Update on NYPD Press Credentialing and Covering New York City

MODERATOR: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for coming to this afternoon's briefing, seen by the audience as a very popular topic. And we're very pleased today to have Paul Browne who is the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information who was appointed in January of '04. He'll have brief remarks in the beginning and then we'll open it to questions and answers. If everybody could please clearly state their name and affiliation, when you get the mike, because this is being transcribed and will appear on the website. So, Mr. Browne.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Good afternoon. I thought I'd start with just a few statistics about the police department to give you a sense of its size. Certainly, in the United States, the New York City Police Department is, by far, the largest. You can see from your chart on the -- I believe it's on the right -- that with 37,000 police officers, we are four time -- we are larger than the next four police departments combined. What that does is give us tremendous flexibility in responding to large events, whether it's protest demonstrations or emergency catastrophes of any kind, we can mask thousands of officers at a time because of our strength and still police the rest of the city on a 24-hour basis. This was probably most aptly demonstrated during the Republican National Convention when we had approximately 10,000 police officers assigned to that convention in one form or another while the rest of the city was policed. We accomplished that by going to 12-hour shifts, overtime shifts which in effect increased the size of the department, the police department, by about a third.

I'll run through a few -- the other chart and I'll get back to that in a moment before I go to questions -- just shows two things: where the New York City Police Department now has detectives assigned overseas as liaisons with the national police agencies in the countries sited there, including the London Metropolitan police in Amman, Jordan, at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France, et cetera. The other indicator is where we sent detectives in the immediate aftermath of terrorist attacks where we felt our officers could learn information important to safeguarding the city of New York, particularly if they involved mass transit facilities, such as the attacks in Madrid, in London and, of course, the hotels in Amman, Jordan. As I said, we have 37,000 police officers with civilians. The department's total headcount is 50,000.

We receive eleven and half million calls to 911 a year and we respond -- what we call radio runs -- where you see a police car responding with lights and sirens possibly. We do that four and half million times a year. We make 350,000 arrests every year. That's from -- would include a minor disorderly conduct to a murder charge. About a third of those are for more serious felonies.

Despite those numbers of arrests, or maybe in part because of them, the police department -- the city of New York has actually experienced the least crime it has in over 40 years. Right now, homicides in New York are -- last year were at 540, which may sound like a large number, but not when it's compared to the recent past when there were over 2,000 homicides a year in New York.

The one thing those homicides have in common from the past is that the victims of the homicides, the majority of them, are engaged in criminal activity themselves. I think a lot of people, particularly tourists when they ask about murders or hear about it, they picture themselves as kind of innocent law abiding people being the victims of crime. In New York, the majority of homicide and other violent crime victims, are engaged in crime and often their involvement in a crime is what their homicide is all about.

After 9/11, the police department under Commissioner Kelly went under a major restructuring. We, for the first time and for the first time any police agency in the United States created a counterterrorism bureau. And we assigned roughly a thousand police officers a day to counterterrorism duties. We also restructured our intelligence division. We had an intelligence division and have for years in the New York City Police Department, but it functioned mainly as -- for dignitary protection. We would assist the Secret Service when the President of the United States was in the New York, which is often, and even more frequently the State Department with their Diplomatic Security personnel and the United Nations when you had heads of state from foreign countries visiting the United Nations or were just here on individual visits. Our intelligence division, the detectives assigned to it would be the individuals responsible for the police department's end of those security arrangements.

Again, in 2002 when Commissioner Kelly returned, the intelligence division focus changed to emphasize. We still do those protective assignments, but its emphasis changed to look at what the name would imply. The collection and analysis of intelligence information, particularly as it applies to terrorism, although we also use the intelligence division to gather information on conventional crime. This refocus means that we are now trying to anticipate and learn of any plots against the city, obviously before they happen. And we recruited a career CIA official and David Cohen to head the intelligence division.

And in the case of the counterterrorism bureau, we recruited a former special forces colonel who later went on to serve in the National Security Councils of former President Bush and later President Clinton and as well as served in the United Nations for their peacekeeping operations, Michael Sheehan. The result of this restructuring has, I think, for average New Yorkers, and sometimes you may have seen it yourself, you've seen high profile policing measures where we will amass maybe hundreds of police officers at a time at a landmark location like Grand Central Station or the Empire State Building. They will arrive as many as 50 to 75 police cars at a time and then leave from there to different assignments.

Besides being an exercise in having police from around the city respond to one location as they would in a real event, besides the training that provides, that kind of high visibility policing in a unpredictable way helps us deter or complicate the kind of reconnaissance that we know al-Qaida engaged in before the 9/11 attacks and as well as after.

We've had other plots against the city, including a plot to take down the Brooklyn Bridge that involved their operatives watching how the police department protects the city. You have a large number of elements designed to disrupt that kind of reconnaissance at the street level as well as in the subway system. And after the attacks in London, we paid even closer attention to the subway system by introducing searches, random searches, of passenger backpacks and large packages. And that is still -- is ongoing. And every station in the city is -- it takes place at every station in the city over the course of a month. And we anticipate that will continue for the foreseeable future.

I think at that, I will just open it up to questions. And if you have any -- I'd also invite you, if you have questions about our credentialing process, I have Lieutenant Gene Whyte with me today who is in charge of that process, who will be able to help anybody who has issues like that, as well today.

QUESTION: I'm Siu-Wai Cheung with Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong. I have a question about the foreign presence. There are a lot of reports and some people say that the New York City -- NYPD has placed itself even faster and above the federal government. In this case, what kind of reactions you get when the officer, the other countries deal with the local government agencies and what their coordination with the federal agents there?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah. Well, first of all, what we're doing doesn't in any way supplant the federal government in any of these countries. We're working, actually with the local participation of the national police in their -- usually in their headquarters in their intelligence division. And the reason we're there is really to ask the New York question that if any event overseas may have a possible connection to New York, we want to know about it. It's a very -- admittedly, it's very parochial.

Our job from the police department's point of view is to protect the city of New York and that's the reason for our presence there. Because it is on a police-to-police basis, I mean, the police agencies we're dealing with, they have the same motivations to protect their cities or their country. So it's worked well and we've been able to take information gleaned immediately on the scene. For example, in the case of the London bombings, the actual -- our detective was on a train that wasn't attacked, but he was -- the train service was shut down. He immediately knew there was a problem. And within hours of that attack, he was on a phone to New York sharing information about it. And the same thing happened in Amman, Jordan because of good relations there. Our detective was invited in to be briefed at the same time the Prime Minister was at one of the hotels that had been attacked. And then he was able to pass that information on to us, so we could reconfigure our posture in New York. But it doesn't in any way transcend the federal authority at all. To the contrary, the lead agency in the United States for terrorism remains the FBI. And overseas certainly the State Department and the federal agency would have primacy over any local police department.

Yes.

QUESTION: Vladimir Lenskiy, Channel One, Russia. I see that your agents were present in Moscow at some moment on this chart. What was the cooperation like and what did they learn from Moscow police, if anything?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, we learned -- well, the cooperation was excellent. This had to -- this was in relation to attacks in the mass transit system in Moscow. And excuse me if I don't remember the details precisely, but I think one issue of particular interest was in -- in a potential suicide bomber, I believe, and one attack may have detonated the device early before actually boarding the subway as she, I believe -- I think it was a woman -- was approaching the subway. Any bits of little information about that are tremendously important to us in building sort of a reservoir of information. With 9/11 aside, New York City has not experienced the kind of suicide, individual suicide bombings that you've -- have seen in different parts of the world. And I believe in the case of the Moscow attacks, the Moscow authority police shared very valuable information on this.

Yes.

QUESTION: Hi. Deborah Kraus, ARD German TV. First of all, I'd like to congratulate you because the department has become a lot more open and friendly to the media under Commissioner Kelly. However, one thing that really hasn't changed is that for us, we who work for foreign news outlets, it's very difficult to find out about anything that the NYPD is doing. There have been, for instance, counterterrorism drills we find out from the AP Daybook. Would there be a way of getting on a media alert list as a foreign news outlet?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Absolutely. What I'd have you to do today before you leave is to see Lieutenant Whyte whom many of you may know. He's in the back of the room.

PARTICIPANT: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Okay. But what I'd have you do is just give this -- particularly if you have an e-mail address, and we have a way of automatically -- you'll probably end up getting more than you want, like the arrest a few hours ago of DJ Star who is foul-mouthed disc jockey in New York who was -- who made the mistake, I guess, maybe from his lawyer's point of view, of coming to police headquarters. Today at our request, we had a question about his pistol permit. And we took the opportunity to arrest him. That will -- that's going to generate a tremendous amount of calls to my office today. I'm not sure of the interest with the international press on that subject. But we can put you on a list that would have details, for example, of every arrest of significance we make each day. And your pager or whatever you're putting that on will go off many times a day. But if you want, we'll be happy to do that.

MODERATOR: Please remember just to say your name and affiliation, please, for the transcript. Thank you.

QUESTION: Mercedes Gallego from the newspaper El Correo Vocento in Spain. Two questions, actually. First, after the September 11th attacks, one the major complaints not only from the foreign press, but from all the press in the city was how we were blocked from any kind of access to anywhere close to the area and that was so -- I think, unreasonable, ask that tourist showing a key of their hotel we're allowed to go into the area. And we -- when we show our press credential, we were blocked. What's going to happen the next time something unfortunately happen in the city? Do you have any plans about how to facilitate or at least not to stop the work of the press? And the second question was related to the Madrid attacks in the subway I was also wondering what was your cooperation there and if you learned any lesson from that?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Okay.

QUESTION: Thank you.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, on your first question and I'm sure you didn't intend it as a loaded question, but the police department's position is that we don't anticipate the inevitability of another attack. We're working every day to make that harder and harder. And we've learned from the intelligence community about the briefings that it has -- that New York is viewed, even among those who wish us harm, as a harder target these days. So I don't want to concede in my answer that there will be another attack. However, I also do not want to judge the decisions made by my predecessors who were here. I did not have this job on 9/11, although I was employed the federal government that day and my office was destroyed on that day at the World Trade Center.

I don't -- I think we've made every effort since Commissioner Kelly's return to make whatever the event may be more accessible. What we've done immediately was put -- allow photographers close into the action, when we're making an arrest. Now the problem for us is it's sort of like no good deed goes unpunished. Because when that happens sometimes, rather than pen them and keep them away from the action, we're allowing them in the street and making the photographs of an arrest being made. But if they get too close and the police officers there and -- myself and Lieutenant Whyte and others, we can't be at all of these scenes all the times.

If -- we've had photographers arrested for interfering as a result of our giving more access. But I think we've worked those out. And I think as we've gone down the path since then, we've moved toward being more open and more accessible. I think even in the case of another -- a large scale emergency, we would make every effort for reporters to be able to capture that. We recognize the historical, as well as the day to day importance of your job. But also for the historical record, I think we recognize the importance of giving you access as best we could.

The Madrid bombings again as in the case of Moscow, we learned very particular information that had right away, which was key, because we were there, and the Madrid police were cooperating with our detectives, we learned that contrary to a lot of attacks we looked at where the terrorists would assemble bombs at a distant point and then bring them to the target, that in the case of Madrid, the bombs were assembled close to the target itself, right near the train stations. And we were configured in New York to look distantly, maybe in warehouses in Brooklyn or New Jersey and possibly for bomb assembly, as opposed to right next to the assembly, going on right next to, say, Grand Central Station or in a large suburban train hub.

So we learned immediately what the bombs were carried in; that they were assembled nearby and carried in these kinds of small duffle bags and where they were placed in overhead compartments and in trash containers on the trains themselves. We had that information instantly. As a result, we were able to reconfigure the way we deploy and give police officers here specific instructions to look for somebody in a van, they look like they're doing some work in the back of the van a block or two from a major train station. It would be something they'd be on the lookout for.

So it was very helpful because we don't know when we see an attack in Madrid or London or Moscow if that's not the first attack in a series that could be -- where New York might be implicated. We make the assumption that that could very well be a possibility and then try to learn as much and as quickly about those attacks so we can apply strategy in New York City within hours of that attack and that's what happened in Madrid.

Yes, sir.

QUESTION: Azim Mian. I'm from Geo Television, Pakistan. I've got two questions like my other colleague. The first question is: NYPD, how closely it has got cooperation from Pakistan, with Pakistan, whether it is at the city government level, the provincial government level or the federal government level? And how beneficial it has been?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: I'm sorry. I didn't hear that -- the second part of that.

QUESTION: The first part is: How beneficial, how much beneficial their cooperation has been because Pakistan is in the vicinity of Afghanistan? And second question is many times in the absence of (inaudible), the foreign -- we were told that Foreign Press Center identification card is good enough. But my experience is more than one time -- you know, we have been interrupted by the police and we were not allowed to shoot, you know, at a point where we wanted to.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Okay. Let me address the -- your second question first about credentials. You're right. Your organizational -- your organization's press credential is not enough, particularly if you're trying to cover an incident or something that's happening out in the street. The police department credential gives you access greater than any other individual credential can give you. But typically, we reserve those for reporters who are essentially cover the police or covering the action. If we anticipate an event where the foreign press -- we think there's going to be particularly interesting, like the, you know, the General Assembly meeting or if there's some where we can anticipate your interest, I think we could make arrangements for that by certainly educating our people on the street, but not on a general basis. We might be able to do it for one event, but we kind of have to have a clear delineator and right now that's the police department credential. And I believe I'm going too - I'll defer to Jean on some of the details of how many members of the Foreign Press have that credential. But we'll be -- we're happy to talk to you afterwards about that. And if you'll be eligible for them or not.

And let me just go to your first question. On Pakistan, we don't have the liaison in Pakistan as we do with other countries. And much of what I'm saying now is really based on, you know, reports that we receive generally from our federal partners and the State Department and that is that the, you know, Pakistan has been very cooperative and helpful in the area of our security concerns.

QUESTION: (Off-Mike) I was talking about the Foreign Press Center, you know, card which is issued to us.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah. Well --

QUESTION: Even on showing that, they will not let us cover here.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah. Well, again, I guess I shouldn't have limited it to just your organization. Let me put it this way. To have complete access on the street or the best access on the street, you need a New York City police press card. A New York City police officer is only going to recognize that credential. It gives special access to cross police lines. And unless people are normally engaged in that kind of reporting, we typically don’t extend it to just -- like if a travel writer wanted that kind of credential, we typically wouldn't give it to them because they wouldn't normally be needing it.

But again, if there's an event where we feel there's going to be -- like during the RNC, for example, we put out instructions to recognize other credentials because we didn't want to be in the business of creating a separate credential just for that event, but we also realize we had many thousands, in fact, of reporters from overseas and out of state and we did our best to recognize those credentials for the coverage of the RNC. However, when there's an event or an explosion or some kind of emergency on the street, we restrict those to reporters who normally cover that kind of things.

QUESTION: I'm John Ellis from Tokyo Broadcasting System. I've heard that the credential system is going to have new safeguards that are a bit tighter than they have been up till now and I wanted to know what is the motivation behind that. And is there any way that our consulates can help us, can vouch for us to minimize the paperwork on both ends, yours and ours?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, I think what you've been hearing really refers to the credentials of the police department itself -- people, like myself, would work at the police department. It has elements in it now that checks for fingerprints. We don't have any immediate plans to add those elements to the press credential.

I think in terms of making things sort of smoother on credentialing issues, I think the State Department here provides a great service in that regard. They're our kind of go-to one entity when we have questions or want to facilitate credentialing issues. I mean, since the State Department's in daily contact with all of you far more than we are, we use them as a resource in much the way you do. So I would urge that we both kind of look to this office here that's accommodating us today for cooperation in that regard. I think they've been doing tremendous assistance for us and I think -- I only anticipate that will continue. Thanks.

QUESTION: Okay. My name is Leila Luna. I work for several newspapers in Brazil. I used to have the -- not the press ID from you, but -- I mean, not the press, the yellow one, the big one, but just the ID. And I cannot have anymore because I don't cover parades, I don't cover big events like this immigration whatever happened here. I have to cover that. And my newspaper doesn't want that. Sometimes I need to go to some place and they me for the police ID and I cannot have. I spoke with (inaudible) many, many times. She said to me that change is not like before. I have to cover this kind of thing in the street and that's not my matter, my subject. Well, how can I get just the ID -- that's the police department ID? Not the open line for fires whatever, no, the simple one.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Right. Okay. I'm going to have you talk to Lieutenant Whyte after the meeting and see if we can accommodate that.

LIEUTENANT WHYTE: Our challenge is that people take the police ID to get into other events that are not police related. Let's say you're covering a game at Madison Square Garden. Let's say you're covering an art opening and they want to see a police ID, we can't issue that because the ID card is by stature. The city council has given us laws on New York City on how we can issue police IDs. And the IDs have to do with people who go past police and fire lines, whether an emergency for the working press pass or for the lower one, the parade one, you talked about the press identification card. But it limits us to people who need to go past police lines. And our challenge is when you need to cover something, that's not police related. There is no ID for us to issue to you and that's our issue. But I'd like to talk to you afterwards and see what we can do.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Hajime Matsuura from Nikkei News from Tokyo. Could you describe us more about the recent trend and your engagement in organized crime and especially over white-collar crime? And secondly, it's not -- it's just my opinion, I'm really astonished by all of these conversations about the press club system and a credential thing because American governments were always accusing the Japanese of having a closed press club system. Thank you.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: OK. I think I'll leave the second part alone. And if I could -- could you clarify on the organized crime question a bit?

QUESTION: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, I think one of -- in the area of white-collar crime, the area that concerns us and we're paying attention to now is -- I guess, economic crime where identity theft and fraud is becoming more of a problem for average citizens in New York and elsewhere when, as people rely more and more on credit cards and electronic transfers and advances in the monetary system. So we've now -- it's created new issues for the police in that you have -- if somebody steals a credit card in New York, but uses it in San Francisco or uses it on the internet, there's jurisdictional issues that are all being worked out. But that area and it's prone to exploitation by organized crime as well, where you have organized groups who systematically stealing and selling credit card numbers over the internet, things of that nature.

We now have in the police department a unit that's exclusively dedicated to identity fraud. And you may have seen a story in today's newspaper about an individual who was wanted in New Jersey as a narcotics trafficker. And a New Jersey police asked -- he had an arrest record in New York, so they asked us for a photograph of him. And when we looked in our records, we found he had been shot to death 20 years ago. The person, the New Jersey police were looking at had gone to a graveyard in the Bronx. And I can only assume he saw my favorite movie the original Day of the Jackal where the assassin in that movie goes and finds somebody of his approximate age who had died younger and takes the name off the gravestone and then applies for certain credentials. Well, that's exactly what this individual did -- and obtained two passports. It was engaged in narcotics activity. But he certainly had the credentials to engage in lots of other things dangerous to society. So we arrested him yesterday and that kind of unit we now have, is dedicated exclusively to that kind of crime, I think is kind of a harbinger of what you'll see in organized crime as a lucrative area for exploitation, namely, identity theft.

QUESTION: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah. It's called the -- I believe it’s called the document fraud unit.

QUESTION: Thank you. Shehabuddin Kisslu, Probe News Agency, Bangladesh. Two questions. What sort of measures or efforts the NYPD has with those country that don't have their extradition treaty, and what are terrorist activities especially in (inaudible) like Pakistan to Bangladesh, India, those countries? And the second question is the annual process of our NYPD pass and the credential usually I used to get by mail the annual form. These days, I have to be one day to go there to get the forms and then fill it out and send it to my organizations and they will fax it to me and then get the copy and take it to the (inaudible). So is there any easy way out that we can do through our Foreign Press Center with their checking (inaudible) whatever it is? Is there any way that you can help us to renew those renewals, please?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, the press center here is very helpful. I don't intend to turn the workload over to them. I know it can be time consuming and it may be easier to do it by mail, but we insist that people come in person to police headquarters. And I'm afraid on that question, it's going to have to be no, we won't.

QUESTION: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Oh, the forms itself. I'm sorry. Yeah, if you go to the NYPD website, I won't give you the long address because if you just put "NYPD" in Google, that'll be the first website you'll come to and you can get the form there. Can you -- the first part of your question again? I'm sorry.

QUESTION: Some of the measures -- efforts taken that work with the countries especially in Southeast Asia, when you don't have any (inaudible) extradition treaties or that kind of (inaudible) if you can work with the local authority to find out the terrorist activities and their, you know, plots?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, you know, we do have -- I guess the one thing the police department has going for it is, even when there aren't formal treaties, there is -- there's a collaboration or I guess a brotherhood of sorts between law enforcement officers around the world and they tend to cooperate with each other, even if there's not a formal requirement to do so. We certainly have consultants from that part of the world that you just mentioned who work with us closely. Rohan Gunaratna is one of them, a well-known expert on al-Qaida who has contacts with law enforcement officials in that part of the world. And we've exploited that relationship to learn more about the threat against -- potential threat against the city of New York.

QUESTION: Hi. I'm Michael Park from The Herald in Scotland. Could you talk a bit about the right approach if somebody wanted to do something not news-based with the NYPD, but feature based, such as with the document fraud unit or something like that? The reason I ask is I put a couple of requests in in the past 12 months, 18 months to do specific things that weren't news related. And I've just got an answer back: "No, you can't do that." And I haven't had any sense of redress or anywhere else I can go to say why can’t I do that or who said --

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, what did he ask to do?

QUESTION: I'd rather not say in public.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Oh, okay.

QUESTION: But --

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Because I might have been the one who said no. (Laughter)

QUESTION: It may have been you, sir. But I just wanted to know if I was doing something wrong, if I wasn't speaking to the right people. So I don't need to cross police lines, but I would like police assistance at some point. Thank you very much.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Okay. Let me be candid about, I think, the problem. I've never been a member of a Foreign Press Corps, but I started out my career as a journalist and I started for a very small newspaper, trying to get the attention of government and my competitors were the biggest papers in the country. So I knew I was the "little guy" in a sense trying to get the organization's attention and it was a very difficult process.

And I see a parallel with the Foreign Press trying to get the attention of the New York City Police Department. And I'll be honest with you, the people who get our attention are the daily newspapers in New York and TV and radio stations that have people working in the building and they're pounding on our door in multiple numbers. There may be one of you from one news organization from your country whereas in police headquarters, there may be five or six reporters from each news organization, half of whom tried to call me in the last hour about -- you now know more than they do about DJ Star, by the way. So I won't try to sugarcoat it. They get the lion's share of attention.

And when my subordinates, if they fail to tell me that somebody from The New York Times had called about a story that's going to be page one tomorrow, that the mayor's interested, they know I'm not going to be happy about that. By the same token, if somebody had called from a newspaper in Scotland about a feature, you know, who knows and when it does publish, whether they'll ever see it or not. And so the pressure isn't on my own people to be as helpful. I'm just being honest with you. That's the kind of reality of it.

Having said that, I would like to have a process where we could accommodate those requests or at least give you more information as to why they're not being accommodated. And against my better judgment, I'm going to give you my e-mail towards that end, which is PJ, as in Paul Joseph, Browne with an "e" at the end of Browne. That's pjbrowne@nypd.org, o-r-g. And in your particular case, why don't you send me the details of your request and I'll see if I can accommodate or at least explain why I said no.

QUESTION: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Sure. Sure. Okay. Very good.

QUESTION: Dogan Uluc, Hurriyet Daily. According to some, 9/11 attacks would have been prevented if the secret agencies would have had enough proper cooperation among them and information sharing, given the example of (inaudible) was prior to the attacks was stopped because a violator event traffic somewhere and then these people did not have information about getting the background of this guy, who was on the U.S. Department of State's terrorist list -- Most Wanted List. Do you think at the moment the NYPD intelligence divisions are in contact and cooperating with the other agency at the FPICI and all the other federal agencies in this regard?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah, I do. I think the cooperation level probably is now -- is the highest it's been in history. But I do want to make one observation about your earlier comment. You know, when you go back and look at missed opportunities, you can really do that in almost everything in life, certainly not with the catastrophic consequences of 9/11. But I think there's been a good-faith effort all along to do that kind of information sharing. I think it's better now, much better now, because of the weaknesses that were exposed in the aftermath. But that's not to suggest that leading up to that event that there was, you know, a lack of goodwill or a lack of, you know, voluntarily trying to share information. I think people try to do -- I mean, in the end they're trying to do the best they can. But in the aftermath of something that comes under such examination, so it's such close scrutiny, you begin to see lost opportunities. I think there'll be less of those -- less opportunities now. And right now and certainly from the NYPD's point of view the sharing of information has been the best it's ever been.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Anil Padmanabhan from India Today. My question is related to the dissemination -- the information dissemination systems that are in place with respect to the boroughs. Like my colleague said, if you want to do a feature story in, say, Brooklyn, which involves some local ethnic population, to whom do we go? We contact you or do we have your counterpart in each of these boroughs?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: No. It's -- the LAPD is very centralized. Our office, and that's assuming you want to do something involving a police officer or a police captain or the police department itself -- yeah, we would go through our headquarters and we would then advise the local, say, Brooklyn police commander that you were coming or about to call.

MODERATOR: Last question.

QUESTION: Well, first of all, I forgot to thank you earlier for the opportunity of answering our doubts and I know your time is precious. But you mentioned earlier the Republican Convention. There was a number of foreign press carrying the Foreign Press Center credentials that were arrested during those events. They spent all night at the (inaudible). I was wondering what are we supposed to do in those situations. Do you have any recommendation, anybody we should ask for or something?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Yeah. Well, we -- yeah, lieutenant -- I'll give you Lieutenant Whyte's call number for that one. (Laughter)

PARTICIPANT: I responded. (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Actually, we did. What I alluded to earlier with photographers also happened with writers in -- and on one hand, allowing people as much access as possible. Some of them got swept up in the arrests and we worked very hard to undo them, if we learned about them. But it was a big, you know, we had -- I think depending on your estimates, between 500,000 and 800,000 individuals in the first March on the Sunday before the convention. In the chaos of that, we weren't always successful but we made every effort.

And when our office calls on behalf of a reporter, unless you were engaged in criminal activity or you were breaking the law, you're going to get a response and we'll come to that as soon as -- come to your aid as soon as we can. I think, what we may have and what we do try to instruct our officers if somebody -- what they're supposed to do and doesn't always happen. But they're instructed, if they've arrested a member of the press is to call us immediately. And if -- and then we would come in and then basically try to get (inaudible).

QUESTION: (Off-Mike)

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BROWNE: Well, you may -- I mean, I think you want to cooperate and then deal with the problem later. But I think you may want to just ask them to call DCPI. You know, everybody in the police department knows what that means. That's me and it's also my office. If you just ask them to please let DCPI know you've been arrested, then we'll respond.