Police at forum discuss changes in response plan for large-scale attacks

The Metropolitan Police Department has been overhauling how its officers respond to large-scale emergencies to be better prepared to combat terrorist actions, department officials said during a forum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Thursday.

Instead of having officers rush to emergencies from all over the valley, leaving some areas without coverage, the department will be more conservative and assign smaller teams of officers to more specific actions.

The department decided to make the changes after sending investigators to Mumbai, India, where teams of terrorists took over several sites in a tourist-heavy area of the city in 2008.

The investigators found that Mumbai police saturated the initial attack site with officers, and did not have enough officers on hand when terrorists took over hotels in other areas of the city.

Las Vegas police have been training for more than a year on how to respond to such a terrorist attack in the valley. Typical crime-fighting tactics would be useless in such an attack, Lt. Steve Menger said, and officers have been trained to use more militaristic tactics.

Federal and state authorities also demonstrated during the forum how they share information and use their high-tech bomb-diffusing equipment.