By TOM HAYS

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department chronically skirted rules intended to protect political groups from unwarranted government surveillance while investigating Muslims, the city’s independent police monitor said in a report released Tuesday.

The audit, conducted by Inspector General Philip Eure, found that while the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had valid reasons to launch investigations, it frequently extended them past court-mandated deadlines without proper authorization.

In 100 percent of the cases reviewed by the inspector general, the department also didn’t adequately explain why it was extending investigations that hadn’t turned up evidence of unlawful activity.

“These failures cannot be dismissed or minimized as paperwork or administrative errors,” the report said. “The very reason these rules were established was to mandate rigorous internal controls to ensure that investigations of political activity – which allow NYPD to intrude into the public and private aspects of people’s lives – were limited in time and scope and to ensure that constitutional rights were not threatened.”

NYPD officials responded by characterizing the criticisms contained in the report by Eure as more technical than substantive.

They also said the department had implemented a new electronic tracking system that will notify them when authorization for surveillance has expired.

“We believe we’ve adhered to the spirit and the letter of the law in each instance,” the NYPD’s top attorney, Lawrence Byrne, said at a news conference. “We don’t break the law to enforce the law.”

The report comes eight months after the city agreed to settle lawsuits accusing the department of waging a covert campaign of religious profiling and illegal spying.

As part of the deal, the NYPD agreed to codify civil rights and other protections required under the court-ordered Handschu decree — put in place in response to surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and ’70s — that ban investigations based on race, religion or ethnicity and require use of the least intrusive investigative techniques possible.

The suits were among legal actions that followed reports by The Associated Press that revealed how city police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques and otherwise spied on Muslims as part of a broad effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

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