What to know about Long Island and NYC security efforts amid war in Iran

Officer patrols, police dogs, drones and a helicopter are being deployed as security precautions in Nassau County to avoid potential local retaliation over the United States' and Israel's ongoing bombing of Iran.

Local measures are focused on houses of worship, popular gathering spots, and places of mass gatherings, particularly Monday night at Jewish institutions celebrating the holiday of Purim, as well as at mosques and Islamic schools, according to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who spoke about the county's security efforts at a news conference Monday afternoon.

"People sometimes lash out in different ways that's not anticipated," Blakeman said. "Whether it's Christian, Muslim or Jewish, Sikh, whatever, we will be out doing stops at all of those institutions to make sure that we have a presence and that we keep them informed."

Stepped-up security

As is typical when an international conflict could reverberate locally, authorities across Long Island, New York City and beyond said they have stepped-up security to deter, detect, and combat terrorism and other violence.

There are no known credible local threats, officials have said.

This past weekend, Nassau's county police force made 1,500 visits to potentially vulnerable sites, said Patrick Ryder, the police commissioner, at the news conference with Blakeman.

Both men urged those celebrating Purim — where costumes are traditionally worn — to avoid wearing face masks when traveling to or from holiday celebrations, and promised that the police would stop anyone masked in public.

"We want to be able to identify everybody," Blakeman said. "We will stop anybody who has a mask, just as we normally do."

In the aftermath of past terrorist attacks, such as one in 2016 in Belgium that killed dozens, similar directives against public masking during Purim have been given.

Blakeman said that Nassau had been threatened in the past but was not specific.

'Proactive steps'

Michael Martino, a spokesperson for Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine, cited a statement over the weekend from Romaine and the county’s police force that patrols were being stepped up at government buildings, "critical infrastructure" and religious institutions.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the NYPD and other agencies were "taking proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution."

Stepping up patrols and putting into place other counterterrorism measures involves hundreds and potentially thousands of police officers, according to John Miller, the police department's former deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism who as a journalist once interviewed Osama bin Laden.That includes hundreds in the NYPD's Critical Response Command, which, according to a 2019 department Facebook post, is "one of the NYPD's first lines of defense against a terrorist attack" and does "daily counterterrorism deployments to critical infrastructure sites."

Hundreds more officers who are ordinarily regular, uniformed cops with jobs in places like precincts but who go through a counterterrorism training program, can be called in; 600 or 700 in the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, Miller said.

Among potential targets the police plan to respond to include houses of worship, government facilities, crowded locations, or places with symbolic meaning, such as the Statue of Liberty, Times Square and Rockefeller Center, he said.

Threat-based protection

The Critical Response Command deploys officers on fixed posts and in "striker teams, which are roving teams that might go between two or three locations in proximity to each other."

So-called Hercules Teams, who stand outside potential targets, are sentry "with the long guns, with the vests, with the rifles," Miller said.

 Locations are chosen based on department analysis of threats, because, "as Sun Tzu said, ‘he who protects everything protects nothing,’" he said. 

It’s not just specialized counterterrorism teams who are involved in averting a local attack.

Miller said each precinct also has a house-of-worship patrol car, and "they’ll be going back and forth among the religious institutions, scanning for things like, what are major times of worship, or special worships where they’re going to get larger crowds? And then they can call for additional resources."

Sal Lifrieri, a retired police officer who was in the NYPD’s intelligence division, whose jobs included undertaking threat assessments, said that behind the scenes, analysts and officers are crunching case information and intelligence information "that you believe might be something that would be the start of a potential attack."

"If you have active cases going or active surveillance going, you start looking at those areas, at those people," he said. "You take a harder look." 

Miller noted that there are finite resources, and ordinary policing doesn't stop.

"That also means there’s a city of 8 and a half million people that still needs policing. People will still call 911, there will still be emergencies, there will still be nonemergencies where people expect a response," he said. "And that’s the kind of thing where, when you start to scrape the bottom of your personnel numbers you just have to account with overtime."