New York State of Mind: Policing Terrorism in the Empire City

What factors explain the New York Police City Department’s (NYPD) post-9/11 counterterrorism reforms? The conventional narrative suggests that New York’s counterterrorism strategy has been a direct reaction to the events of September 11th, with the NYPD adapting to address new threats and vulnerabilities. While necessary, this 9/11-centric explanation is insufficient in understanding the scope, scale, and tactics of the NYPD’s counterterrorism strategy. Instead, the evidence suggests that imprinted institutional norms and path dependence within New York policymaking shaped the Department’s response to terrorism. Dating back to the Progressive Era, New York has demonstrated a bureaucratic bias towards internalizing national priorities, resulting in reforms that are consistently at the vanguard of policing tactics.

To advance this institutional argument, this thesis will analyze three key NYPD decision- making nodes: the reformation of a dedicated Intelligence Division, a legal battle to increase the Department’s ability to gather intelligence, and the establishment of a controversial “Demographics Unit.” At all three junctures, the evidence indicates that policymaking was propelled by a bureaucratic tendency to align reforms with national priorities, effectively ‘localizing’ a federal agenda. As a city teeming with strong-willed personalities, this forward-leaning institutional norm was bolstered by a cohort of policy entrepreneurs, eager to buck traditional notions of the role of local policymaking in a federal system. These findings provide a novel understanding of the NYPD, contributing an analytic counterpart to the conventional, event-driven narrative. While September 11th was the initial catalyst for policing reforms, institutional history and organizational behavior are necessary to explain the forward-leaning character and federally inspired content of New York’s response to terrorism.