The suicide bombings in London and Egypt this week aren’t quite a wake up call to U.S. police officials, who always feared it could happen here.
It’s someone shaking them and pulling them out of bed:
Inside a former Starbucks warehouse, this city’s bomb squad headquarters, the police chief and 15 captains and sergeants – accompanied by a robot that can extract explosives from packages and pin down a suspect – huddled the other day to tackle a topic suddenly urgent to the police across the nation: suicide bombers.
“Now it’s really time,” the chief, Gil Kerlikowske, told his commanders. “It almost seems to be a question of when in this country, not a question of if, after London.”
So now someone has said it: it’s more than just a possibility.
FOOTNOTE FROM SAN DIEGO: In the immediate aftermath of 911, loud helicopters would fly over TMV’s condo at night conducting security patrols. These stopped after a while. Now they have STARTED UP AGAIN. With the events in London, is the U.S. in a heightened state of alert that’s greater than what the public has been told? More from the New York Times:
Across the country, police departments large and small are preparing for a possibility once thought improbable and now feared to be inevitable. On Thursday, the day of four attempted explosions in the London subways, the New York City police began randomly searching bags and backpacks at subway stations and other travel hubs.
In Miami, the police chief returned recently from a conference in England and Scotland that included a long session on suicide bombers. Several officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department returned last Thursday after spending a week with the British authorities studying terrorism responses, department officials there said.
A growing number of police departments, including ones in Seattle; Boston; Los Angeles; Washington; Suffolk County, N.Y.; and Sterling Heights, Mich., a small city north of Detroit, are also turning for guidance to the place many police officials consider the pinnacle of terrorism training. They are sending groups of officers to Israel and bringing Israeli officers to the United States to train the police on the harrowing science of suicide bomber intelligence gathering and apprehension.
Several American police officials said advice from the Israelis had included looking out for suicide bomber “handlers,” who scout bus stations or other crowded areas for deadly attacks. And although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso.
So note that there is a possiblity that U.S. police officials will face the same dilemma that police in London faced, with tragic consquences: combating suicide bombers requires not only split decisions on the part of the police but common sense on the part of citizens stopped by, questioned or confronted by police. MORE:
But the growing relationship between Israeli and United States law enforcement, expanding now after the London bombings, has prompted criticism among some Muslim groups, who say they fear that American police officers will engage in religious or ethnic profiling.
Some officials talk about receiving reports from the public about what the police refer to as “M.E.W.C.’s” – Middle Eastern with a camera – perhaps taking pictures of a bridge, a hydropower plant or a reservoir.
“Israel’s antiterror tactics are largely based on profiling, whether it’s on airlines or at checkpoints,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, based in Washington. “And they’ve produced tremendous resentment and hostility in the Palestinian population through humiliating tactics and through abuses on a daily basis. And I don’t think that’s something we want to replicate.”
But Chief Kerlikowske told the Times that none of the discussions have dealt with profiling — a statement that will once again ignite the arguments that profiling is, in fact, important given the nature of the present war on terrorism.
So an emerging question may be: it’s like the Boy Scouts always said. Be Prepared. But does that also mean be prepared to do non-PC profiling if it is, in fact, what is needed in the present war declared on the United States on 911?
Meanwhile, the Times reports that the National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board is drafting the first national protocol for “suicide bomber response” that’ll be given out to bomb squads all over the country.
So you have the traditional bombs…and the PC bomb…
UPDATE:— Reliapundit informs us that there’s a new blog where Muslims can register their total opposition to terror. Check it out here.
—Michelle Malkin has some comments on this story including:”Many of the police departments mentioned in the story continue to maintain reckless sanctuary policies; other moonbat cities, like Portland, Oregon, refuse to cooperate with federal counterterrorism efforts. The Times, of course, neglects to point any of this out–instead highlighting the fact that Seattle’s police chief refuses to engage in any kind of national security profiling.
—Here’s one guy who got off relatively easy (with his life) after tempting fate and the police:
New York – A man who triggered a bomb scare and the evacuation of New York’s Penn Station has been arraigned on charges of making a terrorist threat and falsely reporting an incident, prosecutors said Monday.
Raul Claudio, 43, was arrested on Sunday following a dispute with a train ticket agent, during which he placed a bag on a counter and said there was a bomb inside…..
Claudio had reportedly become enraged when the ticket agent could not retrieve his reservation. He faces a maximum jail sentence of seven years on each charge.
Following his arraignment, Claudio remained in police custody Monday, having failed to make bail set at 15 000 dollars, a Manhattan District Attorney spokeswoman said.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.