(Image source: NYDailyNews)
BY JING LIU
ANCHOR ANA COMPAIN-ROMERO
You're watching multisource global video news analysis from Newsy.
It seems the New York Police Department is packing some serious heat to fight terrorism. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city could even blow planes out of the sky.
That’s from an interview of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly on CBS’s “60 Minutes”.
“Do you mean to say that NYPD has the means to take down an aircraft? Yes. I prefer not to get into the details. But obviously this would be a very extreme situation.”
A city police department…shooting down a plane?
An expert told Fox News he doubts whether the NYPD has the legal authority.
“They don't. Because the legal authority for protecting the nation's skies and protecting the nation's borders belongs to the federal government… he would defer to the fed who have more knowledge than the New York City police about who, what, when and where of what is in the sky. ”
So just how could NYC take a plan down? According to the New York Daily News, New York Mayor Bloomberg isn’t giving any details.
“The New York City Police Department has lots of capability that you don’t know and won’t know about.”
Despite the cloak and dagger routine, ABC has a theory. The network’s Russel Goldman thinks the weapon might be the helicopter-mounted Barrett .50 caliber rifle. But he doubts the weapon’s effectiveness on planes.
"…it likely could not take down a large commercial passenger jet, like those flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001… To shoot down a large jet, the NYPD would almost certainly need to use a missile or a large caliber machine gun.”
According to New York’s WCBS -- Mayor Bloomberg isn’t confirming whether those capabilities could have prevented the attacks of 9/11.
