Next Time They Parade Around Some Dumbshit Who Says He’s Angry At “Obama” Or “Jews” Or Whatever, Remember That This Is The Same Police Force That Fills Quotas By Picking Off People Who Rest Their Feet On Subway Seats

The biggest misconception in the issue of whether it’s OK to have the NYPD act like the CIA is that they’ve prevented actual terrorist attacks. Take Mike Lupica’s fawning column today, for example:

Let Kelly continue to use NYPD surveillance of conversations inside an Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge, one attached to a mosque, that helps New York cops keep a Herald Square subway station from being blown sky high.

The names you want to know about on that one, guys who certainly were a threat to public safety, were Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay, eventually arrested and tried and convicted in federal court. Siraj, who worked in that bookstore, ended up getting 30 years. And there is the “spying” that last year resulted in the arrests of Ahmed Ferhani and Mohammed Mamdouh and a plan from radical Islam to bomb a Manhattan synagogue.

This is just the start of a much longer list of how the countersurveillance blueprint Kelly has given his city and all big cities in a Sept. 11 world has worked.

The problem is that both the Herald Square and the 2011 synagogue bombing “plots” were actually NYPD sting operations. And federal prosecutors even declined to pursue the synagogue “plot” case.

(And then there are the times when the NYPD is actually in the way of legitimate counter-terrorism efforts, like in the Najibullah Zazi case.)

Supporters of the NYPD find it easy to twist the details of alleged plots, but there’s a huge difference between a plot that is actually a terrorist plot and some cheap sting operation where informants give some dopey kids the idea in the first place. This kind of cheerleading is dangerous and relies on the fact that no one really pays attention when they hear a “terrorist” has been caught, because everyone hates terrorists, right?

Terrorism won’t be fixed by a NYPD sting — limit stings to stuff like teens stealing iPods — because those kids really are pieces of shit.