New York City Police learns lessons from Mumbai attack

Drawing lessons from Mumbai terror attacks, New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly said he is looking into technologies that can disrupt cell phones and other communication devices of the terrorists in a pinpointed manner at the time of such attacks.
    
"When lives are at stake, law enforcement needs to find ways to disrupt cell phones and other communications in a pin-pointed way against terrorists using them," Kelly told members of the US Senate during a Congressional hearing on Mumbai terrorist attacks.
    
Testifying before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs on lessons learned from the Mumbai terrorist attack, New York City police commissioner said his department was also looking into media coverage of such attacks.
    
We have entered into some kind of understanding with the local media about coverage of such attacks. But that is on an ad-hoc basis, he added.
    
Observing that there were similarities between Mumbai and New York -- country's financial capital, densely populated, multi-cultural metropolis, a hub for entertainment industry, and also a port city - Kelly said, the NYPD has taken the Mumbai attack very seriously and already has had several round of exercises based on the lessons learned from India's 9/11.
    
NYPD has also visited several major hotels to document the walkthroughs on video camera, filming entrances and exits, lobbies, unoccupied guest rooms, and banquet halls.
    
"We plan to use the videos as training tools. Further hundreds of private security cameras were now being monitored at a newly opened coordination center in downtown Manhattan," he said, adding the NYPD has taken a number of steps to train more of its personnel in use of latest and heavy equipments.

"In an active shooting incident such as we saw in Mumbai, by far the greatest number of casualties occur in the first minutes of the attack."
    
Part of the reason the members of Lashkar-e-Taiba were able to inflict severe casualties was that, for the most part, the local police did not engage them. Their weapons were not sufficiently powerful and they were not trained for that type of conflict," Kelly said, adding in mid December, the police recruits received training about the operating system of three types of heavy weapons.
    
Given that New York was on top of the agenda of the terrorists, three senior officials were sent to Mumbai on December 1 to gather as much information as possible about the tactics used in the attack.
    
"In Mumbai, our officers toured crime scenes, took photographs, and asked questions of police officials," he added.
    
Giving a detailed analysis from the perspective of the New York City Police Department, he said one of the most important aspects of this attack was the shift in tactics from suicide bombs to a commando-style military assault with small teams of highly trained, heavily armed operatives launching simultaneous, sustained attacks.
    
"They fanned out across the city in groups of two and four. They carried AK-56 assault rifles, a Chinese manufactured copy of the Russian AK-47. It holds a 30-round magazine with a firing rate of 600 to 650 rounds per minute."
    
In addition, the terrorists each carried a duffel bag loaded with extra ammunition, an average of 300 to 400 rounds contained in as many as 12 magazines, along with half a dozen grenades, and one plastic explosive, or IED," he said.
    
Kelly said the attackers displayed a sophisticated level of training, coordination, and stamina. They fired in controlled, disciplined bursts.