Bag checks and explosives swabs: a new NYC reality

BY MELANIE LEFKOWITZ AND ROCCO PARASCANDOLA | Newsday Staff Writers

September 6, 2006

Betty Holland, of Ollathe, Kansas, gets her bag checked by a police officer as she arrives in Times Square on New Year's eve December 31, 2004. (Photo by - Robert Mecea) (Newsday / Robert Mecea)

New York is a city reinvented. Since the World Trade Center attacks five years ago shattered the illusion of safety, its residents have grown accustomed to metal detectors in office buildings, bag checks and explosives swabs in subway stations and machine-gun toting cops.

Security strides have made the city safer, experts agree. Yet despite those successes -- including the NYPD's efforts that range from undercover operations in Brooklyn mosques to random "surges" of cops at high-risk spots -- law-enforcement officials and others say New York can never be completely safe.

The city's sheer size, wealth of targets and attractiveness to terrorists worldwide, compounded by a lack of funding, inadequate communication channels and occasional strain between city, state and federal agencies, keep the city firmly in the crosshairs.

Protecting the city means securing 660 miles of subway track alone, in the face of a 40 percent reduction this year in homeland security funding.

"The terrorists could be anywhere, they could be out of the country, they could be in the country, they could be in some small town. We need a level of competence throughout the United States," said James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI's New York office and now Gov. George Pataki's senior adviser on counterterrorism issues. "We could benefit from a lot more funding to help build the kind of systems, the kind of databases, the kind of infrastructure we need for better conductivity to criminal records, parking tickets, data, to connect the dots."

Enhanced, immediate communication between various agencies is key, Kallstrom said, but so far the federal government has not provided the funding to make that happen. In a low-cost effort to improve such communication, Kelly established a coalition of police officials from neighboring states in the wake of the Mumbai bombings to deal with vulnerabilities on Amtrak. The group recently had its fifth meeting.

"They need more resources," Kelly said. "Until they get more resources, we're going to do everything we can to protect the line, particularly from Washington to New York."

Amtrak, which runs out of Penn Station and employs fewer than 300 police officers for the entire country, said in a statement that "coalition participants share intelligence information, provide assistance to Amtrak, and work in a collaborative way to enhance public safety."

It's widely held that the city's highest risk lies in its byzantine network of subways, which move an average of 7 million riders a day and which, if attacked, could endanger the economy. After the London subway bombings last year, the NYPD instituted random bag checks (which would pick up the kind of explosives terrorists allegedly planned to use on transatlantic flights in the most recent British plot), but experts say cops could not possibly screen enough passengers to guarantee safety.

"Nobody can make assurances about the subways; it just doesn't work," said Jerome Hauer, formerly the city's Office of Emergency Management commissioner. "The technology is not there yet that allows you to detect explosives as people move into the subways in a very rapid fashion."

The 40 percent cuts in federal security funding -- from $207.6 million in 2005 to $124.5 million in 2006 -- enraged city and state officials, but the widespread anger and vigorous lobbying in Washington failed to earn the city more financial support. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that he will see to it the cuts, which he blames on pork-barrel politics, will not impact safety because the city will spend whatever it needs for counterterrorism and worry about the costs later. The city has received nearly $500 million in federal homeland security funds since 2003. In the meantime, the city uses its resources -- a 37,000-officer police department allows the luxury of a 1,000-member counterterrorism unit built since Sept. 11 -- and ingenuity, as with initiatives like Operation Nexus, which cultivates contacts with the local business community, the use of Arabic-speaking officers and informants, and the highly visible Operation Atlas, which randomly dispatches heavily armed officers throughout the city.

In recent months, Kelly and Bloomberg have pointed to 18 known threats against targets within New York over the past decade, most of which have been broken up by city or federal efforts. In May, the NYPD won its first conviction -- of a Pakistani immigrant charged with plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in 2004 -- in an arrest made through intelligence efforts. And as an indication that increased policing has had some effect, city officials often point to the fact that in 2002, Ohio trucker Iyman Faris allegedly told his al-Qaeda contacts that the "weather is too hot" to move ahead with a plan to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, an apparent reference to the city's heavy security.

"We have the best police department in the world, they've devoted 1,000 police officers to intelligence and counterterrorism, and only in retrospect will you know whether we were at the right place at the right time," Bloomberg said Tuesday. Conventional crime is down about 4 percent, he said, but "for terrorism, there is no number other than, we haven't been struck."

Hauer praised Kelly and efforts like the department's undercover intelligence work but dismissed Operation Atlas as "cosmetic."

"I personally think all the guys around with red lights and sirens and having people stand on Madison Avenue randomly with machine guns, automatic weapons, proves nothing," he said. "It just means that the bad guys when they detonate a car bomb are going to take out a lot more with them, including the guys standing around with guns."

Other experts, including Joseph King, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the former head of security for New York's Department of Homeland Security office, said a random show of force like Atlas could have a powerful psychological effect on terrorists who put a premium on planning. But he conceded that the best security possible could do little to stop a determined suicide bomber in a crowded place.

"The subway system is the most vulnerable, but an individual suicide bomber at Times Square, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, walking into the arrivals terminal at Kennedy . . ." he said. "That's just an open society. It's very difficult to say that you can really guarantee that nothing like that could happen."

But experts and local officials agree that while New York may be safer today, it remains an attractive target.

"I have no doubt we are safer as a nation and as a city today than we were on 9/11. I feel very comfortable in that conclusion. But we're never going to be safe in the sense there will never be an end to this threat," said Richard Falkenrath, a former top Department of Homeland Security official who recently became the NYPD's counterterrorism chief. "I think the threat of a potentially catastrophic terrorist attack is now just something we have to deal with. I hope I'm wrong and something happens to make it go away, but I doubt it will."