How to Stop Terrorists Before They Kill
The NYPD's surveillance program was designed to detect local terrorists before they strike — and it's working
By JUDITH MILLER, WSJ
The Boston Police Department responded with extraordinary skill to last week's marathon bombing, but some terrorism experts say that the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 200, may well have been prevented entirely had the perpetrators lived in New York City.
Part of the difference is a matter of numbers and resources. The New York Police Department has a vastly larger force—roughly 35,000 uniformed officers versus Boston's 2,000—and a far larger budget. The NYPD spent $330 million of its $4.6 billion annual budget in 2011 combating terrorism. Yet that is perhaps not New York's most telling advantage.
In the dozen years since 9/11, the city has developed a counterterror program that is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brothers before they strike. The 1,000 cops and analysts who work in the NYPD's intelligence and counterterrorism divisions, for instance, would likely have flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for surveillance, given Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's insistence on aggressively monitoring groups and individuals suspected of radicalization.
New York cops almost surely would have monitored Tamerlan—the elder of the two brothers—if they had known that Russia had warned the FBI in 2011 that he was an Islamic radical, that he was potentially dangerous, and that he had spent several months in Dagestan, a Russian republic with an Islamic insurgency, in 2012. "We would have been very reluctant to shut down an investigation if we knew all that it seems the bureau knew or could have known, especially once he had traveled to a region of concern," says Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, who now works at K2, a New York-based private security firm.
(More here.)
By JUDITH MILLER, WSJ
The Boston Police Department responded with extraordinary skill to last week's marathon bombing, but some terrorism experts say that the attack, which killed three people and injured more than 200, may well have been prevented entirely had the perpetrators lived in New York City.
Part of the difference is a matter of numbers and resources. The New York Police Department has a vastly larger force—roughly 35,000 uniformed officers versus Boston's 2,000—and a far larger budget. The NYPD spent $330 million of its $4.6 billion annual budget in 2011 combating terrorism. Yet that is perhaps not New York's most telling advantage.
In the dozen years since 9/11, the city has developed a counterterror program that is a model of how to identify and stop killers like the Tsarnaev brothers before they strike. The 1,000 cops and analysts who work in the NYPD's intelligence and counterterrorism divisions, for instance, would likely have flagged Tamerlan Tsarnaev for surveillance, given Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's insistence on aggressively monitoring groups and individuals suspected of radicalization.
New York cops almost surely would have monitored Tamerlan—the elder of the two brothers—if they had known that Russia had warned the FBI in 2011 that he was an Islamic radical, that he was potentially dangerous, and that he had spent several months in Dagestan, a Russian republic with an Islamic insurgency, in 2012. "We would have been very reluctant to shut down an investigation if we knew all that it seems the bureau knew or could have known, especially once he had traveled to a region of concern," says Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, who now works at K2, a New York-based private security firm.
(More here.)
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