The NYPD Vindicated — Again

Once again, NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure set out to discredit the city’s police force and provide ammunition to its critics — and once again, he failed.

Yes, Eure’s latest report points to NYPD missed deadlines and insufficient paperwork to justify continued surveillance of terror suspects. But on the far bigger issue, Eure had to re

fute claims — made most dramatically in an inflammatory Associated Press series — that a key NYPD counter-terror program has been a wholesale civil-rights violation.

Eure investigated five years’ worth of NYPD information-gathering in communities with large immigrant populations from terror-producing countries. He not only found no “improper motives,” but concluded that the NYPD was always “able to articulate a valid basis for commencing investigations.”

In other words, as Deputy Commissioner John Miller said, Eure found that “we were looking at the right people for the right reasons within the bounds” of court-ordered guidelines.

Which, after all, is what really counts — that the NYPD is keeping New Yorkers safe without crossing any legal boundaries.

Eure did fault the department for those missed deadlines and paperwork problems and bent over backward to stress that these technical violations “cannot be dismissed or minimized.”

In fact, they can — since they’re easily remedied, and already have been. What’s key here — even if Eure won’t admit it — is that the NYPD never crossed over the line of legal procedure.

The one thing all Eure’s reports have in common is that they tar the NYPD with a broad brush — even as his own evidence points to the opposite conclusion.