Israeli Counter-Terrorism Vet Trains BART Cops To Handle The Unexpected

BART SWAT cops practiced tackling suicide bombers from behind, under the tutelage of Aaron Cohen, a veteran of Israel's counter-terrorism unit. Cohen just spent four days drilling the team on skills common in the middle east, but rare for most local law enforcement in the United States.

"You guys don't have experience dealing with terrorism the way we do. It's not expected," Cohen told the BART police and members of the media invited to the exercises. "It takes time to build these measures."

That included learning how how to free hostages from a BART train, as well as identifying potential terrorists before they enter the system.

"There's a lot of different indicators that these guys have been given in the last few days to try and prevent an attack from happening," Cohen told KCBS reporter Doug Sovern as the final drill unfolded at the Concord BART station.

"This is obviously the worst-case scenario," Cohen said, where a suicide bomber has entered the system and has taken control of a train.

His goal was to teach the officers what they needed " so they can take him down as quickly as possible, and obviously if they need to respond with lethal force, then they'll have the ability to do so if they must, to reduce risk to themselves and to the innocent people around them."

The BART cops seemed worn out after four days of running, crawling, huffing and puffing, but Sgt. Paul Garcia said the training was definitely worth it:

"I am extremely sore, very, very sore after four days," Garcia said. But, "we are far better prepared now than what we previously were in order to encounter a terrorist threat," he admitted..

Garcia said Cohen's techniques opened his eyes to the differences between ordinary criminals the system confronts every day, and the ideological demands a terrorist attacker might make.