New York city, like the rest of the United States, prides itself that it has been able to prevent another terrorist attack after 9/11. A key factor that’s helped is the effort put in by its police force to anticipate threats and try and stay one step ahead of potential attackers.

With the terror strikes in Mumbai sparking fears of copycat attacks in the West, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has not wasted time in sending a team to Mumbai to study the attacks for lessons New York can learn.

A three-member team of NYPD investigators was here for a week gathering information about the methods used by the attackers, the response of local security agencies and emergency services and problems faced during their bid to end the three-day siege.

Such was the urgency of the mission that the team did not even wait to return to New York to brief the city’s stakeholders. A teleconference was organised and about 400 senior security officials and business leaders gathered at the NYPD headquarters to be updated from Mumbai.

“New York has not suffered another terror attack since 9/11 but that does not mean terrorist groups have stopped plotting against large metropolitan cities,” Paul Browne, NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, told The Indian Express. “That is the obvious first lesson we learnt from our experience.”

Although NYPD investigators have visited nearly a dozen terror-hit cities around the world such as London, Madrid, Moscow and Amman, Mumbai was unique as it had many things in common with New York, Browne said.

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