Of Cops and Candidates

While the distracted debate about national security continues sporadically at the stratospheric level on the campaign trail, at NYPD headquarters, mercifully, the clouds of hot air are coming off the top of coffee cups. Paranoid theorizing about what "must be going on" in the Muslim world are played down and the phrase "global war on terror" is spoken only rarely, and often then with irony.

"We're not in the 'must be going on' business, we're in the business of what is going on," said David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, when I saw him in his office the other day. "We have made our bones on a very traditional low-technology intelligence program where the emphasis is on human talent and accountability." Cohen smiled and sipped his coffee from a mug that bore the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he used to be in charge of all clandestine activities. In that bureaucracy, accountability was harder to come by, so Cohen is enthusiastic when he credits Kelly for the very un-federal effectiveness of the NYPD. "You get decisions, and he doesn't look back," said Cohen.

As we talked, a television screen on the wall showed Pakistan in flames. When news had broken the previous morning that Benazir Bhutto was killed, the NYPD, now well accustomed to the repercussions of events on the other side of the world, took several measures "almost on automatic pilot," said Cohen. Some 100,000 Pakistanis live in New York City. They're concentrated in three precincts in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The morning of the assassination, people from the intel division briefed the cops who'd be patrolling in those precincts about the background of the Bhutto killing and told them to be ready for emotional reactions, but not to overreact themselves. Meanwhile, extra police were deployed to guard Pakistani diplomatic posts, the Pakistani airline offices and Pakistani owned banks around the city.

That same morning of the Bhutto assassination, at the 9 o'clock meeting that Kelly holds daily with Cohen and Richard Falkenrath, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, those three already were looking at the incident's impact on future threats to New York. "The challenge that Pakistan has for us in New York City is that it has, reportedly, 60 nuclear weapons, and it has 10,000 madrassas," said Cohen. "To me, that brackets the concern." The fact that many of the students being radicalized in those religious schools come from countries other than Pakistan is a further complication. So is the development of "homegrown" terrorist cells of people with roots in Pakistan (and in this context Cohen included what's going on in Great Britain as "homegrown" since visas are not typically required of British citizens coming to the States). When I asked Cohen whom he thought was behind the Bhutto killing, which was the subject of endless speculation on the news, he said the fact didn't matter as much as perceptions: who would be blamed, who might be targeted for retaliation as a result, and would that have repercussions in his city.

It's not a pretty picture, but it's a clear appreciation of what is known, what it is possible to know and what it is possible to do, which is the way police think about security, and the way presidents ought to think about it, too.

© 2008