NYPD expanding counter-terrorist training after Paris terror attacks

NEW YORK (WABC) -- The NYPD is ramping up its counter-terrorist strategy, expanding training to be on guard not just for attacks by terrorist organizations, but after last week's massacres in Paris, also from small-cell terrorist attacks.

The NYPD is on high alert, striking a defensive posture that in the coming weeks will grow even more intense.

"There's a number of efforts that were underway before the events that have now been accelerated or expanded upon," said Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

Bratton is accelerating those plans after yet another alleged lone wolf terror plot.

An Ohio man is accused of plotting a Paris-style siege on the U.S. Capitol, and with so many more self-directed would-be attackers, this week the FBI Director held a conference call with police chiefs nationwide, urging extra vigilance.

"There's no city in America that has more resources committed to this issue than New York," said Bratton.

The NYPD already experienced one lone wolf act of terror in November, when a man who police say sympathized with ISIS attacked four officers with a hatchet in Queens.

Now Bratton says they'll expand the number of cops trained in heavy weapons, to respond to potential active shooter attacks like the one in Paris.

They'll be issuing new guidelines to every police officer, as their intelligence gathering continues with several officers in Paris doing more than paying condolences.

They've also been walking the crime scenes themselves and sharing information with their Parisian counterparts, in the ongoing race to keep New Yorkers safe.

"The French police services have brought them to the scenes of the incidents, have walked them through, we are receiving a lot of additional intelligence and insights. It also allows us to develop much closer relationships with our French counterparts than we had before," said Bratton.

Bratton noted more officers will be trained like the NYPD's elite Emergency Services Unit, which responds to the most dangerous calls, such as shootings and terror attacks.

More officers will be trained with "better weapons and better tactics," Bratton said. The new training builds on an effort that began in 2009 after a three-day assault in Mumbai on luxury hotels, a Jewish center and other sites in November left 164 people dead. At the time the department trained an additional 130 officers on how to use semi-automatic rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets in close-quarters combat, and on how to rescue hostages in hotels and other high-rise buildings.

Bratton added, without elaboration, that a number of other initiatives were in the works that would expand on "both our deterrents and our response capabilities."

"We do remain, because of who we are and what we are in this city, the No. 1 terrorist target in the world," he said. "It hasn't changed in the past year. It's expanded because terrorism has expanded."

In the aftermath of last week's attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and later a kosher supermarket that left 17 people dead, the NYPD went on high alert, mobilizing armed teams to guard sensitive locations, combing intelligence for any sign of a copycat plot, and sending all 35,000 officers reminders to be extra vigilant and "consider tactics at all times while on patrol."

Police had already been told to double up on patrol and to have an officer stand guard while another is in a patrol car. Those directives followed the shooting death of two officers in their car Dec. 20 by an emotionally disturbed man who vowed online to kill two "pigs," and the re-release of a September 2014 video from ISIS that encourages followers to "rise up and kill intelligence officers, police officers, soldiers, and civilians."

Bratton also said efforts to expand the counterterrorism operation in New York were quietly being accelerated.

"We're going to focus even more energy and resources on what my predecessors built," the commissioner said. "They built the most robust counterterror capabilities of any city in the world."

More than 1,000 police officers and civilian analysts are already assigned to a counterterrorism mission every day and others can be brought in as necessary. The department has a network of thousands of private and city cameras that can track a bag left at subway station too long. Officers have handheld radiation detectors. And technology is only improving, with officers receiving smart phones and tablets for daily use.

(Some information from the Associated Press.)