New York city, like the rest of the United States, prides itself that it has been able to prevent another terrorist attack after 9/11. A key factor that's helped is the effort put in by its police force to anticipate threats and try and stay one step ahead of potential attackers. With the terror strikes in Mumbai sparking fears of copycat attacks in the West, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has not wasted time in sending a team to Mumbai to study the attacks for lessons New York can learn.
A three-member team of NYPD investigators was here for a week gathering information about the methods used by the attackers, the response of local security agencies and emergency services and problems faced during their bid to end the three-day siege. Such was the urgency of the mission that the team did not even wait to return to New York to brief the city's stakeholders. A teleconference was organised and about 400 senior security officials and business leaders gathered at the NYPD headquarters to be updated from Mumbai.
"New York has not suffered another terror attack since 9/11 but that does not mean terrorist groups have stopped plotting against large metropolitan cities," Paul Browne, NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, told The Indian Express. "That is the obvious first lesson we learnt from our experience."
Although NYPD investigators have visited nearly a dozen terror-hit cities around the world such as London, Madrid, Moscow and Amman, Mumbai was unique as it had many things in common with New York, Browne said. Both are international cities by the sea, where "commerce and people flow freely" and have long coastlines and commuter train networks that need to be secured.
"In a selfish way, we try and learn as much as possible from any terrorist attack around the world and how elements of that can be put to work against us," Browne added. "We have to be concerned about multiple, simultaneous attacks, however they are launched."
The team, he said, looked for "granular details", like for instance where the bullet damage was sustained.
"The bullet marks on the walls were no more than head high. This was evidence that the attackers were disciplined and trained in the use of automatic weapons. Inexperienced assailants will fire around and at much higher levels," Browne said.
The fact that the siege lasted for three days underlined the need for the police to have additional officers who are rested and trained with a broad range of skills to be able to replace their fatigued counterparts. Since the attackers came equipped with high-tech handheld communication devices, they were apparently able to modify their strategies even as the siege continued and security agencies needed to be prepared to change tactics too.
Besides, Browne added, the Mumbai attacks showed that "in the age of 24-hour news coverage, there is the added concern of tactical information being conveyed to the terrorists" even if it is unintentional and TV channels are only doing their jobs.
These and other sensitive information was shared with about 400 members of a New York city organisation called Shield', which includes corporate private security officials from the finance and hospitality sectors, among others, during the teleconference, Browne said. Hotels were told, for instance, to train employees to watch for suspicious guests or visitors or those who may book unusually long stays. NYPD is also taking stock of the number of its officers with heavy weapons and a training exercise was conducted in which city police commandos were dropped from a helicopter on the terrace of a building in Brooklyn in a scenario recreating the Nariman House NSG operations.
Diplomatic sources said that the vigilance assumes added significance as since the Mumbai attacks, Western intelligence agencies have reportedly noticed increased chatter on Islamist militant websites and chatrooms cheering the 10 Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorists and calling for more such attacks in other cities.
