Securing the City

Wow, what an interesting read. I have been doing my best to add a number of books on topics that relate to my work to my bookshelf and this one didn't disappoint. I was able to add some generalized knowledge of counter-terrorism as well as came up with a couple of ideas on my own company's emergency exercise design strategies.

Counter-terrorism in the 21st century is a new frontier. The NYPD has taken its own path to forging said frontier, and “Securing the City” is a chronicle of this path. The NYPD shows the two sides of terrorism preparedness. There is the very public side, in which our populace must understand that our agencies are doing all they can. This side includes the training, drilling, public outreach, and constant press. And then there is the more covert side, where preparedness officials attempt to identify and expose plots, fully test partner agencies' preparedness, etc. This covert side is what intrigued me the most - the lengths that the NYPD goes to to uncover potential suppliers of bomb-making materials, the steps it has taken to forge a practical working relationship with federal agencies, its success at gathering intelligence from around the globe.

Is the NYPD's approach suitable for all local law enforcement? Absolutely not. But can we glean helpful strategies based on what the NYPD does on a regular basis? Absolutely. The NYPD doesn't mess around. They know that terrorism is one of the city's highest-priority and highest-risk hazards and it stops at nothing to ensure city-wide preparedness. All of our communities should take such a realistic look at their own hazard analyses and work as hard to strengthen resilience to high-priority and high-risk hazards. Preparedness is not a linear or divergent process. Preparing for our biggest vulnerability is bound to strengthen our preparedness for lesser vulnerabilities. After all, there really is only one process used to evacuate a population, whether from terrorism, flooding, etc.

On a more “review-like” note, there were a number of typos in the text that were quite distracting. Other than that, the book read easily, in a conversational tone. Sometimes the endless barrage of terrorist names, response measures, training jargon, etc. can be overwhelming, but Dickey presents this information in such a way that I believe someone from well outside the emergency management-homeland security realm would enjoy “Security the City”.