NYPD appoints first woman as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism

The largest counterterrorism and intelligence gathering operation in American policing has a new leader today and for the first time it is a woman, a woman who is no stranger to right-wing extremism, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other forms of terrorists including cyber-terrorism.

Rebecca Weiner will replace John Miller as the Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence. Weiner joined the NYPD as an intelligence analyst in 2006 and rose through the ranks to be assistant commissioner under Miller’s command.

She’s been instrumental in developing the NYPD’s Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism squad known as R.E.M.E. focusing on domestic threats including those that seek to target minorities because of their race, Neo-Nazis, and other forms of similar extremists.

And, as NBC News first reported, the team of NYPD analysts who sent four reports to the Capitol Police in the days leading up to January 6 detailing the types of threats they were seeing online prior to that fateful day were under her command.

Weiner initially joined the NYPD following 9/11 helping to build the NYPD’s intelligence analysis unit focusing on stopping terrorist attacks and analyzing terrorist attacks abroad and in the U.S. The mission also expanded to providing analysis of shootings and crime trends to try and help the NYPD better understand specific crime trends and help make arrests of those most responsible for violence, officials say.

While a regular speaker at global terrorism conferences Weiner has given few interviews. On the 20 year anniversary of 9/11 she spoke to NBC News exclusively about what she was combatting daily.

“Our job is to distinguish signal from noise and figure out what we do with the information, how we can use it to protect our city and to make sure that our partners elsewhere across the country, around the world, can use it to their best advantage, too”, Weiner said.

“In the last five years, we've seen not just a transition from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, which we saw in 2014 really sharply, but other actors like racially ethnically motivated violent extremists, white supremacists, neo-Nazi, what we call accelerationists.”

Weiner prophetically said the threat was now also aimed at the government and its institutions as well, “and you've had, over the last couple of years, sort of widespread distrust of institutions, of law enforcement, of government that's manifesting in violent extremisms, civil unrest across the country.”

“So, we still worry about Al-Qaeda, we still worry about ISIS. Now we worry about a whole range of domestic extremist actors as well.”

The announcement was made by New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Edward Caban. Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton spoke at her appointment crediting the work of Weiner and her team in helping to stop or prosecute the over 50 attacks aimed at the city since 9/11, over half of them in the last 10 years.  

Her young sons Xavier and Damian held the bible during her swearing in. Her grandfather was one of the last people to flee Poland prior to the invasion of the Nazis and immigrate to the U.S.

He was soon employed at a lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico as part of the Manhattan Project helping to develop the atom and hydrogen bomb. There he met a young typist who he would eventually marry and would become Weiner’s grandmother.

An Art Deco poster commemorating the lab and Los Alamos currently hangs on her office wall at an undisclosed location in Lower Manhattan.

Weiner's appointment comes a day after two other historic announcements for the NYPD.

On Monday, Edward Caban was named the next NYPD commissioner, making him the first Hispanic person to lead the nation's largest police department. Additionally, Mayor Eric Adams announced Tania Kinsella as the next first deputy commissioner -- the first woman of color to serve in that position in NYPD history.