Indeed, in the first quarter of this year, according to police officials, the team conducted 220 interviews.

The Times reviewed two dozen reports generated by the debriefing team in early 2009. Together, the documents and the interviews offered an up-close view of how the squad operates, functioning as a recruiter for the Intelligence Division, the arm of the department that is dedicated to foiling terrorist plots. But they also showed that the division’s counterterrorism mission had come to intersect in some new — and potentially uncomfortable — ways with the department’s more traditional crime-fighting work.

They showed that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city’s holding cells and lockup facilities. Some reports written by detectives after debriefing sessions noted whether a prisoner attended mosque, celebrated Muslim holidays or had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. The report on the food cart vendor described the location of his Flushing mosque and noted that worshipers were a “mix of Afghani, Persian (Iranians) and Pakistani.” The Egyptian limousine driver said he “considers himself to be a Sunni Muslim” but “has not prayed at a Mosque in quite some time,” according to the report.

Debriefing Prisoners

Detectives have long relied on informants, including drug addicts and underworld figures. But the informants are typically asked to provide information about crimes they know about or other criminals with whom they are acquainted. By contrast, the Citywide Debriefing Team has sought to recruit Muslims regardless of what they know. Police officials described the interviews as voluntary, but several Muslim immigrant interviewees reached by The Times said they were shaken by the encounters.

John Miller, the deputy commissioner in charge of the Police Department’s Intelligence Division, said the debriefing team had emerged from the department’s urgent need in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks for a cadre of sources around the city who might be helpful in counterterrorism. One way to fill that gap, he said, was to look to the hundreds of thousands of people arrested by the department every year.