NYPD to Albanians: we're watching you

A secret New York Police Department dossier obtained and published by the Associated Press reveals that undercover officers spied on Albanian-owned businesses throughout the Bronx and New York City in 2006, including in the 50th Precinct and the surrounding area.

Plainclothes officers in the NYPD’s secretive Demographics Unit photographed businesses and ate at and eavesdropped in restaurants, markets, cafes and barbershops in order to determine where Albanian extremists might be hanging out. No specific threat was reported, but the NYPD’s document listed dozens of Bronx businesses as locations of concern.

The Albanian document is among several that are the focus of a series of AP articles about the NYPD’s intelligence operations. 

A separate document obtained by the AP breaks down the Demographic Unit’s capabilities and mission. In 2007, the unit consisted of two sergeants, 10 detectives and four police officers, with language capabilities in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. Among their stated goals: to “identify and map ethnic residential concentrations in the Tri-State area.”

The documents detail 28 ethnicities the unit looked into, including Albanian and American Black Muslim.

According to the Albanian report, the NYPD used I-94 federal immigration forms to find Albanian-owned locations to spy on, ultimately checking out 19 locations within the 50th Precinct. Although the NYPD marked each location on a map within the document, none of the Five-O businesses were deemed to be locations of concern and therefore were not named in the report. The owners of two mapped locations identified by The Riverdale Press declined to comment on the report, saying they feared police taking a renewed interest in them.

But in Norwood and near Belmont’s Arthur Avenue, two neighborhoods specifically cited as Albanian hot spots, the owners of businesses identified said the NYPD got a lot of information wrong.