The more than 16-hour siege of a Sydney cafe on Monday morning, which left two hostages dead before police killed a self-styled Muslim gunman, has left the country in mourning. While Australia begins its investigation into how Man Haron Monis, a man with a “long history of violent crime, infatuation with extremism and mental instability,” could have obtained a gun license, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said that a similar crime is more or less “inevitable” in New York City.
Speaking on CBS This Morning on Tuesday he said, “I think it’s less a question of if, more a question of when.”
Miller attributed terrorist attacks like that in Sydney and others in recent months as part of the “culture of the marketing of violence” by ISIS and other terrorist groups. He explained, however, that post-9/11, the city has been preparing for similar attacks:
We have a distinct advantage in that there are a thousand people in the NYPD who work counterterrorism matters on a daily basis, hundreds more in the FBI who are dedicated to that not in a part-time way, but in a constant way. And there’s a very strong partnership. There’s 400 people in the emergency service unit, which would be the equivalent of our SWAT team, so if you take a small scenario at one location as we saw in Sydney, or a wider cast like the Mumbai attacks, we’re one of the few cities that is scaled to meet that.
Watch the segment below:
(Photo: CBS This Morning)
