New York City CT Programs

Richard Falkenrath, the head of the New York City Counter-terrorism bureau has given an interesting speech to the Washington Institute here , and with a full audio here .  He gives a description of the NYPD CT programs, discusses threat perceptions and challenges, and raises a couple of concerns.

Falkenrath is known as a thinker and often intellectuals don't necessarily make good leaders of CT operations. But I think Falkenrath is probably an exception - he comes across in this speech as very competent and the programs he runs are apposite and valuable. His ideas are interesting because they are ideas for big city, non-national response, which is a different paradigm from the usual national-level CT programs.

Read the summary at the link or listen to the audio if you can. Here's my highlights of the key points.

• The NYPD CT program addresses those areas where federal, national programs cannot. Police commissioner Ray Kelly, CT bureau lead Richard Falkenrath and CT Intell office lead David Cohen are all, significantly, ex federal employees. Thus they are familiar with the federal entities and their capabilities and able to jigsaw the NYPD capabilities to them. New York is a favorite terrorist target, but one of the reasons they have been able to resource such a sophisticated CT response is because of significantly reduced crime levels. NYPD also has plenary police powers. 
• Falkenrath's responsibilities are quite broad. His bureau is divided into four departments:
  • Counter  WMD which monitors radiation detection and bio detection
  • Office of Infrastructure Protection
  • A training section which trains 10,000 people a year - from "How to manage a intelligence informants" to "How to search a bag".
  • A special projects unit, managing special technology.
• NYPD has a counter terrorism coordinator who uses temporarily assigned police patrols to provide a presence at possible terrorist targets (which interestingly are in low crime areas). These forces also act as a response force for major incidents.
• Of note is the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which unusually now incorporates key private sector companies from the district who are integrated into the department to provide high levels of local awareness of threats.
• Falkenrath maintains a team of analysts, separate from his colleagues Intelligence bureau which monitors terrorist modus operandi or "terrorist trade-craft"
• Falkenrath assess that the rest of the US has lowered its concern of the terrorist threat, but assures us that NYPD has not.  He is concerned especially about "internal" threats from radicalized individuals. He believes that more work is needed to characterize the individual psychology of radicalization and resists taking responsibility for community wide anti-radicalization efforts.
• NYPD clearly has a capability for running intelligence driven CT surveillance programs with "operational patience".
• Highest threat is from explosive devices, not WMD (which are of course the highest consequence devices).  Highest threat globally is from radicalized islamists from Europe who have gone to Pakistan for training and encouragement. 
• He has two key current concerns:
  • The Obama administration change in policy compared to the previous administration's policy towards prosecution of terrorists, which is pulling resources from the JTTF to support prosecutions.
  • The Federal grant system which he believes has the balance wrong between "prevention" and "consequence management". He favors a balance towards the former.

Comments

[Roger]

I forgot to mention that Falkenrath makes an interesting comment in the Q&A session about Hezbollah's lack of response (so far) to the assassination of Imad Mugniyah a year last February.