A truck attack like the one that killed 12 people and injured dozens of others in Berlin on Monday would be difficult to pull off in the Big Apple because of the city’s notorious traffic jams, the NYPD’s counterterrorism chief said Tuesday.
“The good news here is we have the density of traffic,” Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said Tuesday during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“It’s hard to get up to speed to run anybody over.”
Still, the NYPD has responded to the Berlin truck attack at a Christmas market by beefing up police presence at such markets locally — specifically the ones at Bryant Park, Columbus Circle and elsewhere.
Miller also said the NYPD has been working with truck-rental companies around the city to try and prevent lone-wolf terror attacks, especially after groups like al Qaeda and ISIS have encouraged them in recent months.
“One of the first things we did after al Qaeda’s first suggestion that people use trucks years ago was develop a relationship with the truck-rental industry and the truck industry,” Miller said on “CBS This Morning.”
Miller said that effort led police to visit 140 such businesses as a way of looking for suspicious activity among renters as well as educating business owners on how to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior.
The police also looked at commercial driver’s licenses and background checks done on those license holders.
“One of the second things we did after the Nice attack was to go back out to 140 truck-rental locations and say, ‘Here are some indicators of suspicious behavior’ … and really try to raise awareness,” Miller said.
In the French coastal city, a Tunisian-born French resident killed 86 people and injured hundreds in July when he drove a truck down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais into a crowd.
“We see the usual threat stream which has become a part of life but at this point we don’t see any specific, credible threat going toward the holiday season or New York in particular,” he said.
“But we’ve made a lot of adjustments based on these kinds of attacks and other things.”