NEW YORK– The team of police officers crisscrosses down a New York City block, bracing for a potential firefight with heavily armed suspects who’ve taken hostages inside a building.
NEW YORK– The team of police officers crisscrosses down a New York City block, bracing for a potential firefight with heavily armed suspects who’ve taken hostages inside a building.
“We know there are hostages in there,” Lt. Kenneth Beatty warns while supervising the operation. “The number’s unknown.”
It’s not real, but it’s not a standard training session either.
Local authorities believe New York City could be a potential target of militants trained and supplied as well as those who carried out the Mumbai terror attack last November, and NYPD 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 nation’s largest 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 with how the 10 shooters calmly caused so much mayhem by relying on cell phone communication and Chinese knockoff AK-47s. The local police and security officers, they said, were clearly overwhelmed.
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