Addressing the India-US police chiefs' conference — the first ever mega-city policing cooperation between the Americans and another country — Shinde recalled the 9/11 attacks in New York as well as the 26/11 Mumbai strikes to emphasise how terrorists typically targeted large and densely populated urban areas to inflict maximum damage.
"An effective megacity policing system must serve as an effective deterrent against terrorists and their masters, who launch targeted attacks on the nerve centres of a country...our objective must be to make our cities safe, and therefore our countries, safe by reducing our vulnerability to such challenges," he told the gathering of police chiefs from various cities across the US and from all over India.
The two-day police chiefs conference is being organized by the Union home ministry as part of the India-US Homeland Security Dialogue, an outcome of US President Barack Obama's discussions with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during the former's visit here in November 2010.
The dialogue has seen four ministerial level meetings and more than a 100 bilateral engagements between representatives of the US department of homeland security and Indian security establishment covering training, briefings, exchanges and visits.
While Shinde and home secretary Anil Goswami are leading the Indian side, assistant secretary for policy, US department of homeland security, David Heymann, is at the head of the US delegation of police chiefs. Also present at the inaugural session on Tuesday was US ambassador Nancy Powel, who described the Indo-US homeland security dialogue as the most robust pillars of bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
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