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Originally posted by Psychophant:


Outside Madison Square Garden. I hardly manage to avoid snide comments.

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By Times Square.

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The NYPD Hercules teams are the city’s street-level deterrent, according to Finnegan. (p. 71) They travel around in Chevrolet Suburbans with blacked-out windows, pull up to curbs, let the doors fly open, and officers in Kevlar combat helmets and body armor, carrying M-4 assault rifles, rush out. These deployments are asymmetrical, unpredictable and they deliberately follow no pattern. “They are self-conscious displays of force, presuming the existence of enemy reconnaissance.” Their goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist operatives in the city. Their creation is based in part on the actions of the Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris who cased the Brooklyn Bridge in 2002 and eventually sent a message to his handlers that “the weather is too hot” to carry out the mission to blow up the bridge. Investigators took this to mean that Faris picked up on the intensified police activity around the bridge, provided in part by Hercules teams.