Very cool, although for obvious reasons they don’t delve into the details of how the matrix works. I take a strange pride in the fact that the NYPD is so far ahead of the game on counterterrorism: I’ve got nothing to do with it and they really have no choice given the city’s recent history, but a local force that thinks globally is worth boasting about.

There’s nothing in the Blotter’s account that blog readers don’t already know, including and especially the threat from homegrown terrorists in the aftermath of the Fort Dix and JFK plots, but read it anyway. What they’re describing sounds like FBI profiling at the cell level. At what point do a group of 20-year-old Muslim men who are into the Koran suddenly “turn”?

The report identifies mosques, bookstores, cafes, prisons and flop houses as what it calls “radicalization incubators” that provide “extremist fodder or fuel for radicalization.”…

Using the NYPD matrix, those officials say there are at least two dozen “clusters,” or “pockets,” of individuals in the region who are at various places along the path of radicalization.

In an Intelligence Assessment published at the end of June, New Jersey officials at the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness noted, “Through its ongoing review of extremist Web logs, the Intelligence Bureau has identified numerous pockets of radical youth existing in New Jersey communities and especially on N.J. campuses.”

The purpose of the structure proposed by the NYPD is to create a tool enabling authorities to measure whether these “pockets” are moving from sanctioned activities toward violence…

The dense, 90-page NYPD analysis is the nation’s first full analysis of the potential for increased homegrown terror in the United States and the first to develop a matrix on which to plot the course of “unremarkable” people as they move toward the potential for violent action, multiple persons familiar with the report told ABC News.

Months in the drafting, the report makes use of a novel “cluster” model to determine where on the path from preradicalized and self-identification to indoctrination and jihad an individual and immediate peer group may be.

A spokesman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee is naturally outrageously outraged. Exit question: Er, why didn’t the FBI do this?

Update: Influence Peddler reminds me that City Journal had the inside track on the NYPD’s “cluster” model last month. Follow the link to see just how impressive their intel division is — and how stingy the city is being with its research.