The NYPD is gearing up for potential disturbances during the upcoming New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square, as mentioned by Mayor Eric Adams. The city has witnessed close to 500 protests since the beginning of October, raising concerns about the likelihood of demonstrations coinciding with the year-end festivities.

The following is the text and video from a question and answer posed to Mayor Adams:

Question: I wanted to ask you about security concerns surrounding New Year’s Eve. And I know the NYPD will be doing their briefing later on in the week, but I just wanted to ask, are there any sort of increased threat levels here? And I know that naturally because it’s New Year’s Eve, because it’s Times Square, the terror threat naturally rises.

But is there anything new this year, anything that gives any concern, any new strategies, more deployment of officers, anything that you could say about what’s going to be going on down there?

Mayor Adams: We’re going to use technology a lot this year, number one. Number two, as you know, there’s always a serious concern around safety on New Year’s Eve, because there’s a large number of people. Everyone looks for events like this if they want to do bad things. And the Police Department is on top of it.

There’s an added concern because of some of the protests you have been seeing, and there was an attempt to disrupt the tree lighting, and we’re sure that there’s going to be some type of attempt this year to use that stage for some other concerns that people are having. The Police Department did an amazing job during the tree lighting to mitigate any form of major disruptions, and they’re going to do it this year.

And I just think last year, many people don’t recall, in the midst of that, we had that assault on the two police officers. And NYPD analyzed our response to that, and we’re making sure that we don’t use distractions to get in the way of staying on our posts, staying on our locations and making sure we not allow someone to pull us off.

There’s something that’s known in policing, particularly when there’s some type of terrorist action, of secondary devices, things like that, they want to draw attention from one area to go to a specific target area, we’re really exercising our mental muscles to make sure that does not happen.

People have to maintain their locations and use minimum deployment from where a particular incident is happening so that we do not allow people to take us off our goal. So, there’s some different strategies we’ll put into place this year to take into account some of these circumstances. And as always we’re monitoring the chatter, you know, monitoring the chatter out there so we can be prepared.

Question: Is there anything to that chatter? I know you mentioned the protest, and that’s certainly a concern. But any lone wolf, anything on this chatter, anything that’s being picked up by anybody.

Mayor Adams: I wouldn’t… You know, if we did, we wouldn’t mention that. It’s important for us for our Intel Division under Deputy Commissioner Weiner to determine, to let the police know so they could deploy it correctly.

But lone wolves are challenging. Like the individual, the perpetrator last year, he wasn’t on anyone’s radar. His assault on those two police officers, you just, you have to be ready for those unpredictable circumstances. It’s a real herculean task to manage that number of people without being heavy handed but being protective.