BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — A janitor spots an abandoned diaper bag lying on a table in the sprawling food court at the Mall of America. A bomb-sniffing dog and a security officer are there within minutes, examining the package while nearby shoppers are held a safe distance away.
No bomb. Case closed. But that scene is repeated at the nation’s largest shopping center 150 times a month.
Years ago, lost purses or shopping bags would just go to the lost and found. But after the 2001 terrorist attacks and a series of threats against malls, “we realized that bad guys don’t write ‘explosives’ on the side of packages,” said Maj. Douglas Reynolds.
He heads a 150-officer security force trained in Krav Maga, the official self-defense system of Israeli security forces. A plainclothes unit is solely devoted to behavioral profiling.
Terror threats against U.S. malls — federal authorities have charged suspects in at least three terror plots since the 2001 attacks — have made huge behind-the-scenes changes to one of the most treasured American experiences — going to the mall.
Shoppers say they hardly notice the closed-circuit cameras, plainclothes officers and trained dogs. They don’t believe in the risk of getting attacked at a shopping center.
“The average shopper, they don’t walk in and think, ‘This could be the end,’ ” said Don Heinzman, 77, of Elk River, Minn., having coffee with two friends at the Minnesota mall.
But overseas, especially in places like Israel and Turkey, terror attacks in malls occur with frightening regularity. Experts are worried that similar acts will eventually become commonplace in the U.S. In 2004 an anonymous call threatening a Los Angeles plot sent more than 100 officers to protect various shopping centers.
Two Ohio men — originally from Somalia and Pakistan — are serving prison terms in a 2003 threat to bomb Columbus-area malls. Another suspect is serving a prison term for a similar plot against a mall 90 miles north of Chicago. A Massachusetts pharmacist is awaiting trial on terror charges; prosecutors said he conspired with others to gun down shoppers in U.S. malls and kill U.S. troops in Iraq.
Paul Maniscalco, a senior research scientist at George Washington University who was involved in developing a program to train mall officers, called shopping malls “soft targets.”
“I think they’re as safe as any place else in the U.S.,” he said. “Unfortunately, in an open and free democratic society, there’s certain trade-offs. The concept of a shopping center is a pretty complex social icon within our society. You can’t turn them into armed camps.”
Malachy Kavanagh, spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, said the latest threat to public places in the U.S. is not from organized terrorist groups, but “lone wolf” individuals.
Preparation in U.S.
In a 2006 report, the nonprofit RAND Corp. think tank found that there were 60 shopping mall attacks in 21 countries between 1998 and 2005 and that U.S. malls may not be well-prepared for them. The International Council of Shopping Centers trained about 10,000 mall officers between 2003 and 2009 to better recognize terrorists and other threats. Experts at George Washington University designed the $3 million program, which was discontinued because of a lack of funding.
