Anti-terror patrols give a city the jitters

After the New York City Marathon a few Sundays ago, we waited for the crowds to disperse on the West Side and then we cut over to a park near the Hudson River. It was unusually warm and soon the neighborhood kids found one another for touch football and soccer. The adults lolled around the field, watching the kids skid in the mud against a red autumn sunset.

Out of nowhere two police officers, a burly man and a smallish woman, appeared on the field. In one motion he boosted her up a tree and waved away the children. Then a suitcase dropped from the tree. All conversation stopped as if we were waiting for something else to happen. But there was only a mental jolt -- back into the reality of the new New York.

It occurred to me then how much time New Yorkers have spent since Sept. 11 watching legions of newly trained eyes watching for terror. The New York City police are attempting to perfect the art of surveillance. We read about covert investigations of would-be terrorists and of multiple arrests, and we hear reports of Al Qaeda operatives still in the shadows. We stay orange even when the feds say go yellow. And as we go about our lives, it’s hard not to watch the watchers and wonder if anything can make a difference.

The cops make sure we regularly trip over whole layers of their security activities that are intended partly as a public relations ploy to keep New Yorkers alert and partly to bully the enemy into believing the cops are on the ball.

On the way to the cash machine, we pass formidable officers in combat gear on foot patrol in front of a Bank of America. Crossing the street to get to work, we have to wait for a fleet of blue and white patrol cars racing en masse through Times Square on a “surge” exercise to protect landmark sites from terrorist attacks.

For New Yorkers, it’s at once alarming and comforting. The displays of force, so obvious when President Bush is in town or during the Republican National Convention, are now integrated into the everyday bustle. We have been eased into this, but some days it just catches you.

Everyone, it seems, has observed this in action.

A middle-aged friend, a lifelong New Yorker, takes a brisk walk on the river most mornings. Unlike the joggers indifferent to the world around them, he is drawn to the romance of the waterfront. He stops and watches and savors. But as of late, his postcard views are littered with many more official boats crowding the river.

There used to be the occasional rescue mission -- a cop fishing out a “floater” on the Hudson banks. Now police boats idle all morning among the currents or hover behind cruise ships as they pull into port. Probably a good idea, my friend thinks, recalling the small boat laden with explosives that detonated beside the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Paul J. Browne, an NYPD deputy police commissioner, confirms this hunch. There are now 38 police boats and several Coast Guard cutters in the rivers. They work in conjunction with helicopters to keep watch on New York’s waterways.

Another example: Two cops are walking down the middle of 46th Street in the Theater District at about 7 on a Tuesday evening. They look like they’re writing tickets, but then one motions to me as I’m pulling out of a spot. “Put on your seat belts,” he says, pointing at me and my passenger.

I laugh, relieved but also amazed about how much has changed since the days of “Midnight Cowboy,” when dopers and hookers were the problem around here, not seat belt shirkers. My passenger isn’t laughing: “He wasn’t looking at your seat belt. He was looking at us. And the car. Yes, they even use Volvos for car bombs.”

Again, Browne confirms a citizen’s hunch: “You shoulda had on your belt. But that’s right, we keep an eye on areas close to landmarks and likely targets. We know from the Madrid bombing that a strategy is to assemble bombs nearby and then go in.”

One more: If you happen to be in the insecticide business, you noticed a New York cop at the last trade show. There were speeches about fire ants and other pests but a detective also cruised the booths in the convention hall giving little spiels about strangers who might ask about easy techniques for spraying chemicals.

Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner who took office five months after Sept. 11, hired a guy who had worked at the CIA for 35 years as his top manager in this area. Kelly has reorganized and vastly beefed up the fight in New York. There are 36,000 police officers in the force, but hundreds have been redeployed to do anti-terrorism work. NYPD detectives are also in London, Lyon, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Montreal and Toronto to keep up with new techniques for fighting terrorism.

Part of the mind-set among cops and even regular New Yorkers is a grudging respect for the enemy. We know that Al Qaeda, known as AQ in the department, is watching us, recording minutiae about life here. After an operative was arrested last year, the police learned that not only were AQ surveillance teams counting guards in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but they also were noting how many chairs were assembled around the table in the main boardroom. “They’re patient, they’re resilient and they’re not giving up,” says Browne.

The police would like to enlist the 8 million sets of eyes watching them to watch for this new breed of criminals. “If you see something, say something,” says the slogan plastered all over New York City subways. The cops covet the tips that come in on the mayor’s 311 hotline. Still, this city has long been wired to fight crime differently.

Before, the police were always thinking about 8 million people with 8 million reasons to commit a crime. Now they are also forced to worry about one guy or group of guys wanting to kill us all. So they need more and better-trained shoe leather. Because Washington isn’t sending enough cash for overtime, the police complain, increasingly they are reliant on the public.

The team approach

Lt. Chris Higgins is the detective who oversees the most obvious anti-terrorism operations. He runs Hercules teams, those helmeted cops who carry submachine guns and show up unexpectedly with detectives and bomb-sniffing dogs at prime targets on different days.

He also choreographs the so-called critical response vehicle surges: Seventy-six police cars, each from a different precinct in the five boroughs, converge in one spot, park “combat style,” which means with their back wheels on the sidewalk, and then all at once take off to different sites in the financial district or to landmark buildings in midtown or potential targets such as the historic Central Synagogue on Lexington Avenue or St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Terrorists might be watching so the cops spend an hour scouting around, looking like they mean business, all in full view of regular New Yorkers. “I always instruct the precinct cops assigned to this force to interact with the public,” says Higgins. “We want high visibility.”

They got that right. When the police first started these surge exercises last summer in preparation for the GOP convention, it was positively bizarre. It looked like a police funeral on fast-forward or one of those May Day parades in the old Soviet Union. Now it’s an everyday occurrence.

Last week Dale Hubler, a 27-year-old tourist from Warsaw, Ind., population 12,415, happened upon 30 police cars taking off down 42nd Street between 7th and 8th avenues. “Wow,” he said, his mouth agape, his camera ready, “what the heck is going on?” A friendly inspector stopped to explain. But dozens of passing New Yorkers didn’t bother to even look up from the sidewalk.

Still, the NYPD thinks this “display of readiness” is valuable both as a training tool for precinct cops and as a way of intimidating potential AQ operatives who want to create havoc here or, as Osama bin Laden put it in his latest video message, want “to bleed” the United States economy. “I study his words closely,” says Higgins. “It’s funny how he refers to ‘Manhattan’ like he is so comfortable with our culture.”

As a New Yorker, it’s hard to imagine that anything can stop the inevitable in this porous metropolis, even if we all do our part. The suitcase-up-a-tree was reported to police by two young women who’d been walking in the park that beautiful Sunday afternoon. In another era, it would have been assumed the suitcase contained anything but a bomb; that day we adults were sure it was going to explode in our faces. Instead, it was just a homeless guy’s clever ploy to keep his belongings safe. Like we used to be.