80 Sirens Wailing, but Do Not Panic: This Is Only a Drill
By MICHAEL WILSON
Published: July 29, 2004
Since its debut about a month ago, it has quickly become one of New York City's hottest acts for those lucky enough to catch a free, unannounced performance. Call it "The Police Drive Fast! And Park!"
It goes something like this: On a typical block in, say, Midtown Manhattan, as many as 80 police cars quickly stream in out of nowhere, in neat rows, their lights and sirens going. The drills seem to take place on blocks with restricted parking, and each car executes a fast back-in parking job against the curb.
Sometimes, depending on the block, they park perpendicular to the curb; sometimes at a slant. The officers - scores of them - get out of the cars. They do not rush into a building. They do not draw their guns. They pretty much just stand around for half an hour or so. Then, officers pile back into their cars and, again in formation, the cars pull away from the curb and drive off.
The drills, held almost daily and coming just weeks before the Republican National Convention, are alternately impressive, alarming and even amusing, but within the Police Department, they are deadly serious - so serious that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly refused to divulge details.
"It's part of a counterterrorism overlay that is tweaked from time to time, based on conditions and intelligence," said a police spokesman, Paul J. Browne. Suffice it to say that police vehicles are practicing moving quickly through the city en masse.
It is unclear whether the drills are part of the department's much-publicized counterterrorism operations, including Hercules, Samson and Atlas.
Yesterday's drill began at 10:30 a.m. along two blocks of Central Park South that are usually the turf of horse-drawn carriages and the uniformed doormen of the Plaza Hotel. Suddenly, a flying column of squad cars quickly filled the entire north curb, their trunks facing Central Park. It clearly rattled some pedestrians. "What is going on here?" Atle Holm, an avionics engineer visiting from Norway, asked no one in particular. "I would like to know."
Wouldn't we all, Mr. Holm. Wouldn't we all.
The strange, oddly balletic exercises in motion and stillness have their own sort-of-cool name: critical response surges. Mr. Browne would not say how many vehicles participated in a surge, or how often ("frequently," he said), or whether the surges were in preparation for the Republican National Convention ("not exclusively"
or if they would continue after it was over ("they may"
.
"I'm being purposely circumspect," Mr. Browne said. He allowed that different locations call for different kinds of surges, and that sometimes there are surges within surges, when a small group of cars within the larger group splits off.
Moving several dozen cars from one place to another quickly in Manhattan takes work. "It's the fifth or sixth time they've done it," said Ryan Rzepecki, 25, a carriage driver, referring to the activity on Central Park South yesterday.
Earlier yesterday, there was a drill on the Upper East Side outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Monday, police cars mysteriously appeared outside several news organizations, including the New York Times building.
Outside Central Park yesterday, there were almost as many theories as parked police cars.
"We thought it was dignitaries being transported in and out," said Georgia Staab, visiting from Santa Barbara, Calif.
"I thought maybe some Democrats got lost," said her companion, Chip Oxton.
A woman hurried past officers from the heavily armed Emergency Service Unit, talking into her cellphone: "I don't know. They have machine guns "
Indeed, what must a surge look like to a tourist? Do the police turn out like this for every little thing? Is there really any place safer than New York? Roger and Ann Wright, visiting the city for the first time with their children, asked one of the officers what was happening.
"He said they all gather at one point and then swarm an area," Mrs. Wright said the officer told her. "See if there's any terrorist activity going on."
Ralf Borchardt, a tourist from Germany, puffed a cigarette while his 6-year-old son, Garth, stared at an officer's automatic rifle. "He just wanted to know how far they can shoot," Mr. Borchardt said. "They said 300 yards, maybe 600. That's quite a lot."
In typical fashion, New Yorkers were less impressed. Several marched quickly by, seemingly oblivious to the surge. A 16-year-old from White Plains, Omega Spikes, studied the precinct numbers on the cars. "They're from the 20th Precinct to the 76th," he said conspiratorially. (Actually, a full-sized surge can have cars from all 76 precincts.)
His girlfriend, Daniqua Gallier, 17, said she had the creeps. "I felt weird, like something was really going wrong. Like there were terrorists around," she said.
Mark Luehrs, 50, a sanitation worker, went right on sweeping the streets around the surge. "You know," he said, "if you're going to have a drill, you better have it on clean streets, right?"
At the edge of the park, Mohammed A. Hossain, a food vendor, sold pretzels and hot dogs from his cart, with no idea what was going on. "I ask one time," Mr. Hossain recalled. "He say, 'I don't know.' Policeman!" Mr. Hossain offered his impression of a surge with hand motions. "Just moving - 'This way! This way!' "
The surge was not good for the sightseeing bus tours that leave from Central Park South, but Juan Caceres, who passes out fliers and sells tickets, did not seem to mind, sitting back to watch his fifth or sixth surge. The first one, he remembered, lasted 90 minutes.
"They're getting a little faster," he said.
Thu Jul 29, 2004 10:30 am 
