cover image Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force—the NYPD

Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force—the NYPD

Christopher Dickey, . . Simon & Schuster, $26 (321pp) ISBN 978-1-4165-5240-6

With an informed eye on the history of New York City as a leading target of world terrorism, Dickey, Newsweek’ s Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor, chronicles the effectiveness and resources of the high-tech intelligence operation of the New York Police Department. He speaks without bias of hard-nosed veterans Raymond Kelly, the pragmatic NYPD police commissioner, and David Cohen, a former CIA analyst, who formed the counterterrorism division, which watches over the city with more than 600 cops and operatives stationed stateside and around the world. As Cohen says: “There’s a plot taking shape on New York City every day of every week since 9/11.” Dickey examines the history of terrorism in the city, but poses the thorny question of surveillance vs. civil liberties (e.g., helicopters whose cameras can look directly into specific apartments) since the 2001 World Trade Center tragedy and the Madrid and London bombings. In the increasingly crowded field of “war on terror” books, Dickey’s (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son ) measured meditation on a secured city and its vigilant police force stands out as one of the best. (Feb.)