NYPD on ‘high alert’ amid sweeping protests

Joining me now on the phone is NYPD Chief of Patrol John Shell. John, Chief, very good to have you with us back on the program. Thank you so much for being here. Can can you give us a sense of chief of of what’s going on downtown in Manhattan right now and and what your forces are able to do to keep an eye on the situation? Are they concerned that this will get volatile? It looks fairly peaceful but very crowded. So right now we have 16 protests plans for today. We’ve already cleared up with about five of them. We’ve been on high alert since this morning with our bridges and tunnel crossings for what’s happening around the country and we will stay in that posture till later on tonight. We’ve got some added resources that are being held over. We have our aviation here. We have a joint operation center ready to go in terms of the protests right now down by Wall Street, they have a couple 100 so far as peaceful. This kind of stationary at the right now and then we have about 60-70 protesters going on at at the Trump grand jury proceedings right now. So we’re ready. We’ve been ready. We’ve anticipated today and so far so good. New York City Chief I I just want to let everybody at home listen to the sounds of this protest. We we have a live shot. Let’s just listen for a few seconds here and we’ll come back to the chief. None, OK, Chief. You hear a little bit of what they’re saying there. We heard the Palestinian protesters early and they were saying Israel bombs, US pays. How many kids did you kill today? Genocide. Joe has got to go. And they go on to say Israel go to hell. Their signs say Israel’s responsible for 75 years of bloodshed. How do you instruct your officers in this situation to keep the peace? And obviously this is very disruptive for anybody who’s working in that area, businesses in that area. How do you juggle all that, chief? Well, we’ve been dealing with this since October 7th, so we’ll we’re well versed in this. Cops are well changed, well trained, Response groups are well trained. So we just tell them to, you know, keep the peace, be neutral, they respect the 1st Amendment, OK. But under no circumstances, to the best of our ability are we going to allow any laws, behavior as extends to breaking property, assaulting people and blocking traffic when we can make those arrests. So they do it well, they’re well trained and been doing this on October 7th and we’re used to it. Chief, do you have a sense? You said that you were basically, you had intelligence that was around 16 protests were coming. You said five of them have been cleared so far. What is your sense of who’s organizing all of this? And so it varies every day. It could be different groups representing, you know, their own group. They could be students. That’d be schools. They could be larger, larger organizations. They could be a tax, tax day protest today. So like I said, we have 16 of them. They vary, but we track them very well through our Intelligence Bureau and we usually stay ahead of them and we know what they’re trying to do. What’s your what would you tell to to people in terms of how safe New York City is in this environment? When it comes to protests, New York is a tough resilience. We’ve been doing them since October 7th and beyond. We have the best Police Department in the world and we’re going to do the best, best we can to keep them safe, to keep it moving, keep traffic flowing and try to inconvenience them as least as possible. But it is tough for us to do, but we get it done. Chief. Thank you very much, Chief of Patrol John Shell.