19/07/23
New York gets its first female counterterrorism chief
The country’s largest police department has its first female intelligence and counterterrorism chief. New York City officials announced Tuesday that Rebecca Weiner will replace John Miller as the police department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism.
Weiner has a long track record of investigating right-wing extremism, the Islamic State terrorist group, Al Qaeda and other forms of terrorism, including cyberterrorism. She joined the NYPD as an intelligence analyst in 2006 and rose through the ranks to become assistant commissioner for counterterrorism and intelligence under Miller.
Officials said she has been instrumental in developing the NYPD’s Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism squad. The unit focuses on domestic groups and people who seek to target minorities because of their race or ethnicity, such as neo-Nazis.
NYPD analysts under Weiner's command sent four reports to U.S. Capitol Police in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol detailing the threats they were seeing online.
Weiner also helped build the intelligence analysis unit, officials said, which focused on thwarting terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and analyzing terrorist attacks abroad. The unit’s work expanded to provide analysis of shootings and crime trends to help the NYPD better understand crime trends and arrest offenders who were most responsible for violence.
In an interview with MSNBC on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Weiner talked about what she saw as her mission.
“Our job is to distinguish signal from noise and figure out what we do with the information, how we can use it to protect our city and to make sure that our partners elsewhere across the country, around the world, can use it to their best advantage, too,” she said.
She added that threats to the U.S. had evolved. “In the last five years, we’ve seen not just a transition from Al Qaeda to ISIS but other actors, like racially ethnically motivated violent extremists, white supremacists, neo-Nazi, what we call accelerationists.”
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