As the nation's top terror target, New York City is always on the offensive gathering intelligence and having a large force ready to take to the streets, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton said on Sunday.
The city has almost a thousand people permanently assigned to counterterrorism, and has 35,000 able to ramp up quickly, as has been seen since Friday night's terror attack on Paris, Bratton said on ABC's
"This Week"
"We now have a 500-person unit in our counterterrorism bureau that is specially equipped, long guns, heavy vests, vehicles that are prepared to go in and protect locations with the ability to go into locations that are under attack," he said.
"Additionally we have another 800-person unit that we've created similarly armed and equipped that also capable of that type of activity," he added. "At any given time I've got 400 to 500 officers in the city equipped like that. No American city has that capability."
Still, he admitted, "You can't protect everything," as was seen in Paris with an attack on a music concert where people were gunned down one-by-one. One suicide bomber was stopped by security trying to get inside a nearby soccer match and detonated his bomb outside the venue.
The New York Police Department told Reuters on Saturday it had officers from its Counterterrorism Response Command and other special units deployed in areas frequented by tourists, and at the French Consulate in Manhattan.
"One of the things we attempt to do is to protect the larger venues, Times Square, for example, or, in this case of this issue, all of the French entities in the city," Bratton said on Sunday.
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