New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly (pictured here) says the NYPD has thwarted 16 terrorist attacks since 9/11, according to CNN.
“What we do is follow leads wherever those leads take us,” Kelly told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “We’ve been targeted 16 times. A combination of good work by the federal government and the NYPD and sheer luck, we’ve never been attacked. We will follow those leads wherever they take us irrespective of the community we’re talking about.”
Kelly says reports in the news media that the NYPD’s Counterterrorism unit has never generated a single lead are misleading.
“We wanted to know more about the neighborhoods we’re policing and that’s what the report is all about. The so called demographics unit. That’s what you’re reporting about. It was never put in place to generate leads. It was put in place to have contextual information about what’s going on in city.”
You can watch Zakaria’s interview with Kelly on CNN.