NEW YORK CITY — NYPD police chief Bill Bratton announced the NYPD will add 450 officers to its counterterrorism division.
Speaking in a radio interview he said “We need to be very concerned about terrorism … The significantly increased threat from ISIS using social media to recruit people not only to go to Syria to fight, but encouraging people … to attack police, to attack government officials, to basically brainwash them under their screwed-up ideology. That threat has expanded significantly in the now 16 months I’ve been police commissioner.”
He told listeners that he has officially requested the extra staff to tackle the threat saying:
“We’re treating that threat so seriously, I’m going to put another 450 police officers – if we get the approval to increase the size of the police force – and I need to do it very very quickly – into our counterterrorism operations to increase the ability of our officers to protect critical sites around the city. Or, if we were to have an incident, so I’d have a lot more officers in the streets with the appropriate equipment to deal with active shooters or hostage situations.”
In April two women from Queens were arrested on terrorism charges for plotting to carry out a bomb attack in the US. At the same time a woman from Philadelphia was arrested on charges of attempting to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State.
Bratton will likely receive backlash from Mayor de Blasio. The NYPD already employs 35,000 officers, and the mayor has indicated that he believes that number to be adequate.
“This year…the NYPD is going to be a lot stronger than it was because it is going to be better trained than it was a year or two ago,” de Blasio said, stressing that lower crime rates are an indicator that the police force’s numbers are adequate.
