New York’s finest exude confidence

NEW YORK – Delegates to the Republican National Convention will arrive in a city that remains a target for terrorists possibly plotting a Madrid-style rail attack, New York’s top law enforcement official said Tuesday.

Yet the nation’s largest police department – 36,000 officers in all – has the might and the expertise to secure the convention as well as to keep order amid mass demonstrations, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in an interview with the Associated Press.

“I don’t think any other police department in the country can provide the protection that the New York Police Department can. No place else in America can do it as well,” Kelly said.

While insisting there are no specific threats against the convention, Kelly cited a “consensus in the intelligence community” that New York is the No. 1 target.

Police will use bomb dogs to screen subway and commuter trains and will use high-tech cameras to screen cars. About 10,000 officers – some armed with handheld radiation detectors – will flood the streets around Madison Square Garden, site of the convention Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.

The NYPD’s intelligence division has studied the bombings in Madrid, which killed 190 people in the days leading up to an election, as a possible template for a New York attack during the convention and beyond. Kelly pointed proudly to a decision to dispatch his own investigators to Spain to consult with their counterparts there.