NYC Police Commissioner Says All Roads Lead to New York City When It Comes to Terrorism

The Al Qaeda published magazine
Inspire included the U.S. Open, held in Flushing Meadows,
Queens, every August, on a “wish list” of terrorist targets, the
director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police
Department (NYPD)
told the city’s “private security community” at a briefing
today.

The NYPD stressed there’s no specific threat they know of
against the U.S. Open but Bill Bratton, New York’s once and again
police commissioner, warned that New York is a top target. “Two
thousand years ago, the expression was ‘all roads lead to Rome,'”
he said. “Well, in 2014, as it relates to this subject matter,
terrorism, unfortunately all roads lead to New York City.”

In 2012, the most recent year for which data is available from
the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism, the top three countries where terrorism
occurred were Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan, which accounted for
55 percent of all terrorist attacks, followed by India and Nigeria.
About 8,500 people died in terrorist attacks in those five
countries in 2012.

By contrast, fewer than 3,500 people died in terrorism attacks
in the United States between 1970 and 2010, nearly 3,000 of them on
the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.  Those
attacks were unprecedented in U.S. history and as Ronald Bailey

estimated in a 2011 column, even taking into account every
plausible attack allegedly prevented by counterterrorism
 efforts, Americans had only a 1 in 1.7 million chance of
dying in a terrorist attack.

Nevertheless, New York is the most populous city in the Western
world and as former mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted has
the seventh largest army in the world. The idea that all
terrorist roads lead to New York City is not a necessary one for
adequate counterterrorism measures. It does, however, fuel the
desire to maintain such a large militarized force in America’s
largest city and even to
operate it as an intelligence agency that targets Muslims for
surveillance, just like the federal ones do.