New York Times - December 26, 1999
Safir Describes Security Plan for Times Sq.
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Against a backdrop of almost daily government warnings about potential terrorist acts around the country, the authorities are readying an elaborate plan to keep Times Square's millennial celebration safe.
Eight thousand police officers -- a force larger than most municipal police departments around the country -- will be assigned to an area around Times Square about half the size of Central Park. The police plan to tow every car parked on the streets anywhere within the mile-long, three-block-wide strip of Midtown, both to clear the way for throngs of revelers and to thwart a possible car bombing in the area, which will be closed to traffic.
Consolidated Edison and Bell Atlantic have welded manhole covers shut, and the Sanitation Department will remove garbage cans from every street corner in the so-called frozen zone around Times Square.
The authorities are also locking mailboxes in the area.
In an interview, Police Commissioner Howard Safir described what he said was a painstaking plan for Times Square this New Year's Eve, three years in the making. It includes keeping the Police Department's six helicopters aloft for surveillance and extra training for officers in the street to identify suspicious people as they file through tightly controlled channels allowing access to Times Square.
Mr. Safir, appearing confident that the elaborate preparations and the huge deployment of uniformed and plainclothes officers will keep the New Year's celebration safe, has sought to reassure New Yorkers despite the escalating series of warnings about possible millennial terrorist attacks.
Since the arrest in Washington State two weeks ago of an Algerian charged with possessing bomb materials, and the arrest last week in Vermont of a couple the authorities say have ties to terrorists, federal agencies have increased airport and border security and issued alerts about travel and possible mail bomb attacks.
Mr. Safir has emphasized that there is no specific information suggesting that terrorists are planning to strike in Times Square or at any other locations or events in New York City. "There are no guarantees, but we can take every precaution that's humanly possible, and that's what we're going to do," Mr. Safir said. "I think the public should come to Times Square, and I think they should not be deterred by all of this terrorist hype that is going on."
Officers have also been trained to watch carefully for revelers bringing alcohol into the area, as part of the Giuliani administration's strict enforcement of the open-container law.
Mr. Safir said about 7,000 uniformed officers will be in the area, overseen by nearly 700 supervisors, while about 300 plainclothes officers mix with the revelers. Special surveillance teams with bomb-sniffing dogs will also check the crowd.
But at the same time, the Police Department and other law enforcement agencies are working to track and monitor potential terror suspects in the New York area and prepare for the worst-case scenario, a large-scale assault somewhere in the city.
These measures, seldom discussed and often cloaked in secrecy, are the outgrowth of concerns that a terrorist attack could occur, rather than of suspicions or specific information about a particular threat, city and law enforcement officials said. The concerns are rooted in the knowledge among senior law enforcement officials that, as one put it, "There are people out there who hate us, who want to destroy us and have proven they have the means to hurt us."
F.B.I. agents and police detectives assigned to the Joint Terrorist Task Force have been reviewing reports of interviews with informants and intercepted communications looking for clues that could have been missed, clues that may point to planned terrorist actions, according to several law enforcement sources. The task force, which includes more than 100 agents, detectives and other federal agents, are also keeping close surveillance on suspected terrorists in the New York area.
A Police Department plan, code-named Archangel, will be in effect on New Year's Eve, the sources said. The plan puts the department on its highest alert and includes detailed methods for responding to and investigating terrorist acts, including biological and chemical assaults, the sources said. Mr. Safir would not discuss the plan.
The city's five district attorneys have a plan to operate in the event of a widespread power failure or terrorist attack, according to city and law enforcement officials. People arrested in Manhattan and Staten Island would be arraigned in Brooklyn, where one of the borough's courthouses can be powered by a generator, and Bronx suspects would be taken to Queens, where there is a courthouse with its own limited power source, officials said.
Prosecutors have been stockpiling pens, legal pads and copies of the Criminal Procedure Law -- now usually read on computer terminals -- to write complaints by hand, officials said. Prosecutors' offices have either purchased new carbon-copy complaint forms or dug out boxes of the old forms that had been used before operations were computerized, the officials said. Bottled water and other supplies have been stockpiled.
Mr. Safir said the Police Department has made similar plans to operate without power, stockpiling supplies, including more than two dozen typewriters, military rations and magnesium lights.
But the visible preparations will begin in the days before Dec. 31, as "no parking" signs in the Times Square area go up, warning motorists that come early Friday morning, cars parked there will be towed.
Then, shortly after 12:01 a.m. on the 31st, police will halt the flow of traffic into the frozen zone around Times Square, from West 43rd to West 47th Streets and along Broadway and Seventh Avenue, officials said. They will expand the area, and tow any remaining cars, up to West 59th Street, down to West 35th, east to the Avenue of the Americas and west to Eighth Avenue during the afternoon as the crowd grows.
In that area, the police will set up emergency lanes down the middle of each street so that ambulances and firetrucks can move through the crowds in an emergency.