Terrorist attacks transform NYPD
Nation’s biggest police force evolved after deadly Sept. 11 crime

BY TOM HAYS
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:25 AM PDT

The World Trade Center site (center), is under construction Monday in New York. Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., are scheduled to attend a ceremony at the site on Thursday, to mark the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States.

NEW YORK  — Nearly seven years after terrorists took down the World Trade Center's twin towers, New York police officials have embarked on an ambitious plan to secure the new development that is finally sprouting at the lower Manhattan site.

But a repeat of the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001 is only one of a long list of worries that have prompted the New York Police Department to spend the last several years reinventing itself as an intelligence and homeland security agency.

The largest U.S. police department, with about 37,000 officers, has spent tens of millions of dollars — much it from federal grants — on an array of high-tech security measures designed to thwart threats potentially more daunting than another attack on a downtown skyscraper. It has also assigned 1,000 officers to counterterrorism duty, including 10 detectives posted around the globe who collect and share intelligence.

Overall, it is an effort unmatched by any other city in the United States, and perhaps the world.

“We’ve made major changes in this organization since Sept. 11,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a recent interview. “I think they’re working. But it’s still very much a work in progress.”

ADVERTISEMENT

David Cohen — a former CIA official brought aboard after Sept. 11 to head the NYPD’s intelligence division — said the department has identified more than a dozen serious plots against the city in the past seven years that were either interrupted or abandoned, including some that haven’t become public.

Among those that have come to light: a planned cyanide attack on the subways by al-Qaida operatives that authorities say was called off in 2002; another aborted al-Qaida plot to destroy the iconic Brooklyn Bridge in 2003; a local scheme to blow up a midtown subway station in 2004, resulting in the arrest and conviction of a Pakistani immigrant; and a plot to bomb underwater train tunnels to flood lower Manhattan, which was broken up in 2006 by several arrests overseas.

For terrorists, attacking New York City “is marbled into their thought process,” Cohen said. “If you want to get into the major leagues in the terrorism business, you come here.”

Cohen and Richard Falkenrath, the department’s counterterrorism chief, drive home that point in daily briefings with Kelly.

On one recent morning in the commissioner’s 14th floor conference room, the pair told him that in the past 24 hours, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen had come forward to warn that his roommates wanted to attack the subway, that there had been multiple bomb threats against the U.S. Open tennis tournament and that an anonymous caller in Italy had told the CIA, “I put a bomb in New York.”

Falkenrath said the Pakistani-American’s case, like the others, was a false alarm: Investigators believe it may have stemmed from a dispute over money.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going to turn into a terrorism case,” Falkenrath, a security expert who served in the White House until joining the NYPD, told Kelly.

Cohen also informed the commissioner that two NYPD detectives sent to Kosovo and Montenegro to gauge the threat of Islamic extremism in the Balkan region would be coming back with “a lot of valuable information.”

The briefings are derived in part from classified information shared by federal law enforcement.