Bloomberg defends NYPD spying on Muslims

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg served notice Friday that his police department will do everything within its power to root out terrorists in the United States, even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny.

"We just cannot let our guard down again," Bloomberg warned.

The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show following a week of criticism over a secret NYPD effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges upstate as well as in Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Several college administrators and politicians have complained that the intelligence-gathering -- exposed in a series of stories by The Associated Press -- pried too deeply into the lives of innocent people.

With about 1,000 officers dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism, the New York Police Department has one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence operations in the United States. Its methods have stirred debate in legal circles over whether it has crossed the line and violated the civil liberties of Muslims.

In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the NYPD's anti-terrorism efforts, Bloomberg called it "legal," "appropriate" and "constitutional" for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. And he said investigators must pursue "leads and threats wherever they come from," even across state lines.

"It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border," Bloomberg said.

The department has come under fire from university officials and others, including the president of Yale University, after the AP revealed that police agents had monitored Muslim student groups around the Northeast and had sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip with some college students.

More criticism came from public officials in New Jersey after another AP report detailed a secret effort by the NYPD to photograph every mosque in Newark and catalog Muslim businesses.

Critics have said it isn't appropriate for the police to spy on citizens without reason to believe they committed a crime.

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement Friday accusing the NYPD of turning the city into a "surveillance state."