Review “NYPD’s Counterterrorism Division,
Please respond to the following:
Review “NYPD’s Counterterrorism Division,” in Chapter 9 of Managing the Public Sector.
- Dickey is sharply critical of “the dangerously ill-conceived, mismanaged, and highly militarized global war on terror” and sees the success of the NYPD’s counterterrorism program as offering an alternative approach. Recommend 1–2 actions you would take to implement a different plan from Dickey and/or Kelly.
Review “Problems and Applications,” in Chapter 9 of Managing the Public Sector, and respond to Scenario 2 about smuggling drugs.
- Assume that you are on Commissioner Lane’s team. Recommend 1–2 alternatives to the plan described, and explain how you will evaluate the success of each recommendation.
NYPD’s COUNTERTERRORISM DIVISION
Unless objectives are converted into action, they are not objectives; they are
dreams.
Peter F. Drucker
In November 2001, weeks after Al Qaeda had successfully attacked New York City for the second time, newly appointed police commissioner Ray
Kelly decided that NYPD would fight its own war against terrorism. The
federal government had provided for the city’s protection in 1993 when the
group later known as Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center, and the feds
were also responsible when two planes devastated the Twin Towers. The time
had come, Kelly believed, to make New York’s first line of defense the NYPD
rather than the U.S. military or what cops call the “three letter guys”—the CIA,
DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA.
Specifically, Kelly took three bold actions: establish a counterterrorism
division; dramatically expand the intelligence division (which had been
essentially an escort service for visiting dignitaries) and hire a former senior
CIA official, David Cohen, to run it; and increase the number of cops working
with the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. But listing these three actions
does not convey the enormity of the challenge Kelly faced. According to
Cohen, in the early days of the Kelly regime, everything was intense and
anything seemed possible. “It was like putting tires on a speeding car,” Cohen
said.
Although NYPD might have 50,000 employees and a budget of nearly $4
billion, Kelly was essentially trying to transform a local police department into
an organization that could compete on an international scale. If they were to
make New York City safe again, Kelly and Cohen thought they needed to build
something different from the federal agencies; that meant an organization with
minimum bureaucracy and maximum flexibility. The result was basically a
combination of crime fighting and intelligence gathering, a hybrid approach
that has since become known as “intelligence-led policing.” Journalist
Christopher Dickey explains, “The aim should be to gather information and
intelligence, identify risk, and then manage the risks by intervening selectively
to protect against the threat. Sometimes that means detaining a suspect, but use
of information and intimidation to disrupt potential plots may be even more
effective. Sometimes, all that’s required is to make a target harder to hit, or to
put on a show that makes it seem so.”
Plans to do this type of policing were developed in morning meetings that
Kelly held with the heads of the intelligence division and counterterrorism
division every day at eight o’clock sharp. Because Kelly never missed a
morning, Cohen never missed a meeting. From those meetings, Cohen said,
“We created the playbook.”
Why would a city need its own CIA? Some would say New York City had
no choice. Terrorists are obsessed with New York City, focusing on it, Dickey
writes, “like a compass needle quivering toward magnetic north.” Consider
this. The 1998 remake of Godzilla, starring Matthew Broderick, was largely
rejected by American audiences, but Al Qaeda sympathizers abroad loved it.
The scenes of Godzilla stomping across New York City, crushing everything
in its path, were mesmerizing and inspiring. One captured terrorist leader
warned of an attack against “the bridge in the Godzilla movie.” Interrogators
had to rent the film to find out what he meant: the Brooklyn Bridge.
Moreover, organizations like the FBI and the CIA didn’t always share vital
information. Therefore, NYPD began to get its intelligence its own way,
posting cops with their counterparts in London, Paris, Amman, Montreal,
Santo Domingo, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and other foreign cities. Once the
division began to gather important information on its own, it could deal with
the FBI and CIA from a position of strength. “There is no such thing as
information sharing,” said Cohen. “There is only information trading.”
Language was the key. NYPD could not run informers in immigrant
communities, much less undercover cops, if it didn’t have personnel who spoke
the dialects. NYPD could not have the Cyber Intelligence Unit successfully
patrol chat rooms if it didn’t have personnel who could talk about the same
street corners and schools that others in the chat room knew. A record search
showed that about 2500 department employees spoke a foreign language. The
department’s Chinese speakers can converse in Fukienese as well as Mandarin;
its Spanish linguists talk with Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Puerto
Rican, or Dominican accents. NYPD officers speak Russian, French, German,
Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, too. In contrast, because of strict security clearance
procedures, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. military, and the U.S. State Department
are weak in linguists.
Though language is hugely important in eliciting intelligence, the Counter
Terrorism Division had other operations designed to prevent future attacks. For
example:
OPERATION HERCULES. Every day, officers of different precincts
go to a location that was chosen at random to provide a show of force to
deter anyone out there who might be planning an attack. The heavily
armed “Hercules team” also moves around the city at random protecting
high-value targets and infrastructure and disrupting operational planning
details of terrorists. The reason for this theatricality is that cops “have to
make themselves seem all-powerful and all knowing.”
OPERATION NEXUS. The NYPD also involves business in
counterterrorism. A program called Operation Nexus, begun in 2002,
networked police officers “with businesses that might be exploited by
terrorists. Companies that sold chemicals like hydrogen peroxide or
nitrate fertilizers, the stuff of homemade bombs, needed to have their
consciousness raised. But so did self-storage warehouses (where
components and chemicals might be hidden), exterminators (poisons and
sprayers), propane gas vendors (the canisters can serve as ready-made
explosives), cell phone vendors (mobiles work as timers and triggers). …
some 80 different categories of businesses were deemed of interest to the
police.”
OPERATION KABOOM. Inside the windowless Counterterrorism
Bureau headquarters, the Special Projects Group, or “red cell,” plots
terrorist attacks. The idea is to take several cops who have no particular
experience with explosives and see what they can pull together from
information on the Internet and from suppliers within a few hours drive
of Manhattan. One model they used was the massive bomb detonated by
the Irish Republican Army at Manchester, England, in June 1996.
Disturbingly, the team was able to pick up 1200 pounds of ammonium
nitrate—the same stuff used by the IRA—in Pennsylvania without
incident.
In addition to language skills and various visible and undercover activities,
the counterterrorism division has the technology to stay one step ahead of the
enemy. On the ground, thousands of cops wear “personal radiation detectors”
which are very effective at picking up minute traces of potentially dangerous
rays. In addition to the city’s 300 square miles of land, there are 165 square
miles of waterways—any of which would make good entry points for weapons
of mass distraction. The counterterrorism boats don’t look different from other
police boats on the water, but the classified technology they carry makes them
unique. But the most high-tech tools are 1000 feet above the city, giving
officers on the ground real-time intelligence. Dickey describes his ride one cold
winter night in an unmarked NYPD helicopter:
The morning is clear in a way—in that way—that is always a little
heartbreaking if you were here on September 11, 2001. There were police
choppers in New York’s sky then, too, but not like this one, which can see so
much from so far. It is a state-of-the-art crime-fighting, terror-busting, order-
keeping techno-toy, with its enormous lens that can magnify any scene on the
street almost 1000 times, then double that digitally; that can watch a crime in
progress from miles away, can look in windows, and sense the body heat of
people on rooftops or running along sidewalks, can track beepers slipped under
cars, can do so many things that the man in the helmet watching the screens
and moving the images with the joystick in his lap . . . is often a little bit at loss
for words. “It really is an amazing tool,” he keeps saying. On the left-hand
screen is a map of Manhattan. He punches in an address on the Upper East
Side, my address. The camera on the belly of the machines swerves
instantaneously, focuses, and there on the second screen is my building scene
from more than a mile away now, but up close and personal from this
surprising astral angle. The cameras and sensors are locked onto it, staying
with it as the chopper turns and homes in.
Assess how well the NYPD has converted its objectives into actions. What
actions besides those mentioned in the case would you recommend? What are
the limitations or weaknesses in NYPD’s approach? Dickey is sharply critical
of “the dangerously ill-conceived, mismanaged, and highly militarized global
war on terror,” and sees the success of the NYPD’s counterterrorism program
as offering an alternative approach. Do you agree or disagree?
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