Rebecca Weiner discovered about catastrophic threats at an early age: She grew up in Santa Fe, N.M., close to the cradle of the nuclear bomb.
Her grandfather, a mathematician, fled Poland in 1939, studied at Harvard after which moved to New Mexico in 1943 to lend a hand broaden atomic guns. In faculty, Ms. Weiner studied the moral questions that Manhattan Project scientists, and their better halves, faced as they devised the bombs that annihilated two Japanese towns, however that they was hoping would “end war as we know it,” she stated.
Now, Ms. Weiner, 46, has been named the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, commanding about 1,500 other people unfold all the way through the town. The bureau comprises dozens of analysts and loads of officials and investigators who track threats like bomb plots, mass shootings and spontaneous chaos like a social media influencer’s online game giveaway that drew 1000’s of rowdy youngsters to Union Square this month.
A attorney and 17-year division veteran, Ms. Weiner is taking up a bureau that features a counterterrorism unit created after the Sept. 11 assaults. Since its inception, the unit has helped foil a plan to kidnap an American-Iranian journalist and what officers say have been dozens of terrorist plots.
It could also be a bureau whose paintings stays shrouded in secrecy and that has been condemned as a result of of its surveillance actions, together with in 2011, when the general public discovered that its officials were spying on Muslims for years.
The bureau has been maximum visual when it has violated civil liberties, however Ms. Weiner stated in an interview that it had secure them extra carefully prior to now decade. The unit’s focal point, now, she stated, was once on preventing so-called lone wolves like the person who massacred Black citizens of Buffalo at a grocery store, the truck driving force who mowed down 8 other people on a Manhattan motorbike trail and the person who stabbed the writer Salman Rushdie final August in Chautauqua, N.Y.
In the interview, Ms. Weiner ticked off some of the threats New York City recently faces: the Islamic State, right-wing extremists and accelerationists, a white supremacist motion that advocates overthrowing the federal government.
“The individual actor has been the biggest concern for a while,” she stated, including that what saved her conscious was once “the concern that we’ve missed something.”
Ms. Weiner, who was once sworn in final month as her two sons, 5 and eight, held a Bible, is the uncommon best police govt who does no longer have shut non-public ties to Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain who identifies intently with the pressure. Rather than strolling a local beat, she joined as a civilian junior analyst with a legislation stage.
In 2020, all through a panel dialogue hosted by way of the Global Security Forum, an annual accumulating of mavens and officers, the moderator — a lady — requested Ms. Weiner whether or not she led with “tough love mothering” or by way of embracing a “flirtatious, more traditional vamp style.”
Ms. Weiner was once silent for a second.
“I hope those aren’t the only two options,” she responded, then burst out giggling.
“I am going to be who I am,” Ms. Weiner advised the moderator. “And that’s how I’m going to lead from wherever I am in the organization.”
Reassuring citizens of the bureau’s intentions and practices is a a very powerful activity for Ms. Weiner as police departments basically confront “an erosion of trust,” stated William J. Bratton, who met her when he returned to guide the dep. for a 2d time period as commissioner in 2014.
Ms. Weiner’s mind, humor and approachability must lend a hand, Mr. Bratton stated.
“One of the reasons she collaborates so well with people is that she makes her points without alienating people,” he stated.
Ms. Weiner stated that the participation of her grandfather, Stanislaw Ulam, in essentially the most secret army initiative of World War II influenced her profession alternatives.
“I was always interested in national security work, in protecting our country,” she stated.
Mr. Ulam, Ms. Weiner stated, performed reminiscence video games along with her when she was once a kid to check how the mind resembled a pc. But she was once specifically thinking about her grandmother, Francoise Aron Ulam, who got here to the United States from France and met Mr. Ulam in 1941.
Ms. Ulam spoke 3 languages, helped write her husband’s memoirs and labored as a “calculator” at the Manhattan Project in conjunction with different better halves, appearing complicated arithmetic the usage of paper, pencil and slide regulations.
Ms. Weiner grew up in need of to be informed extra about her and the opposite younger ladies who relocated to Los Alamos so their husbands may paintings on “the Gadget,” the nickname for the bomb.
“Many of them were really grappling with the same ethical quandaries as their husbands, but without the exhilaration of knowing that they were in charge of the scientific discovery,” Ms. Weiner stated.
She helped her grandmother write her personal memoirs as a scholar at Harvard, the place she majored in historical past and literature and met her husband, Drake Bennett, a reporter at Bloomberg News. She earned a legislation stage at Harvard, then started researching world safety as a fellow on the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
When she joined the Police Department in 2006, she was once one of only some feminine analysts. She rose throughout the ranks, changing into director of intelligence research in 2012 and assistant commissioner of the intelligence bureau in 2016.
John Miller, who become deputy commissioner of the bureau in 2014, stated she had a “remarkable” talent to acknowledge how safety threats have been converting.
“Whether it was the shift to Al Qaeda to ISIS, or the shift from sleeper cells to lone wolves to domestic-inspired racism, it was Rebecca and her team of analysts who were always on the cutting edge,” Mr. Miller stated.
By the time Ms. Weiner joined the dep., the counterterrorism department had evolved a secret demographics unit composed of officials whose task was once to create a map that confirmed the place other ethnic teams lived. The function was once to be informed the place terrorist suspects may mix in, however the unit’s techniques shifted right into a blanket surveillance of Muslims and creating databases of the place they shopped, labored and prayed.
The unit was once uncovered in 2011 by The Associated Press, prompting proceedings by way of Muslim and civil liberties teams, who stated the techniques violated the principles that were established in consequence of a Nineteen Seventies case involving the dep.’s spying on scholars, civil rights teams and suspected Communist sympathizers. Known because the Handschu case, the litigation ended in federal tips prohibiting the Police Department from accumulating information about political speech until it’s associated with possible terrorism.
Ms. Weiner didn’t paintings within the demographics unit, however she helped care for negotiations between the dep. and legal professionals for the plaintiffs within the fits filed after the unit’s techniques have been uncovered.
“There was a level of mistrust that we had to rectify,” she stated.
Jethro Eisenstein, a attorney for plaintiffs within the Handschu case, stated Ms. Weiner had proven a powerful regard for civil liberties. During one negotiation consultation in 2016, Ms. Weiner requested hypothetically whether or not the bureau must examine any person who had declared strengthen for ISIS on-line.
Of direction it must, the legal professionals responded. Her reaction was once sudden, Mr. Eisenstein recalled.
“‘Really? Just based on that?’” she stated.
“She was reviewing a lot of things that people said and then trying to decide whether that warranted a disruption of their lives,” Mr. Eisenstein stated. “She was really putting on the brakes.”
Ms. Weiner and different police officers now meet per 30 days with a civilian consultant who critiques the dep.’s investigations and experiences possible wrongdoing to a federal pass judgement on. The consultant has submitted 5 experiences since 2018. All discovered the dep. in compliance with the ideas.
Naz Ahmad, the performing director of the CLEAR project, one of the organizations that sued the dep. over the spying program, stated the consultant had helped police officers believe how their paintings impacts civil liberties. Still, Ms. Ahmad added, the dep. didn’t need to element its on-line investigations or disclose the race or faith of its goals.
In 2016, the town’s inspector common discovered that during greater than 95 % of case recordsdata, the goals of investigations “were predominantly associated with Muslims” or engaged in political process related to Islam.
“We have no insight into whether those numbers have changed,” Ms. Ahmad stated.
Ms. Weiner stated the bureau didn’t monitor the race and ethnicity of other people it was once investigating, however she stated the demographics can be other lately, given how the threats had shifted to right-wing extremism.
Often, she stated, the threats got here from other people pushed by way of conflicting ideologies, like Ethan Melzer, a soldier who ate up each ISIS and neo-Nazi propaganda sooner than hatching a plan to kill U.S. provider contributors.
Ibrahim Bechrouri, who teaches surveillance and counterterrorism on the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, stated the bureau Ms. Weiner now oversees stays too secretive.
“It still does not have enough oversight,” he stated. “We don’t have any transparency on what is happening now when it comes to the use of new technologies.”
Ms. Weiner stated the bureau stocks information “whenever we can.”
“Ultimately, our job is to protect people,” she stated. “We’re not withholding information to benefit us. We want to protect people’s lives.”