astonishing speed and efficiency, infuriating former federal colleagues along the way. In no time, he had twice as many fluent Arabic speakers on his staff as in the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation. His agents speak some 50 languages and dialects in all, which matches the reported linguistic capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The book is: SECURING THE CITY Inside America's Best Counterterror Force -- the NYPD By Christopher Dickey.

But there's also this:
"Dickey might have dug a little deeper in addressing the persistent but vague allegations in Washington that the NYPD counterterrorism unit cuts legal corners and that some of its methods are unconstitutional. "They do stuff that would get us arrested," says one three-letter guy."

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