The NYPD Sent Two Officers To The Kenyan Mall Shooting And Their Findings Are Directly Contradicted By The FBI's Report

Failures

from the TEAM-NYPD:-WORLD-POLICE dept

Just recently, we covered the NYPD’s insistence on playing police force to the world by sending officers to foreign nations to impede investigations and damage international relations. Not only were these officers’ presence unwelcome, but they were in no position to gather local intel as they lacked the security clearance needed to work directly with local law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The biggest motivator of the NYPD’s Ugly American program was its feeling that the FBI wasn’t sharing enough intel with it. Or doing it fast enough. Or competently enough. So, to beat the FBI at its own investigative game, Police Chief Ray Kelly sent NYPD officers to various locations around the world to gather better, faster intel for the city’s anti-terrorist division. As Kelly himself noted as he exited office, the FBI just “can’t be trusted” to protect New York from terrorist attacks. That’s why local police officers have been stationed overseas for more than a decade at this point.

Inside officials, however, declared the program to be a waste of money that generated no useful intelligence, hardly an equitable exchange for arriving unbidden at crime scenes and annoying local agencies.

The flow of useless intelligence is still ongoing. As The Guardian reports, an FBI official’s statement on the Kenyan Mall attack directly contradicts an earlier report compiled by officers sent by the NYPD.

Dennis Brady, the FBI legal attache in Nairobi, said in an interview posted Friday on the bureau’s website: “We believe, as do the Kenyan authorities, that the four gunmen inside the mall were killed.”

“Our ERT [Evidence Response Team] made significant finds, and there is no evidence that any of the attackers escaped from the area where they made their last stand,” he said. A very secure crime scene perimeter made an escape unlikely, Brady added.

“Additionally, had the attackers escaped, it would have been publicly celebrated and exploited for propaganda purposes by al-Shabaab. That hasn’t happened.”

This statement diverges greatly from the report compiled by two NYPD officers sent unbidden to Kenya while the siege was still underway. According to that report, the four attackers most likely escaped after turning away cameras recording their ad hoc HQ and making their way through the “loose perimeter” set up by the Kenyan military.

The State Dept. wasted very little time distancing itself from this report, stating the NYPD’s report “did not reflect the US government position.”

The FBI, which beat the NYPD to the scene (arriving on day one), maintains that the perimeter was “secure.” The NYPD claims the opposite. So, who’s right? Well, if you consider the sources and what they respectively have to lose if they’re wrong, it would appear that the FBI’s conclusions are more apt to be accurate. After all, it does have an international presence and the clearances needed to work with local intelligence officials. The NYPD has none of these advantages and, as was noted earlier, a tendency to offend local agencies with their very existence. It’s kind of hard to compile useful intel if the locals won’t talk to you.

Worse, though, is the fact that the NYPD’s overseas deployments tend to show up uninvited, giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies one more thing to worry about when securing a scene or, in this case, hunting down four terrorists in a crowded mall. Even if the NYPD’s investigators are more skilled than the FBI’s, the simple fact that they’re uninvited renders them mostly useless. People expect the FBI — a federal agency — to appear at occurrences like these. What they don’t expect to run into is an officer from a police department halfway around the world. The NYPD’s foreign placements aspire to out-FBI the FBI, but undercut their own goal simply by existing.

Filed Under: fbi, kenya, mall, nypd