Ric Bradshaw's morning at the office on Sept. 11, 2001, began routinely enough.
"I was on the treadmill in the gym at my police department in West Palm Beach — I was the police chief at that time," Bradshaw, today the elected Sheriff of Palm Beach County, Fla., told
Newsmax TV on Thursday.
What happened next, as one jetliner and then another flew into New York City's World Trade Center towers, has stayed with just about everyone who, like him, had until that day barely imagined the notion of a catacalysmic terror attack on U.S. soil, Bradshaw told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
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"I will never forget it," said Bradshaw. "I don't think most Americans will ever forget where they were. And it was almost unbelievable. It was kind of surreal."
Bradshaw and his colleagues "thought it was an accident to start with," he said. "But when reality came . . . we shifted gears tremendously, and everything has changed since then."
"Not only [in terms of] your personal security," said Bradshaw, "but how we look at buildings, how we look at the mail, how we look at people coming into the airport, how we look at people coming into the courthouse, [and] our security on the ocean and our borders out here."
In addition to becoming sheriff in a region where several of the 9/11 attackers lived and plotted, Bradshaw has taken on other responsibilities, some of which didn't exist before 9/11: executive board member of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force; regional Domestic Security Task Force chairman, with responsibility for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's
Palm Beach Regional Fusion Center, which gathers and analyzes potential threat intelligence.
Bradshaw also collects data from a coastal radar grid stretching from Martin County to Key West.
"So it's been a tremendous paradigm shift in law enforcement," he said, adding that "the extent of the resources that we've had to deploy, and the training that comes along with it, has been exponentially ramped up."
Before 9/11, he said, "I was in la-la land like everybody else was; I really didn't believe somebody could come here and do that, because we always had this sense that it's on the other side of the ocean no one is going to cross over here and dare to do that."
"I don't take anything for granted anymore," he said.
Bradshaw spoke with some confidence about America's preparedness today, looking through the long lens of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., and the crash of a third hijacked plane in Pennsylvania; a deadly anthrax letter attack weeks later in neighboring Boca Raton, Fla.; the redirecting of local law enforcement resources to terror threats; and a decade-plus of Middle East war.
"Are we safer than we were before? Absolutely," he said.
But he cautioned that "we can't afford to let our guard down," especially with the renewed terror threat posed by the militants of the Islamic State (ISIS), who have already killed Americans and vowed to
raise their flag at the White House.
"I really believe that they'll try to get someone into the United States," he said, "and when you think about 100,000 people last year got into the United States undetected, it's not a far stretch."
Bradshaw said these realities press at him constantly.
"Every day, I always think am I doing enough to protect the people in Palm Beach County? I want to be able to say yes, but then I always have this lingering thought, can I do more?" he said. "I think about it every day."
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