The NYPD’s counterterrorism chief said the Thanksgiving Day Parade route will be lined with 81 sand-filled garbage trucks designed to prevent a lone-wolf attack like the one in France that killed 86 and wounded hundreds more during the summer.
The announcement came more than a week after groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda published articles calling Thursday’s parade an “excellent target.”
“Reviewing it based on that article, we’ve ordered up 81 sand trucks … you can ram a New York City Sanitation Department sand truck with a lot of things, but you’re not going to move it,” Miller said Monday on “CBS This Morning.”
“From our standpoint, for the Thanksgiving Day Parade, it was pictured [in the article], it had a caption saying ‘excellent target,’” he said.
Miller said the NYPD for years has been using patrol cars to block vehicles from gaining access to parade routes, but said the need for more security became clear after the Bastille Day attack in Nice.
A lone wolf terrorist used a cargo truck to mow down hundreds of people walking along a pedestrian promenade next to the Mediterranean Sea.
The attack killed 86 and wounded more than 400.
“There is a churning in the terrorist community asking people to act on their own,” Miller said during the interview.
“What they’re asking anybody who’s following their propaganda to do is something low tech, low cost, and potentially high impact. So the idea of renting a big truck and ramming it into crowds is something that they find attractive.”
Meanwhile, Miller said the NYPD is still grappling with the challenges of trying to secure the area around Trump Tower while also trying to minimize the impact on traffic and pedestrians.
“The biggest challenge is trying to blend the two things that we have to make work as a police department.
One is securing the president of the United States when he’s in New York… And the other is doing it on what could be a very regular basis at what we consider, practically, the center of the Earth: 57th Street and Fifth Avenue,” he said.
