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New York’s State Of Mind
Out of the Twin Towers’ ashes, NYPD is building a world-class terror-fighting machine
October, 2004 By Anya Sostek SHORTLY AFTER 10 BOMBS exploded simultaneously aboard Spanish trains this March, a team of investigators from the New York City police department arrived at the railroad tracks in Madrid. Flying from their permanent posting in Tel Aviv, the detectives started probing the crime scene within hours. The next day, they were joined by several other members of the NYPD who had jumped on the first flight out of New York. As a direct result of the officers' observations of vulnerabilities in Madrid's transit system, New York City made immediate tactical adjustments in its own subway security.
Over the past three years, New York City's police department has revolutionized the role of local police in fighting terrorism. With numerous detectives posted abroad and 250 city officers working full time on counterterrorism, the police force is redefining traditional roles and responsibilities on an international scale. "It really makes the NYPD into its own freestanding law enforcement agency," says Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University. "In a way, the city has its own state department."
The seeds of the transformation were planted on September 11, 2001, as former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly watched the Twin Towers burn and collapse from his home in Battery Park City. Kelly was then director of corporate security at Bear, Sterns & Co., and like all Americans, he wanted to help. "I didn't want to be sitting on the sidelines," says Kelly. "I felt like I still had something to offer."
His chance came when newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed him to a second term as police commissioner. (His first stint was from 1992-94.) Kelly knew that fighting terrorism would be his top priority, and he held brainstorming sessions with terrorism and crime-fighting experts as he prepared to take office. Joined by David Cohen, a 35-year CIA veteran, and Michael Sheehan, former director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council, Kelly created a counterterrorism bureau and reformed the intelligence division.
The NYPD now spends 20 times more man hours on counterterrorism than it did before 9/11, according to an article in the New York University Review of Law and Security. The intelligence division spends 35 to 40 percent of its resources on counterterrorism, as opposed to just 2 percent in the past. The counterterrorism division includes officers and civilians who speak Arabic, Pashtu, Farsi, Urdu and 40 other languages. On September 11, the city had 17 officers posted to the joint Terrorism Task Force, a group that shares information from federal agencies. That number is now 130, and those detectives have joined federal agents in terrorist investigations in Jordan, Germany, Kuwait and Indonesia. NYPD detectives also traveled to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to participate in prisoner interrogations.
The NYPD's international presence is one of the most dramatic and noteworthy changes since September 11. In addition to the New York-based detectives who have made trips overseas, others have received long-term assignments in Tel Aviv, London, Toronto, Montreal, Singapore and Lyon, France, to learn how those cities combat terrorism. In Tel Aviv, for example, officers have focused on Israeli tactics for identifying and preventing suicide bombers. "It's become very clear that these terrorist networks are extremely global," says R.P. Eddy, executive director of the Center for Tactical Counterterrorism at the Manhattan Institute, an adjunct think tank for the NYPD. "Things that happen there are harbingers of what can happen here."
Stopping Attacks
Although observers appreciate the speed and comprehensiveness of the NYPD's counterterrorism efforts, some wonder whether intelligence gathering and international investigations are better left to federal agencies. For Kelly, the first priority is making sure that New York City is protected to the greatest extent possible. And if that means assuming responsibilities previously delegated to the feds, so be it. "We'd love to sit back and let the federal government do it, but I don't think we can,” he says. “We need this information right away. We can't wait months or years before some federal agency might give it to us."
Eddy adds that local police officers possess some advantages over their federal counterparts in intelligence gathering. In sheer numbers, there are more NYPD police officers than FBI agents nationwide. In addition, local officers spend a great deal of their time in neighborhoods, giving them better access to terrorist cells operating in the United States. According to Eddy, terrorist patterns are shifting from "Caliphate to Columbine," or from the idea of organized violence in the name of constructing a single Moslem state to bloodshed that is random, destructive and independently planned. The newer terrorists, represented by Jose Padilla and the Lackawanna Six, haven't done much international travel or communication. The possibility of stopping them, therefore, will be greater with state and local law enforcement than with federal agents operating abroad.
In addition to the work done inside the police department's state-of-the-art counterterrorism center, officers also take to the street to protect the city. At the start of the war in Iraq, for instance, the city launched Operation Atlas, which increases police presence at major NYC entry points and landmarks. Because of the continued terrorist threat, Operation Atlas is still in effect. At the most sensitive locations, officers are present around the clock. At other targeted places, security is achieved through cameras and intermittent police supervision. The operation, staffed mainly through police overtime, costs the city $1 million per week.
The city also has created Hercules units, special anti-terror concentrations of large numbers of heavily armed officers in unannounced locations. "Black trucks stop and 10 officers with machine guns come out," explains Bo Dietl, a former New York City police officer and chairman of the security firm Beau Dietl Associates. "They're giving an omnipresence to anybody who's thinking of doing anything."
Through Operation Atlas and the Hercules units, Commissioner Kelly is confident that the city stymied a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. An al Qaeda operative sent to survey the bridge communicated a message that the weather was too hot. "In other words, security was too high because of the things we were doing," says Kelly. "It says that uniformed presence is a deterrent and validated to some extent what we're doing."
Another recently uncovered al Qaeda plan of attack-- smuggling weapons into New York City by taking over a garment-district shipping business-- validates another NYPD effort, the Nexus program. Nexus is an aggressive outreach to about 15,000 businesses to garner information about terrorism from such sources as storage warehouses and insecticide sprayers.
Ready for Anything
New York also has embarked on myriad smaller-scale preventative programs. The city setup a terrorism hotline, for example, that has received more than 20,000 calls. It has also supervised a program that trains and recruits 28,000 doormen and janitors to keep watch for suspicious activity. In addition, all police sergeants on patrol now carry pager-sized radiation detectors.
Along with the prevention and detection of terrorism, New York City has crafted a formal terrorism response plan since September 11. Such a plan, modeled off the National Incident Management System, is required for any city that wants to receive federal Homeland Security funds. "It's part of a united effort to deal with emergencies in a consistent way," says Joseph Bruno, commissioner of the Office of Emergency Management. "In the event of a nuclear disaster or a hazardous-materials incident, everybody would immediately understand the structure we are using."
But New York City's version, called the Citywide Incident Management System, makes some significant departures from the national model. For routine incidents, such as a civil disturbance or a bomb threat, the city sticks to the NIMS model of a single command. But for major emergencies, such as a plane crash or a chemical attack, the city creates a unified command not seen in NIMS or other city plans. The unified command divides up tasks by areas of core competency, not incident type. For example, police and fire would share command of a haz-mat assessment, with fire doing the search and rescue and police leading the crime scene investigation.
The complexity of the unified command drew criticism from the 9/11 Commission in its final report. A former fire chief has also criticized CIMS for rewarding the police department with too many responsibilities. For Bruno, these criticisms do not hold much weight. "For the ordinary person, this may seem complex,” says Bruno. “But they do this 500 times a day, they understand it very well and we have not dramatically changed what departments do.”
By all accounts, the work of the NYPD has been impressive and effective in fighting terrorism. But it has also been expensive. Kelly, and several others, have been outspoken about the matter of federal funding, and New York City’s lack of it. Kelly estimates that the city spends $200 million annually on counterterrorism. "We're protecting national assets here," says Kelly, “and we're receiving very little help. We're using our own dime." About R. P. Eddy: articles, bio, and photo |
