A new breed of ‘NYPD Blue’

And the technology is likely to get more specific and, some might say, more intrusive.  If a bag should be left at a location in a high-traffic area, Cohen says they are building a camera system that enables police to look closer. "When did that bag get there, and what did the guy who did it look like?”

Like a lot of what the NYPD does, that comes out of older police technology. The same is true of the scuba team, which now randomly dives under ships in New York Harbor to check for “parasite bombs,”  bombs surreptitiously attached to a ship’s hull at a previous port of call.

“The maritime aspect and team was a much-needed component,” says Detective Keith Duval of the Counter Terrorism Division’s maritime unit. “I came from the scuba team, where I spent time doing evidence searches,” which meant looking for guns, knives, bodies.

But some are brand-new to police work, more a component of intelligence work, like the speedboat mounted with mobile radiological detection devices or mobile sonar devices — to search pier lines. 

“We’ve ramped up security around the harbor. We’ve increased our presence around ferry terminals and critical infrastructure,” adds Lt. John Harkins, who works with Duval on the water. “We’re hardening the target and trying to make the citizens of New York safer, and everyone is working twice as hard after 9/11.”

And in the air, unmarked helicopters, flying out of the NYPD’s own air base at Floyd Bennett Field, a World War II Navy base that used to send out planes to search for Nazi submarines.  The choppers are equipped with gyro-mounted infrared cameras that can spot heat sources, including nuclear material, inside a ship’s hull or snap color images of individuals and, yes, even read license plate numbers from a thousand feet. 

Fran Townsend, President Bush’s homeland security adviser, calls the NYPD the “gold standard ... building a long-term intelligence capability, both analysis and collection; it’s incredibly effective." She does not worry about civil liberties’ being violated. “This is not domestic spying. This is very particularly focused on the terrorism threat. This is, 'What is the information?'”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, is worried. “I don’t like having essentially a police department that can video people, infiltrate people, leave them in prison, entrap them. I don’t think that’s making it safer — it’s making us less safe.”

A face in the Muslim community
Lt. Bobby Stapleton, who heads the Counter Terrorism Division’s Transportation Section, and has responsibility for the air and sea components, thinks “the next terrorist attack will probably be foiled by a rookie cop who got suspicious and asked the right questions.  It’s what we drill into them at the (police) academy.”

Detective Ahmed Nasser is not a rookie, but an eight-year veteran of the police department.  Born in Yemen, he is one 800 New York cops who speak a variety of languages critical to police work as well as counter-terrorism in a city where more than 3 million residents are foreign-born and as many as 700,000 are Muslims. His and the others’ language skills and proficiency levels are stored in a database available to the Counter Terrorism Division. Some of the officers have even been lent to the CIA and FBI.

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