Ex-New York Police Department Chief Terry Monahan on Thursday slammed Donald Trump for slashing tens of millions of {dollars} in federal counterterrorism funding to the division simply weeks after the twenty fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 assaults.
“Taking this cash away, it endangers Individuals all throughout this nation, I discover it has a catastrophic-type contact,” mentioned Monahan in an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur. “It actually places all Individuals in hassle.”
Monahan’s feedback arrive after a federal decide temporarily blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from slashing $187 million in funding for the state from the Homeland Safety Grant Program, which was launched within the aftermath of the 2001 terror assaults.
New York, 10 different states and the District of Columbia sued the Division of Homeland Safety on Monday in hopes of restoring the funding, pointing to Trump’s day one push for DHS to withhold such cash from states and cities with “sanctuary” jurisdictions that don’t fall according to his mass deportation agenda.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), in a press release, known as it “totally surprising” that the administration could be “strolling away from the struggle in opposition to terrorism within the primary terrorist goal in America.”
Pacific Press by way of Getty Photographs
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch mentioned the division is about to lose about $80 million in federal counterterrorism funding, calling the transfer a “profound mistake” in a time of “international battle and surging threats.”
“To be blunt, that is the distinction between a metropolis that stops the subsequent assault and a metropolis left uncovered to it,” she mentioned in a press conference on Wednesday.
Monahan — who served as NYPD chief from 2018 to 2021 — pointed to NYPD numbers that mentioned counterterrorism operations prevented 71 terror plots because the 9/11 assaults, including that a few of the thwarted plans have been tied to different U.S. cities in “pink and blue” states alike.
Because the twenty fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches subsequent yr, Monahan mentioned taking federal counterterrorism funding away from the nation’s largest municipal police pressure is “completely mistaken.”
Within the years since 9/11, town has seen a number of different assaults together with a 2022 subway mass taking pictures, a lethal truck-ramming assault on a Manhattan bike path in 2017 and a 2016 bombing within the metropolis’s Chelsea neighborhood.