New York City is safer from terrorism than it was prior to Sept. 11th, 2001 — but the threat of another deadly strike remains, former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told
Newsmax TV on the 13th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.
"We’re definitely safer. We've done an awful lot. No city has done what New York City has done," said on Newmax's "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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"We've invested a lot of money and over 1,000 police officers everyday do counterterrorism work, so we are much safer than we were.
"But as so many people have said, we're not safe because the risk is out there and comes from many different quarters."
Those include so-called "lone wolf" plots in which one person is involved as well as schemes hatched by organized groups, according to Kelly.
"We see ISIS now emerging. We know that there are, significant terrorist operations in Yemen, in Nigeria with Boko Haram, in Somalia with al-Shabaab," he said.
Kelly, the city's longest-serving police commissioner, served from 1992 to 1994 and 2002 to 2013, during which the World Trade Center was attacked twice.
He has been credited with introducing state-of-the-art law enforcement techniques to keep the metropolitan area safe from terror plots.
"I had a very skilled group of executives that I was able to put together — people from in the department and people from outside the department that we brought in," Kelly said.
Those law enforcement specialists included CIA and FBI officials and U.S. Marines.
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"We put together this operation, this plan, and were able to get it in place fairly quickly and the people in the department certainly fell into line," he said.
"I thought there might be some resistance bringing in all this civilian leadership that ... [but there] really wasn't. We knew, the city knew that it was at risk and the police officers were tremendous."
Kelly — now President of Risk Management for Cushman & Wakefield, the world's largest privately-held commercial real estate services firm — said the nation is also at risk for cyberattacks.
"We can't rule it out, it's certainly a possibility … This is a difficult time and it's only going to get more difficult as far as the cyber threat is concerned,'' he said.
"It's more complex, you set up your defenses to take care of everything … It's expensive to protect a company from a cyber-intrusion."
Asked about a probe the NFL has ordered into its handling of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice — cut from the team and indefinitely suspended after a video of him beating his wife-to-be emerged — Kelly said.
"Getting Bob Mueller to do the investigation was a terrific move. Bob, a former Marine by the way, [was] the head of the FBI for 12 years and he's a lawyer and brings the law firm with him.
"They've had previous experience with the NFL so it all seems to fit nicely, Bob Mueller will call it as he sees it … He's the guy who will get the answers."
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