Vigilance Never Sleeps

Rico says it's undoubtedly television worth watching, and Mike Hale has a review of Counterterror NYC in The New York Times:

It was the most memorable contest of last year’s United States Open: an argument, a slap, and then bodies tumbling down the rows of Arthur Ashe Stadium. But the combatants might have stayed in their seats had they known that their audience included not only gawking tennis fans with cellphone cameras, but also the counterterrorism forces of the New York Police Department, armed with high-powered sniper rifles and ready to take out troublemakers from the stadium’s rim.
That scene provides a moment of comic relief in the National Geographic Channel’s Counterterror NYC. The September brawl at the Open, a hit on YouTube, was viewed with more consternation than amusement by the police. “It was not terrorist-related, but it was a concern of ours,” an officer says. “We’re going to incorporate that incident into next year’s plan.”
The two-hour report, which tracks the police department’s counterterrorism units over the last four months of 2010, should be of at least passing interest to any New Yorker who has done a doubletake at the sight of armored cops carrying assault rifles on a subway concourse or in a skyscraper lobby. The fact that it’s largely a glossy commercial for the post-9/11 NYPD doesn’t make the discussions of the department’s tactics, the glimpses of its new high-tech gadgets, or the view through its thousands of surveillance cameras any less intriguing.
The real challenge for the program’s producers is that, like the city’s security officials themselves, they are in the position of trying to prove a negative: that there have been no successful attacks because of the department’s strenuous, increasingly paramilitary efforts (with names like Operation Torch and Hercules Teams).
Against the backdrops of carnage in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and other cities, this seems intuitively obvious. The National Geographic crews don’t have any threats to show for their four-month embedment, however, beyond a hapless bicycle delivery man who tries to breach the perimeter of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting. That’s good news for the populace but bad news for the program’s dramatic tension.
Instead we watch training exercises, patrols, “surges” of squad cars, and lots of dogs sniffing for explosives, and we listen to generalizations about likely targets. Some of this is fascinating, as when we see in action a police boat that is equipped to detect radioactive material through the hull of an oil tanker, or a computer system that recognizes unattended bags on busy streets and alerts the bomb squad.
Despite its demonstrations of whiz-bang machinery, and the earnestness and occasional bravado of the many officers and police department officials who are interviewed, Counterterror NYC has a cautionary, even scary, tone. “We will be in this fight for generations,” says the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, the architect of the department’s counterterrorism efforts.
The only actual terrorist threat that the program examines at length is the attempted car bombing last May, four months before National Geographic started filming. It will remind many viewers that all of the surveillance cameras and computers and bomb-sniffing dogs the city deploys didn’t stop Faisal Shahzad from driving his propane-filled Nissan Pathfinder into the heart of Times Square.