Despite the good police work in the New York City attempted terrorist bombing, while an “agile terrorist network is preparing the next strike [] our loping, bureaucratic network is still too much a work in progress,” former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton writes in the New York Daily News. Bratton notes that we narrowly escaped a “massive fireball rolling across the heart of the theater district leaving New Yorkers and tourists dead or burned” that “would have had an effect that went beyond the casualties of the wreckage and smoke.”
The New York plot “failed not because we did everything right [but] because the terrorists made technical errors in bomb-making,” Bratton said. “Nine years after 9/11, we still face challenges in sharing across our network. The [Detroit] Christmas plot showed that while we collect massive amounts of data, we don’t always know what we know. State and local authorities still believe that not enough information is shared with them.” Meanwhile, “Cash-strapped cities are cutting funds for police counterterrorism because we haven’t been attacked – and the federal system takes too long to right the inequities among its 16 intelligence agencies.”