A mobile wall.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fans of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade who come to see the soaring SpongeBob and Snoopy balloons may get a far less heartwarming sight this year: giant dump trucks filled with sand.
More than 80 city sanitation trucks will be used at intersections and other strategic spots along the 2 ½ mile parade route to create an imposing physical barrier to terror. The trucks weigh about 16 tons empty and up to twice that with sand.
“You can ram a New York City Sanitation Department sand truck with a lot of things, but you’re not going to move it,” said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s top counterterrorism official.
While the trucks have been used like this before – most recently to protect Trump Tower – the New York Police Department says they will play a bigger role at this year’s parade in the wake of the cargo truck attack in Nice, France, that killed more than 80 people and a recent posting in an English-language Islamic State magazine that called the parade “an excellent target.”
As scary as that sounds, authorities say there’s no confirmation of a credible threat and they have repeatedly urged spectators to not stay away.
Miller said that while such postings are psychological warfare intended to spread a message of fear, “We never accede to that.” A front-page headline in Tuesday’s Daily News creatively paraphrased the message the NYPD seeks to send: “Truck You, ISIS!”
Aside from the trucks, security for the parade includes teams of officers armed with assault weapons, bomb-sniffing dogs and portable radiation detectors. Plainclothes officers will blend in with the crowd, and other officers will be posted on rooftops along the parade route.