New York promising secure marathon
Just days after attack, city offers assurances
NEW YORK — In a city shaken by its deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11, police are promising an unprecedented security effort to try to secure a soft target spanning five boroughs and 26.2 miles: the New York City Marathon.
City officials have sought to calm the nerves of more than 50,000 runners and huge crowds of onlookers expected to line the marathon route by insisting it will go off Sunday without a hitch only days after a truck attack killed eight people in lower Manhattan.
The security detail will include hundreds of extra uniformed patrol and plainclothes officers, roving teams of counterterrorism commandos armed with heavy weapons, bomb-sniffing dogs and rooftop snipers poised to shoot if a threat emerges.
The Police Department is also turning to a tactic it has used to protect Trump Tower and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: 16-ton sanitation trucks filled with sand. The trucks, along with “blocker cars,” will be positioned at key intersections to try and prevent anyone from driving onto the course.
Marathoners from around the world who have been streaming into the city in anticipation of the race expressed mixed feelings about running so soon after the carnage.
“I can be really scared of it when
I am at home and in front of the
TV,” Annemerel de Jongh, 28, of The Hague, Netherlands, said Thursday as she picked up her race number at a Manhattan convention center. “But when I am running I feel maybe a little bit invincible, like nothing can happen to me. I can run away from it.”
The New York Police Department said it has no information pointing to any credible threat against the race.
There is no question, though, that the course provides a security challenge, even for a police department with 35,000 officers.
The crowd is so big, runners start in waves, meaning some people will be standing on the starting line while competitors in the wheelchair division are crossing the finish line in Manhattan’s Central Park.
“It will be an extraordinary event, as it always is,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said this week at a news conference. “It will be well protected, as it always is.”
Police said they’ll use more of the blocker vehicles for the marathon than they have used for any other event.
The attack Tuesday, on a bicycle path miles from the marathon route, was a grim reminder of how the Islamic State group is using its propaganda to encourage radicalized “lone wolves” to cause harm with unsophisticated means in easily accessible settings.
The attack by an alleged Islamic State group supporter “appears to have followed, almost exactly to a T, the instructions ISIS has put out in its social media channels,” said the NYPD’S top counterterrorism official, John Miller.