NEW YORK (AP) A team of heavily armed New York Police Department officers conducted a late-night drill at a closed shopping mall last month in hopes of avoiding a repeat of the chaos that accompanied the mall massacre earlier this year in Kenya, police officials said Tuesday.
The after-hours NYPD exercise at Kings Plaza in Brooklyn was intended to test officers' ability to thwart rampaging gunmen in a crowded public setting, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters following a briefing for corporate security officials at police headquarters.
With Kelly nearing the end of his tenure as the head of America's largest police department, he once again warned that the city should never let its guard down on the terror front. The NYPD claims that more than a dozen terror plots involving the city have been uncovered since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
"This is a time for vigilance and not complacency," he said. "The world we are in remains a very dangerous place."
The grenades-and-gunfire assault on the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi on Sept. 21 killed at least 67 people. The Somali militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for Kenya's sending of troops into Somalia.