On the eve of the 10^th anniversary of September 11, the Associated Press is issuing an expose suggesting that the New York Police Department has been overly aggressive in pursuing our enemies in the current war. The gist of the story seems to be that that the NYPD has entered a partnership with the Central Intelligence Agency that has “blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.” By our lights the right reaction to the story is to stand the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, up in a prominent position and drape him with the highest medals our city and our nation can bestow.

It is hard to think of many — if any — here in the city or nationally who have turned in a more heroic performance than Mr. Kelly and the department he leads. No doubt there are a lot of heroes in the war that broke out a decade ago. But not many, if any, have been more steadfast, imaginative, daring, and — though attacks are always possible — effective than Commissioner Kelly and the NYPD. Except in a few cases that get to court — like the plot to bomb the subway at Herald Square — one can do little but speculate at what attacks on the city have been stymied by the NYPD. It is still hard to read the Associated Press’s account without wanting to send Mr. Kelly congratulations.

What worries the AP seems to be that the police department has dispatched officers into what the wire calls minority neighborhoods to monitor “daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs” and also used informants in mosques, “even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing” and “scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.” Reports the AP: “Many of the operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit after the September 2001 terror attacks.”

This strikes us as thin gruel. The fact is that all communities in the city — Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and others — share an interest in the success of the NYPD. The compartmentalization of intelligence, meaning the lack of sharing and coordination between America’s foreign intelligence services and domestic law enforcement agencies, was one of the flaws in America’s defense set up that left us more vulnerable than we should have been to the attacks of a decade ago. Since then various commissions and studies have exposed this flaw and policy has been directed at repairing it. The collaboration between the CIA and the NYPD is best seen as a model program.

This is widely and long recognized in the city. City Journal magazine concluded in 2007 that New York sets the “gold standard for counterterrorism.” The Daily News had a terrific editorial yesterday praising the police, and Mayor Bloomberg is defending the NYPD, saying, according to the AP, that the department’s “first job is prevention” and that it has done “a very good job of that.” He went on to say that the law is clear about what is required of intelligence agencies — a reference to the fact that the CIA itself is not permitted to spy on Americans at home — and that the NYPD has followed the law. One can just add that no interpretation of the law required New York City to go back to sleep after September 11, 2001, and wait to be attacked again.

Our own view is that the achievements of the NYPD are a signal success of Mr. Bloomberg’s long mayoralty. But not even Commissioner Kelly is immortal. There is going to come a day when he will retire. It is a day that most New Yorkers would like to delay as long as possible. Whenever it comes they will look back on the Kelly years as a span in which the rebirth of the city was enabled in large part by the officers he led. One of the things to start thinking about on the 10^th anniversary of September 11 is making the advances the NYPD has made in intelligence and preventive policing against international terror a permanent part of the department’s work.