The New York City Police Foundation was created in the 1970s, when the NYPD was seen as too corrupt to handle its own donations. In recent years, the foundation has been used as a kind of PR slush fund—paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Commissioner Bratton's consultants in the early '90s, Ray Kelly's $30,000 tab at the Harvard Club in the mid aughts. Now we learn that the United Arab Emirates donated $1 million to the foundation, and it appears that most of it went to pay for NYPD Intelligence officers stationed in London, Tel Aviv, and Abu Dhabi.
The Intercept obtained financial documents from the foundation which are secreted from the public showing that the UAE's $1 million donation came in 2012. That same year, the foundation transferred an identical amount to the Intelligence Division's International Liaison Program, which the foundation says “enables the NYPD to station detectives throughout the world to work with local law enforcement on terrorism related incidents."
It costs the department roughly $75,000/year per officer to keep them stationed overseas (not a single actionable lead has been produced from the NYPD Intelligence Division).
Little is known about what these overseas officers actually do. A breathless Daily News report from 2005 notes that after several hotels were suicide-bombed in Amman, Jordan, a detective stationed there briefed the NYPD and "20 minutes after the first briefing, the city had 75 police cars and 150 officers massing at the Jacob Javits Center."
Last July, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism John Miller told reporters that the officers monitor a "threat stream."
"We had a conversation with our detective assigned in Tel Aviv, and there have been 70 rockets fired from Gaza, so that's a situation that continues to change and remain dynamic," Miller said.
The foundation denied to the Intercept that the UAE's money went to the officers assigned overseas, and instead claim that the donation “was directed to upgrade NYPD equipment and facilities used to aid in criminal investigations throughout New York City," but provided no details on those investigations.
“Any foreign government’s ‘assistance’ would invariably come with conditions and expectations, whether they are explicit or not," a former FBI agent and member of the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security project told the outlet.
Another member of the Brennan Center added, “When we’re talking about large sums of money from a foreign government potentially being used to fund essential police functions, it raises serious operational and legal questions."
Towards the end of his tenure as NYPD Commissioner, Ray Kelly traveled to Abu Dhabi to sign an information-exchange agreement. A department spokesman at the time said that "the NYPD has advised Abu Dhabi's Critical Infrastructure & Coastal Protection Authority (CICPA) about how to protect its assets."
There are other things we have in common with our overseas allies in the War On Terror: According to Amnesty International, political prisoners in the UAE are "commonly held incommunicado in undisclosed locations" and tortured.
Methods have included sleep deprivation, suspension by the wrists or ankles followed by severe beatings to the soles of the feet and even the use of electric shocks to various parts of the body.
Foreign-born migrant workers in the UAE are also "tragically underpaid and ill-treated," with many of them living in squalid labor camps, working to pay off massive debts they incurred just to get to Abu Dhabi.
Commissioner Bratton also appears to have gotten his "brain trust" back on the foundation's dime: George Kelling and John Linder, who both helped burnish Bratton's Broken Windows policing theory and his crime-fighting bona fides, are back working at NYPD headquarters. Fun fact: Kelling once compared Bratton to Plato.
