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Mar 20, 2006 2:15 am US/Eastern
Inside The NYPD Counter-Terrorism Unit
NEW YORK (CBS News) ―
New York City, struck twice by terrorists, can ill afford to leave its defense just to the military, FBI or CIA, says Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. So he trained his 37,000 police to combat terror and formed a special 1,000-member unit dedicated to counter-terrorism.
Correspondent Ed Bradley reported from inside that unit on 60 Minutes on Sunday night.
"Has any other police department in this country or anywhere in the world taken the kind of steps that you have here in New York?" Bradley asks Kelly. "I don't believe so, no," says Kelly. And he didn't discuss doing so with the FBI. "We just did it on our own."
The unit even has a group of officers stationed overseas. Thanks to one of them, the NYPD created its own report on the 2004 terror bombing in Madrid. The government's report on the bombing that killed 200 took months to get to New York authorities. The overseas officers' main job is to gather details of terror attacks, learn other police departments' techniques' abroad and relay them home so New York can adjust its anti-terror measures. Or as Kelly puts it, "To ask the New York question...Is there anything…that's going to help us better protect this city?"
More information is gleaned from the Internet, where officers monitor radical and terrorist Web sites and chat rooms. The unit also has its own informants working with the NYPD throughout the city whose tips helped thwart a plan to bomb a subway station. Extra anti-terror vigilance by the NYPD also deterred an al Qaeda plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. Would such schemes have been uncovered anyway without Kelly's new initiative? "Absolutely not," says New York Police Intelligence Chief David Cohen – former director of operations at the CIA.
Looking to put the CIA's expertise to work inside the NYPD, Cohen was brought back into the intelligence business after a two-year absence. "We show up every morning with that core assumption in our mind, that if [terrorists] could, they'd like to come back," says Cohen. "Our job is to raise the bar and make it more difficult, if not impossible."
Besides sophisticated intelligence, conducted by 600 of the terror unit's officers, police use old-fashioned cop-on-the-beat techniques to intimidate terrorists and reassure the public. Every day, "surges" are conducted, where several, heavily armed officers just show up randomly in different parts of the city. Says Mayor Michael Bloomberg, "Every once in awhile, you'll see this stream of police cars zipping down the street, lights and sirens. And you say, 'What's happening?' Nothing! I hope."
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