Search Result: Counter-Terrorism Initiatives

Conference attendance was up significantly at this year’s TREXPO East, held Aug. 29 through Aug. 31 in Chantilly, Va. And with good reason. The conference program offered an excellent balance of hands-on defensive tactics training, anti-terrorism classes, and patrol and SWAT tactics courses.

This year's TREXPO East, held Aug. 29 through Sept. 1 in Chantilly, Va., was an unusual kind of law enforcement trade show. It actually had star power. It had Sgt. Major Billy Waugh of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

Quick. Short of a nuclear detonation, think of the worst possible terrorist attack that you can imagine.

Although they don't receive nearly as much press as bombings, vehicular ambushes are quite common in Israel.

John Kerry has committed to increasing the number of U.S. Special Forces operators. This single point will do more to achieve victory than all the hardware in our inventory.

L.A. County's Terrorism Early Warning group was the brainchild of two L.A. Sheriff's Department officers who saw a threat in the rhetoric of a then little-known Islamist radical named Bin Laden. It was August 1996 and Osama had just issued his first fatwa, urging his followers to conduct global terrorist attacks against the United States and its citizens.

NYPD's counter-terrorism unit works out of a windowless brick building somewhere in one of the five boroughs of the Big Apple. To the average person passing by, the building looks no different than any of the other rundown buildings in the area. It's covered with graffiti, surrounded by nondescript private cars, and shadowed by a worn elevated commercial billboard.

Using training including how to fall properly without injury, a French special ops unit successfully completed a dynamic hostage rescue.

Most cities and counties have increased police and fire funding since 9-11, but in many cases, budget bumps can barely meet newly established needs.

"The threat of suicide bombers in the U.S. is not an 'if' but a 'when,'" read a recent alert to law enforcement that was sent by the California Department of Justice.

The lesson of the Baltimore exercise is quite clear: police agencies can't just arbitrarily decide that their jurisdictions end at the water's edge and assume that anything on the water will be handled by the Coast Guard, the Navy, or somebody else.

Conventional police forces deployed in large and normally  slow-to-react formations were not capable of dealing with small, clandestine terrorist cells, striking swiftly and melting into the civil scenery.