Just what is the beef that the Associated Press has with the New York Police Department? With the latest dispatch its series, it starts to look like the complaint has less to do with the NYPD encroaching on the rights of Muslims than with New York’s Finest encroaching on the turf of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is a feud that is as old as J. Edgar Hoover, and if past is prologue, it will be with us as long as there is a New York City. The FBI doesn’t like to be scooped by home-town police departments.

“The relationship between the FBI and the NYPD — particularly the NYPD Intelligence Division — is among the most studied collaborations in all law enforcement,” the AP says in its latest bulletin. “Not trivial” is how it characterizes the rift. “At its core, it is based on fundamental disagreements between the nation’s largest police force and the nation’s premier counterterrorism agency. As the NYPD has transformed itself into one of the nation’s most aggressive intelligence agencies and has spied on Muslims in ways that would be prohibited for the FBI, the rift has widened.”

So what is prohibited for the FBI? A spokesman for the NYPD points out the Department of Justice guidance, which, in a section dealing with “Community Race and Ethnicity as a Factor,” includes a heading called ”Collecting and analyzing demographics.” Says it:

“The DOJ guidance and FBI policy permit the FBI to identify locations of concentrated ethnic communities in the Filed Office’s domain, if these locations will reasonably aid the analysis of potential threats and vulnerabilities, and, overall, assist domain awareness for the purpose of performing intelligence analysis. If, for example, intelligence reporting reveals that members of certain terrorist organizations live and operate primarily within a certain concentrated community of the same ethnicity, the location of that community is clearly valuable-and properly collectible-data. Similarly, the locations of ethnic oriented businesses and other facilities may be collected if their locations will reasonably contribute to an awareness of threats and vulnerabilities, and intelligence collection opportunities. Also, members of some communities may be potential victims of civil rights crimes and, for this reason, community location may aid enforcement of civil right laws. Information about such communities should not be collected, however, unless the communities are sufficiently concentrated and established so as to provide a reasonable potential for intelligence collection that would support FBI mission programs (e.g., where identified terrorist subjects from certain countries may relocate to blend in and avoid detection).”

That is from the 2008 iteration of the guidance, which, presumably, could be amended in an upcoming edition. Reduced to plain English, though, what that says is that the FBI would be every bit as much within the law as the NYPD if it wanted to compete with Commissioner Kelly and the NYPD. There’s no need to go complaining to the Associated Press. It’s true that the NYPD has had an extraordinary run of scoops under Commissioner Kelly. But there’s no reason in the law that the FBI can’t compete. It’s a brilliant agency. There’s no need, either, for all the insinuation by the AP and its sources that somehow the NYPD is inadequately respectful of the Muslim community. The Muslim community, after all, has the same interests in a successful guard against terrorism as any other community in this city.

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This editorial was updated to note a possible updating of the 2008 guidance.