But the experts I spoke to thought that most of the time, such measures were counterproductive. It meant that the 15 members of the Southampton counterterrorism unit weren’t doing more productive policing. With both their hands needing to be on the gun, it was far more cumbersome to respond to less extreme situations that might arise. Most real terrorism prevention takes place before “the moment of contact” -- when the intelligence community scopes out a planned attack and stops it before it begins. There were, after all, Capitol police guarding the congressional baseball game in June, but they couldn’t prevent James Hodgkinson from nearly killing House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. You could even make the case that the presence of the Southampton police at high-end galas increases the likelihood of an attack by drawing attention to the events.
“If you do the math,” says Schneier, “the odds of a terrorist attack at one of these events is infinitesimal. You would do more good screening for drunk drivers. But that isn’t sexy.”
When I questioned Skrynecki about the utility of his new counterterrorism force, he took quick umbrage. He talked about lone wolves and the dark web, where bad guys could communicate without being observed by intelligence agents. He spoke not just about the truck attack on a crowd in Nice, France, but also shootings at the Bataclan in Paris and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando as well as the most recent attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters. “There are crowds just as large in Southampton,” he said.
And that’s true. But they’re not just at celebrity galas. And I’m hard-pressed to think of a single example where terrorists sought to kill the rich and famous, as opposed to all of us, innocently going about our lives. Any terrorist attack akin to the ones Skrynecki listed would simply not have been stopped by his counterterrorism program. Michael Price of the Brennan Center for Justice, who writes often about security and local policing, described what Skrynecki is doing as “security chic.” That sounds about right.
I went to one Hamptons fundraiser this summer. It was thrown by the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. There were lots of rich people at the event, including several billionaires. But there wasn’t a single automatic weapon in sight.
That’s because the event took place in East Hampton, one town over. Thankfully, East Hampton doesn’t have a counterterrorism unit. At least not yet.
Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg View columnist. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. He is the co-author of "Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA."