The team of police officers crisscrosses down a New York City block, bracing for a potential firefight with heavily armed suspects who have taken hostages inside a building.
“We know there are hostages in there,” Lieutenant Kenneth Beatty warns while supervising the operation. “The number’s unknown.”
It’s not real, but it’s not a standard training session, either.
PHOTO: AP
Local authorities believe New York City could be a potential target of militants trained and supplied as well as those who staged coordinated attacks in Mumbai last November, and New York Police Department leaders are determined not to be outgunned.
“Terrorists are thinking creatively about new tactics,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said last week at a City Council public safety hearing. “So must we.”
The largest US police department launched a counterterrorism initiative this month to train a new team of officers with semiautomatic rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets.
The officers also are being trained in tactics for close quarters combat and rescuing hostages in hotels and other high-rise buildings.
After the three-day assault in Mumbai on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other sites in November left 164 people dead, the NYPD dispatched investigators to India to see if there were any security lessons for New York. They were struck by how the 10 shooters calmly caused so much mayhem by relying on cellphone communication and Chinese knockoff AK-47s. The local police and security officers, they said, were clearly overwhelmed.
“Their weapons were not sufficiently powerful and they were not trained for that type of conflict,” Kelly said. “It took more than 12 hours for properly armed Indian commandos to arrive.”
The NYPD’s 400 Emergency Service Unit officers already can carry fully automatic Colt M4 rifles — what the manufacturer bills as “the weapon of the 21st century soldier.”
But post-Mumbai, the department decided to train about 130 reinforcements from its Organized Crime Control Bureau with Ruger Mini-14s in case a militant force even larger than the one that struck India’s financial capital invaded here. Police academy recruits will get a tutorial on how to secure assault weapons recovered in combat situations or, in a pinch, how to shoot them.
The NYPD also has begun videotaping the interiors of large hotels so emergency service officers can learn their layouts and match wits with terrorists who, as in Mumbai, may have done surveillance.
In addition, Kelly told the city council that the police want to explore ways to disrupt cell phone service “in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them.”
The training session last week took place at the police department’s firearms training facility on a desolate, wind-swept peninsula in the borough of the Bronx.
The street the officers crisscrossed is the NYPD version of a movie studio back lot, with mock street signs, cinderblock storefronts, even a yellow cab and city bus. The guns can’t fire. The hostages are played by other officers.
Instructors drilled officers on how to rescue hostages while giving each other cover.
They warned that terrorists could try to blend in with victims. Any lapse in concentration could prove deadly.
“You guys have to communicate!” one instructor yelled as the officers secured a darkened stairwell as an escape route.
At a nearby firing range, another set of officers used their assault weapons to blast away at targets. They would shoot 600 rounds over two days to complete the training.
Some of the guns were purposely rigged to suddenly fire blanks — a signal to the officers to practice dropping a jammed weapon and immediately draw their semiautomatic pistols and keep shooting.
The exercise was another sign of a new era in policing, said Assistant Chief George Anderson, commanding officer of the police academy.
“We’ve always been prepared to deal with criminals, not terrorists,” Anderson said. “Now we have to go to the next level.”
China’s military yesterday showed off its machine-gun equipped robot battle “dogs” at the start of its biggest ever drills with Cambodian forces. More than 2,000 troops, including 760 Chinese military personnel, are taking part in the drills at a remote training center in central Kampong Chhnang Province and at sea off Preah Sihanouk Province. The 15-day exercise, dubbed Golden Dragon, also involves 14 warships — three from China — two helicopters and 69 armored vehicles and tanks, and includes live-fire, anti-terrorism and humanitarian rescue drills. The hardware on show included the so-called “robodogs” — remote-controlled four-legged robots with automatic rifles mounted on their
A Philippine boat convoy bearing supplies for Filipino fishers yesterday said that it was headed back to port, ditching plans to sail to a reef off the Southeast Asian country after one of their boats was “constantly shadowed” by a Chinese vessel. The Atin Ito (“This Is Ours”) coalition convoy on Wednesday set sail to distribute fuel and food to fishers and assert Philippine rights in the disputed South China Sea. “They will now proceed to the Subic fish port to mark the end of their successful mission,” the group said in a statement. A Philippine Coast Guard vessel escorting the convoy was
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
STREET WATCH: Residents watched over barricades blocking roads and flew white flags to show that they intended to keep an eye on their neighborhoods France yesterday deployed troops to New Caledonia’s ports and international airport, banned TikTok and imposed a state of emergency after three nights of clashes that have left four dead and hundreds wounded. Pro-independence, largely indigenous protests against a French plan to impose new voting rules on its Pacific archipelago have spiraled into the deadliest violence since the 1980s, with a police officer among several killed by gunfire. On roads, the torched detritus amassed over four days of unrest was scattered amid fist-size hunks of rock and cement that appeared to have been flung during riots. Armored vehicles roved the city’s palm-lined boulevards, usually