Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Delivers Remarks, Holds Q&A at Vigil in Washington Square Park

November 14, 2015

Mayor Bill de Blasio: . . . we also know how important it is to persevere. And we know Paris will persevere. We know we will be strong together. I would say simply, “Vive La France”.

Crowd: Vive La France

Mayor: And I would ask to thank the Ambassador, the Consul General, the Speaker of the City Council for being here. Ambassador, Consul General, could you lead us in La Marseillaise please?
[François Delattre, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations, speaks in French]

[Crowd sings La Marseillaise]
[Applause and chants of “Vive La France”]
. . .
Mayor: I want to thank everyone who has come out today in solidarity with the people of Paris and with the people of France.

New York City stands together today with our sister city Paris. We feel such deep sorrow. We feel such a sense of loss with the people of Paris. Our two cities are so close, and we feel so much together. We felt it in January, after those horrible attacks. We feel it today.

I want to thank our Speaker of the City Council – Melissa Mark-Viverito is here. I want to thank leaders of the NYPD who are here, who will join me in answering questions, including our Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence, John Miller. I certainly want to thank the Ambassador and the Counsel General for all they are doing in this difficult moment to support the French community here in this city and in this nation. It's a large community, as you saw a moment ago. I know the pain that French citizens here in New York and the United States are feeling right now.

I had the honor of joining with the Counsel General at the Consulate. And we thanked the NYPD officers who are there protecting the Consulate. We have deployed NYPD contingents to key French government and community locations around New York City, and the Counsel General and the Ambassador have expressed their gratitude for that support. And we will continue to support them throughout this crisis. It’s important to know that we have to be resolute in a moment like this. New York City, we can teach a lesson to the world because of what we went through on 9/11, fourteen years ago. The only answer to terrorism is to be resolute, to not allow the terrorists to change who we are. We must refuse to be terrorized. We won't change our democracy. We won't change our values. We won't change our culture. We'll stand firm and strong in the face of the challenge.

And in moments like this call for solidarity between people and call for tremendous cooperation between governments. We will do all we can to work with our brothers and sisters in Paris to support them in every way. We are blessed to have an NYPD presence in Paris where we've been getting direct information from the scene. We want to work together in every way we can, and obviously we want to learn from this tragedy how we can continue to best thwart these threats and protect our people together.

So, it's a moment of sorrow, but it's a moment of purposefulness too. We feel purposeful in saying we will never give in to terrorist threats.

That we, this city, came back so strong after 9/11. We talked about this in January when I had the honor of being with Mayor Hidalgo at the Memorial site outside Charlie Hebdo and outside the Hyper Cacher. This city went through such pain in 2011 [sic], but we learned how to come back stronger. We've continued to learn year in and year out how to stop these terrorist threats. We'll continue to do that work together.

My message to the people of Paris and the people of France is you will persevere and you will win the day because of the values the great nation of France, our oldest ally, those values speak to the whole world. Those values are the ones that ultimately will be embraced. With that, we welcome your questions.

Question: Mr. Mayor, is there a growing threat to soft targets in this city? American targets?

Mayor: I would like Deputy Commissioner Miller to come up and join me. My answer is this, that for 14 years now in this city, we have been able to stop numerous attempted terrorist actions. We're very proud of what the NYPD has done in developing its own counterterrorism capacity, but we also know we have to work closely with the FBI and other federal partners and international partners.

Right now in this city, we have over 1,500 officers trained and ready to deal with all matters related to terrorism involving preventative actions that we do every day, kinds of shows of force that help to inhibit terrorism, but also to be ready to respond in any such event. We're very proud of that capacity. But we also know that we see some new phenomenon here – the lone wolf dynamic that we've seen now over this last year or more. We'll do everything we can to stop that. God forbid, we ever encounter such a situation, the key is to have a very substantial force ready to act quickly and that we do have in this city.

[Reporters shout questions]

Mayor: I'm going to pass to the Commissioner please. Let me ask the Commissioner to add, if you have something.

John Miller, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism, NYPD: To echo the Mayor's comments – one of the advantages we have now is that in the 1,397 additional police officers that were authorized by the Mayor and the City Council just recently, 400 of those are going into a counterterrorism response command that will be guarding sensitive locations throughout the city. These will be a highly-trained elite force. On top of that, there is the strategic response group which is a citywide [inaudible] squad that can be divided up or sent en masse and are trained in the same heavy weapons with the same heavy protective equipment. And, of course, the Emergency Service Unit, which is our equivalent of the SWAT team. And that's what comprises that 1,500 strong tactical force that can be divided up and moved to any target.

Every week, in a warehouse location in Brooklyn, the NYPD engages in a constant cycle for patrol officers and these specialized officers in active shooter training about how to go towards the target, to go towards the danger, and engage in a situation like we saw in Paris last night or in Charlie Hebdo in January or in Mumbai in 2008. So when these attacks occurred last night, we were on the phone with our assets and rather than having to create a sea change in our posture, what we're actually able to do is to make relatively minor adjustments in the counterterrorism overlay that we have on a normal day by increasing that and moving them around to the places within the threat picture.

So I think as the Mayor described, this is not the kind of thing that is a wake-up call to New York City. We've been awake about this for a long time – and it's a program that is constantly in development.

Question: Mayor, how do you recover very confidently? What would be your advice to the French people for the next few weeks?

Mayor: My advice – and let me offer first, for all of us, we stand in solidarity with Paris and with France and we know that there's going to be a lot that develops over the next days and weeks. A lot of information, and the decisions that will have to be made by the French government will be based on the information they gather. So all we can do from afar is give advice humbly. But my advice would be to stay strong and to continue, as much as possible, life as normal to send a message to terrorists that they cannot win.

I hope and pray that the Climate Summit will continue as planned. I think not only is this going to be a crucial moment in history as we finally address these powerful issues, but I think it's even more important that it be in Paris to show that in the end the terrorists can't win. Again, I understand that there will be a lot of concern about security precautions and information that may change that.

But what we found after 9/11 – remember we lost 3,000 people, we had the tallest buildings in our city destroyed before our very eyes. You remember that day there had been a local election scheduled – it took place two weeks later. Our cultural institutions were encouraged to go back to their normal work. We wanted to show that we could recover and recover quickly.

So my advice for the people of Paris to be resolute and to return to being the great city that Paris is.

Question: For Commissioner Miller, could you give us a specific takeaway from what happened in Paris. I realize it's only been less than 24 hours, but a takeaway for New York City to prevent something like this from happening here.

Deputy Commissioner Miller: I think the specific takeaway is that the sophistication of the attack was in its lack of sophistication. What we're seeing is a continued shift in a trend that we've already identified to things that are low-tech, low-cost, and high-impact. I think that's what we saw there. It was conventional weapons, rudimentary explosives. It wasn't the complex kind of [inaudible] that you would see in the immediate world post-9/11. This is the trend now. The things that you want to look at there is do you have the intelligence ahead of time to prevent something like that.

One of the great challenges there is now the commercial applications that are being sold to the general public that are encrypted in a way that they can't be decrypted, even by the companies that supply them. And the fact that these messages have a built in self-destruct mode that makes them erase right after they're read. So the aperture on our ability using lawful means, search warrants, subpoenas, court orders, to collect on things like that, which are essential intelligence in a case like Mumbai or Charlie Hebdo or last night in Paris, that aperture is closing. And I predict that when we get to the end of the investigation relating to these incidents, we will likely find that some of those commercially available applications were used.

Mayor: Let me just add that it's very important for all New Yorkers to know what is being done right now to protect them.

And Commissioner Miller talked about the extraordinary anti-terrorism apparatus. We have again over 1,500 strong now. Well, that apparatus is deployed in a variety of ways right now clearly protecting the French government and other French institutions around the city. You're going to see expanded presence at some of our busiest places in the city tonight and in the coming days, so there'll be a very visible additional presence. You'll see additional checking of bags in the subways at select locations and those locations will change regularly.

The point is, we're always in a state of vigilance but we've added additional capacity to keep people safe. And I think it's important to recognize in the new dynamic we're in that people in the city and any city have to recognize that they can help the police in so many ways. We've always talked about “if you see something, say something”. That phrase is real. It is powerful. Sometimes someone overhears a conversation or hears secondhand that someone may have an evil intent. The NYPD needs to know about that right away. You may see a bag left unattended. We need to know about that right away.

That can be absolutely crucial and in fact in the past some terrorist attacks were thwarted because individual citizens stepped forward and provided information that proved to be crucial. So you'll see a lot of NYPD presence and as you heard from Commissioner Miller, that presence is stronger, better trained, better equipped than ever before. But on top of that, every citizen has a role to play in keeping us safe. Any other questions?

Question: Mayor, what do you say to New Yorkers who feel afraid?

Mayor: Just that. That for 14 years, the NYPD has successfully thwarted many potential terrorist attacks. The NYPD has an extraordinary capacity here, but we also have offices all around the world that provide us helpful information in staying ahead of any potential attack. We have the closest cooperation I think we've had since 9/11 with the FBI and Homeland Security and our federal partners. We are in a very high state of readiness.

As Commissioner Miller indicated, we've added a 400-strong additional force of exclusively trained and equipped anti-terrorism officers. In the past, the NYPD relied on borrowing officers from individual precincts for some of the anti-terrorism activities. Because of the decision we made with the City Council in June, this group of about 400 officers is now specifically trained and equipped for counterterrorism activities as their full-time job. They have no other work but that, which means we have officers who have volunteered to do anti-terrorism work and are trained and working in that field each and every day on top of the already very strong presence we had.

So a lot of assets deployed. A lot of working done to keep people safe. But again, people should make sure if they think they have information that would be of value to the NYPD, it's absolutely crucial to report it. Otherwise, my message would be people should continue with our lives as normal. We are not going to be intimidated by terrorists. It's so important to continue our lives as a statement of our resolve to protect our way of life.

Unknown: All right, last question.

Mayor: Any other? Any other?

Question: Your recommendation for the Mayors across the country too sir. [inaudible]

Mayor: Look, I think we know that we're, in this country, the number one terror target. We know that the other place that does tremendous precautions along the lines we do of course is Washington, DC.

But for other cities, I think depending on what they see, it's important to consider some of these measures. To have these specialized forces and to work very, very closely at the community level to make sure that community members feel they can share information with the police.

Part of what we believe in here is deepening the relationship between police and community. And that is about everyday life and about fighting everyday crime, but it has another great benefit. The closer the police and the community get, the more dialogue, the more information flows. It can also lead to us being able to identify a potential terrorist threat. So I would urge all my fellow Mayors to deepen the relationship between their police forces in their communities – to think about how to consciously create that bond and that communication and, where necessary, to have some of these specialized forces as well.

Thank you everyone.