The fact that 10 Islamic terrorists, with minimum training, could seize hostages, take over the Indian city for three days, kill at least 178 people and glean continuous worldwide media attention for their treacherous exploits, was enough to make Bratton entirely re-think his department’s approach to hostage-taking situations.

“Normally, when hostages are taken, you try to buy time to negotiate for those hostages,” Bratton told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum on June 29. To accomplish such a hostage rescue mission (as well as other purposes), the LAPD had assembled a traditional 60-person SWAT team which was armed with several hundred high-powered firearms.

“We thought we had sufficient firepower,” Bratton explained, but after witnessing this small band of terrorists capture hostages and create havoc in about 10 separate locations around Mumbai, Bratton organized new tabletop training exercises and concluded within 60 days that the LAPD “required more assault weapons.”

The LAPD also changed its entire strategy related to a hostage-taking incident conducted by terrorists in the future. Bratton said he concluded that terrorists are not interested in negotiating for the release of the hostages, but would try to gain as much media attention as possible, and would eventually kill their hostages.

So, instead of negotiating, Bratton said he would plan for his police officers to break in on the terrorists quickly, and kill them, if possible.

At the time, the LAPD had about 300 officers assigned to its counterterrorism units, said Bratton, and they were re-trained “on a dime” in the revised tactics.

Of course, the LAPD, where Bratton served as commissioner from 2002 to 2009, addressed the growing threat of terrorism with a lot more than a beefed up supply of assault weapons.

He said he was also proud of the work done by the fusion center in Los Angeles, known as the Joint Regional Intelligence Center, or JRIC, which gathered intelligence data related to potential terrorism threats and married it with crime data as well, which improved the quality of information available to the center’s analysts.

Bratton worries about the future of such fusion centers in an age where the budgets for local law enforcement are being cut. He pointed out that there is no standardization throughout the U.S. on who should pay to set up and run such fusion centers. And he is concerned that because intelligence analysts are “out of sight and out of mind,” too many of them may be laid off under budget pressures.

Perhaps the best measure of the rising threat of terrorism is the amount of time Bratton has been spending on this subject in recent decades. Before 9/11, he recalled, he might have devoted one percent of his work day to issues related to terrorism. But, by the time he left the LAPD, in 2009, he told his Aspen audience, he was spending 40-50 percent of his time of terrorist-related matters.