NEW YORK (AP) — The grainy photographs could have come from any undercover police file: A man in jeans talking on his cell phone. Another in a windbreaker walking past people at a coffee shop. A car parked outside a grocery store.

But the surveillance was not part of any criminal case. The photos were snapped as part of secret New York Police Department intelligence program that focused on people and businesses based on their ethnicity.

Police documents obtained by The Associated Press show how the city's rich heritage as a place where immigrants can blend in and build their lives now clashes with today's New York, where police see blending in as one of the first priorities for would-be terrorists. The documents describe in extraordinary detail an NYPD program to build a database of daily life, cataloguing where people ate, worked and prayed

It started with one group, Moroccans, but the documents show police intended to build intelligence files on other ethnicities. U.S. citizens were among those subjected to surveillance.

Undercover officers snapped photographs of restaurants frequented by Moroccans, including one that was noted for serving "religious Muslims." Police documented where Moroccans bought groceries, which hotels they visited and where they prayed. While visiting an apartment used by new Moroccan immigrants, one officer noted in his reports that he saw two Qurans and a calendar from a nearby mosque.

"A lot of these locations were innocent," said an official involved in the effort, who, like many others interviewed by the AP, spoke only on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive police operations. "They just happened to be in the community."

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