Fighting the odds: Making NYC more secure

Even with more police, surveillance and experience with terrorism than any place in the country, Manhattan remains an inviting target.

The densely packed island's 19 entry points - four tunnels, three toll bridges and 12 free spans - have few defenses against the simplest of plots: a car bomb. The botched attempt on May 1 in Times Square proved how easy it is to drive explosives into America's financial and cultural capital.

Securing the crossings is a fight against overwhelming odds.

"It's a very porous city," said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. "Most democratic societies have open cities and that makes them hard to protect against any eventuality."

The failed bombing has spurred calls to beef up law enforcement's three-pronged strategy to protect routes that carry nearly 1 million vehicles into Manhattan daily: more manpower, technology so that even the unmanned entries are covered, and, most importantly, intelligence gathering that can actually prevent a plot before a terrorist strikes.

-Michael Amon, Alfonso A. Castillo, and Keith Herbert

NYC presents challenging security concerns, say experts

Is New York City secure enough?

For some experts, despite last weekend's bomb scare, the answer might be yes.

Adding additional security measures - more surveillance cameras, checkpoints and blockades to lock down critical areas of Manhattan - would be costly, would slow down traffic and commerce, and may not even be effective, experts said.

"Do you want to turn Times Square into an airport, where you have to go through a magnetometer, and no cars are allowed, and traffic gets backed up into New Jersey?" said Joseph King, a counterterrorism expert and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "We're used to a very free society, where everyone is free to walk about anywhere you want."

It was a sentiment echoed last week by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who spoke of plans to implement new security initiatives even as he urged New Yorkers to accept some level of uncertainty and go about their lives.

"There is a balance between being so safe that you can't go out of your house and enjoying the freedoms," he said, adding that "freedom to come and to go and to travel and to talk and to be in charge of your own destiny, always entails some risks. I feel safe letting my kids live here."

Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a group of business leaders, said one reason her organization opposed the Obama administration's proposal to have terror trials in Manhattan was that it would require a level of security that would keep the city from functioning.

"It would have forced lockdown conditions and interfered with normal life and business activity in the city," she said. "We do not think the circumstances warrant that."

One of the city's best security measures - and the one that may have worked in this case - is the vigilance of its citizens, Wylde said.

"I think the level of public awareness post-9/11 is so high that it allows us to keep a balance," she said - adding that if budget constraints lead to a decrease in the ranks of police, it could endanger the city. "If I were going to say what's the biggest threat, it would be a loss of resources for law enforcement and intelligence activity."

Even if money were no object, the kind of technology that could stop, say, a truck bombing in Times Square doesn't exist yet, said Jerry Hauer, a former director of New York City's Office of Emergency Management who worked later for the federal Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness.

"We have yet to come up with the technology that can detect explosives in a vehicle, in a truck, in a backpack, from a distance," Hauer said. "I just don't think we have the technology available to do what is necessary to protect the city."

Surveillance software that could pick up out-of-the-ordinary behavior in large crowds - such as a car stopping too long, or a suitcase left behind - would be needed to alert authorities to suspicious activity, he said. Sniffing out explosives doesn't work unless the explosive is extremely close to the sniffing device. Just filming it with cameras only works after the fact, many experts said.

-Melanie Lefkowitz

Gathering intelligence is key, experts say

Every day, New York City and Port Authority police get briefings from the CIA and other intelligence agencies and share information they have gathered. Supervisors check in with covert NYPD officers, who, like old-fashioned spies, are trying to infiltrate militant groups.

And, in a command center in Lower Manhattan, NYPD analysts study video from more than 3,000 cameras, looking for suspicious behavior and patterns that could portend a future attack.

Of the more than 1,100 officers devoted to counterterrorism duty in New York City, many are assigned to what security experts say is the job most crucial to protecting against terrorism: gathering intelligence to predict an attack.

"The most bang for your buck is in intelligence and surveillance, as opposed to just trying to screen everybody on an across-the-board basis," said Heather Mac Donald, a counterterrorism fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

One disturbing aspect of the attempted Times Square attack, experts said, was the lack of information presaging a car bombing in midtown Manhattan.

The NYPD wants to expand the extensive intelligence-gathering system in Manhattan's Financial District to midtown and most bridges and tunnels, giving them, in essence, a spy on every street corner and creating a "Ring of Steel" around obvious targets, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.

The plan is not simply designed to stop terrorist attacks in progress. It's also supposed to monitor suspicious behavior that could be a dry run, something accused Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad reportedly did before his failed attempt on May 1, officials said.

National security experts such as Stephen E. Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations said too much federal money goes to technology and not enough to manpower for intelligence-gathering and sharing before "the bad person, the SUV filled with explosives" rolls into Manhattan.

Said Flynn: "What you want is intelligence, like, 'There's a truck coming with tinted windows, be on the lookout for it.' "

-Michael Amon

NYPD last line of defense in NYC terror fight

The iconic Brooklyn Bridge is patrolled by the NYPD 24 hours a day, and a harbor patrol boat stands ready nearby. On the George Washington Bridge, at least two patrol cars monitor the 300,000 vehicles crossing the Hudson every day.

And, at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's four East River and Harlem River bridges and tunnels, about 900 officers take turns watching the exits and entrances.

Those officers - what counterterrorism experts call the "boots on the ground" approach - represent one of the last lines of defense against a vehicle carrying explosives into Manhattan.

MTA and Port Authority officials said they had enough officers to effectively secure their crossings - including the George Washington and other heavily traveled bridges and tunnels for the Hudson and the East rivers.

But the NYPD, which is responsible for Manhattan's 12 free bridges, does not have the resources to constantly watch all of them, especially the smaller Harlem River bridges that carry about 180,000 vehicles into Manhattan every day, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. Those bridges are periodically patrolled.

"If you had unlimited resources, it would always be great to have police at every crossing," Browne said. He added: "There is concern about our head count going down."

With the NYPD's sworn force down to 35,000 from a 2003 high of 40,800, the department this year is diverting about 10 percent of its uniformed anti-terrorism officers to conventional crime this year because homicides and other violent crime spiked, Browne said. The department deploys between 20 and 150 anti-terrorism patrols daily to protect crossings and other sensitive sites, Browne said.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly wants the Department of Homeland Security to change its grant-making rules to allow more funding for personnel, rather than equipment, Browne said. A homeland security spokesman noted that the agency paid $36 million recently to help the NYPD hire 128 officers for transit security.

Union officials representing MTA and Port Authority officers say both agencies need more officers at the river crossings. At MTA crossings, random checkpoints looking for suspicious vehicles replaced more frequent stops after 9/11, union officials said. MTA officials declined to comment.

Ernesto Butcher, chief operating officer of the Port Authority, defended current staffing, which he would not detail, saying police do "an effective job" of patrolling the bridge.

Port Authority spokesman John Kelly said the number of public safety workers has increased to 1,700 since 9/11, even as the total number of officers has declined. Public safety officers now comprise 24 percent of the workforce, up from 11 percent nine years ago.

-Keith Herbert

NYC officials seek high-tech means to fight terror

You may not always see someone around. But the major bridges and tunnels into and out of Manhattan are constantly under the watch of authorities using increasingly high-tech methods.

From a helicopter named "23" - in honor of the number of New York Police Department officers who died on Sept. 11 - a camera can zoom in from nearly a mile away and read letters on a worker's shirt on the George Washington Bridge.

At the Queens Midtown Tunnel, MTA Bridge and Tunnel Officers keep watch via dozens of cameras mounted in toll booths, near the toll plazas and in the tunnel. Tunnel ventilation buildings in Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood and Long Island City in Queens have cameras, motion detectors and listening devices monitored for intruders.

But with 19 ways into Manhattan, some of the smaller bridges over the Harlem River don't have 24-hour surveillance - something authorities want to change.

"There's a lot of crossings where you're not going to have a toll booth or necessarily a presence," NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. "You could use the technology to help you there."

The NYPD wants license-plate readers, radiation sensors, pop-up barriers to trap vehicles and security cameras that feed into the city's counterterrorism bureau - part of a midtown security initiative similar to one in lower Manhattan. A $24 million federal grant has started the project, but officials want more funding.

The high-tech gadgets are especially needed at the 12 free bridges for which the NYPD provides security, Browne said. Some bridges between the Bronx and Manhattan have only "dumb" surveillance cameras, he said, which can't be monitored live.

Highest on law enforcement officials' wish lists are radiation sensors. The NYPD has three of the $450,000 devices stationed at bridges and tunnels, and is seeking $20 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to buy about 40 more to place at most entrances and to use in sensitive areas as needed.

Some MTA Bridge and Tunnel officers carry portable radiation detectors, but Bridge & Tunnel Officers Benevolent Association vice president Greg Lombardi said detectors at tunnels and bridges are needed.

The Obama administration has opposed putting more money into the grant program, called Securing the Cities. Department of Homeland Security spokesman Clark Stevens said the program was authorized for three years ending in 2010 and still has $37 million, which may be allocated for radiation sensors.

"In 2011, DHS plans to support a full-scale exercise in the New York City region to assess the effectiveness of Securing the Cities," Stevens said in a statement.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates Hudson River crossings, has its own plans to upgrade surveillance and detection equipment as part of a $326-million plan for "critical capital projects," authority spokesman John P. Kelly said. He would not specify how much would go to equipment for the bridges and tunnels.

-Alfonso A. Castillo