NYPD expands liaison program to Tucson, Arizona and Bogota

The NYPD will be sending officers to Tucson, Arizona and Bogota, Columbia to help address the migrant crisis and the flow of drugs and guns pouring through the southern US border bound for the Big Apple.

Police Commissioner Edward Caban announced the expansion of the department’s International Liaison Program during his “State of the NYPD” address at Cipriani in Midtown on Wednesday morning.

The program, funded by the nonprofit New York City Police Foundation, currently has 18 officers operating in 14 locations around the globe.

“These posts will help the NYPD address the myriad issues that are coming across our southern border, from guns to drugs to people,” said NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism Rebecca Weiner.

The NYPD official in Tucson will work with US Customs & Border Protection on issues including fentanyl searches, transnational criminal organizations that might have a footprint in New York City and the migrant crisis, she said.

The Bogota liaison will focus on migration routes, drug trafficking and other transnational criminal issues, while working in tandem with the Colombian National Police, Weiner said.

“We’re not going to wait for the problem to come to us. We’re not going to say this is someone else’s responsibility. It’s our job to protect our city, and so we have to do that by understanding really at the root of the problem is how these scourges that I mentioned are coming to New York,” Weiner said.

The two new posts will bring the total number of locations the NYPD has liaisons in to 16.

Officers, mainly focused on counterterrorism intelligence gathering, are already stationed in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, as well as in Toronto and Montreal in Canada, and world capitals including London, Paris and Madrid. Other locations include: Tel Aviv. Abu Dhabi, Doha, Singapore, Sydney, Amman, Lyon, Santo Domingo and The Hague.

The liaison in Tel Aviv who is embedded with the Israeli International Police, has sent “hourly” updates to NYPD headquarters in lower Manhattan since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, Weiner said.

Weiner said she learned about the surprise attacks during a phone call from the NYPD Tel Aviv liaison while she was on a trip to Columbia with Mayor Eric Adams to discuss migration.

“Within hours of that phone call we were back in New York City and in the midst of responding to the first of more than 600 protests related to the conflict that have taken place here since Oct. 7,” Weiner said.

“Without the International Liaison Program, the NYPD would be myopic, resigned to policing the most global and interconnected city in the world without truly seeing beyond our borders,” Weiner said.