phones to use them and attackers cannot. making sure that terrorists don t have access to each other in making sure they don t get information from public sources that they can use to our detriment. reporter: some police now exercise how to counter the tactics used in mumbai as they watch for if you innovations in the terrorist playbook. you have to be careful not to fight yesterday s war and look over the horizon. am mumbai is the template for an attack here, at least new york, washington and los angeles will be better prepared. i hope it wouldn t last more than 30 minutes before we contain it and neutralize it. reporter: making preparations like this is expensive. not every city can afford to do. not every city is ready for an attack like mumbai. jeanne meserve, cnn, new york. so much serious news. we have a get here, a man who gives you a few reasons to laugh right after this. look familiar? there he is.
you have to put the threat down immediately and you have to run toward the fire and not away from it. reporter: now every police recruit in new york is given some heavy weapons instruction and 250 officers have been trained and equipped to reinforce the department s emergency response team. the nypd knowing mumbai attackers moved by boat has identified 100 sensitive locations in the harbor. they help identify suspicious people and it is reviewed in case a boat is taken over. we know how to take control of certain ships and where fuel turnoffs are. reporter: in new york and washington the lay out of hotels and transit hubs have been mapped in case police need to get in or hostages need to get out and police are learning how to harness technologies like survesraeuveillance cameras and
all right. good deal. thanks so much. the intelligence community has been following new details about possible terror attacks in europe for several days now. one nugget of information suggests a commando attack similar to the one seen in mumbai a few years ago could be launched. it made american police reexamine their own ability to handle such a brazen assault. here now is cnn s jeanne meserve. reporter: mumbai was a low tech high impact attack. terrorists armed with only semiautomatic weapons hit multiple targets in quick succession. some u.s. police officials had this thought. we re not ready for that specific type of attack especially on soft targets. reporter: los angeles and new york immediately dispatched personnel to india to learn all they could. there was one big take away.
threat that s really emanated from this mosque behind me that s closed down the mosque here that is the same one that the 9/11 hijacker got together with a small cell back in the late 1990s and again has been the place where a group of young radicals have got together and gone off to training camps in pakistan about a year and a half ago. one of them now in u.s. custody talking about this mumbai style attack across different cities in europe. although that s not what is explicit in this travel advisory, it does seem to correlate. it s talking about the same countries. britain, germany, and france. what s interested is that while britain raised its warning for british people traveling oversea, germans here are saying that they are not seeing an increase threat and not raising their threat level in germany. the spanish saying their threat level is at two on a scale of