Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) State Crime Alerts (c)
Visualizing the Threat Picture
FBI New York personnel aim to be ready for anything when safeguarding NYE festivities, Burgwald said.
“Those threats can really range the ideological spectrum that can go from your traditional violent criminality to certainly terrorist attacks for New Year’s Eve,” he explained.
For example, on Dec. 31, 2022, an attacker driven by extremist ideology attacked three NYPD officers with a machete. The attacker, Trevor Bickford, recently plead guilty to federal terrorism charges in connection with the attack.
Wittenberg says that the night of the festivities, the FBI takes nothing for granted.
“During the course of the event, there is a constant assessment of how things are going and, as needed, we can adjust our plans and redirect some of the experts that we have deployed just to make sure that everything is going as smoothly as possible,” Wittenberg said.
As for 2023’s event, “there were no significant incidents,” Wittenberg said. “The plan and the new measures that were put into place to make sure that the event was smooth and not disrupted were very effective.”
It’s event for which no news is good news.
“The New Year’s Eve event is just a reminder of the love of mission and just the sheer dedication to the FBI’s mission to keep the American people safe,” Burgwald said. “The team’s collective work is often done away from the spotlight, so when an event goes off without a quote unquote ‘incident,’ that’s a good thing.”