A new breed of ‘NYPD Blue’

On subway station platforms, on boats on New York Harbor, in unmarked helicopters above the city and on the beat in Muslim neighborhoods, a new breed of “NYPD Blue” is looking not just for drug dealers or burglars, but for terrorists.

Hit twice and threatened many more times, New York has developed a counter-terrorism division that supporters and critics both liken to a city version of the CIA.

It shouldn’t be surprising.  A total of 2,756 people have died in New York terrorist attacks over the past 15 years — six in the World Trade Center attack in February 1993 and the remainder on 9/11 as airliners crashed into those same towers.  Nor should it be surprising for a city that has long had its own radio station, television station and other facilities and services other cities can only dream of.

“We devote almost 1,200 police officers every day to our counter-terrorism initiatives,” says police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who was commissioner in 1993, then returned after 9/11 at the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  “No other city can do that, but again, no other city sees itself in the position that we do. We have been attacked here twice successfully, and there have been other plots against the city. So we are doing a lot — you can see it on the streets of the city.”

They're doing it under the streets and above them as well.

The Counter Terrorism Division was set up in January 2002, three months after 9/11. It now has a public budget of $203 million. It includes a variety of operations: a cyber-intelligence section, a group of native speakers in languages like Arabic and Urdu who monitor jihadi Web sites, called Operation Nexis; a transportation systems section that monitors bridges, tunnels, roads, pipelines, tank farms, ships, ports; an intelligence unit that produces CIA-quality reports on the overall threat. There are cops doing translations, Web monitoring, diving under ships in the harbor, flying over the city watching suspect vehicles, driving vans with radiological and biological “sniffer” devices, and talking to informants, both formal and informal.

All of it is coordinated at the deputy commissioner level by Richard Falkenrath, who runs counter-terror, and David Cohen, who runs the intelligence division. Falkenrath and Cohen are both highly qualified. Falkenrath holds a Ph.D. in international relations and served as deputy assistant to President Bush and deputy homeland security adviser.  Cohen was a CIA officer for 37 years, rising to the rank of acting director of operations, the man in charge of America’s spies. 

Every day at 9:30 a.m., they and Kelly meet in the commissioner’s executive command post at One Police Plaza and, says Cohen, they have to.

“In my view there’s no question that on any given day, there’s somebody out there who’s talking about the possibilities of an attack on New York — what a plot might looks like, what the elements might be,” says Cohen. “Every day, I wake up in the morning just assuming someone out there is having that conversation with someone else. Every day.”

New technology born from good old police work
To thwart that attack, Cohen shows off a lot of technology in the command post. Cohen can pretty much look anywhere in New York, using both the city’s own resources and private security cameras.

“[One] focuses on the stock exchange area for example,” says Cohen, pointing to a monitor showing several scenes in the financial district. “And the camera will move around. Over in the intelligence division, we keep a whole series of monitors just to spot-check subway stations.”

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