Arguing Over a Lesson in Security From 9/11 At a hearing Wednesday on the Police Department's security plans for the new World Trade Center site, the head of the area's community board broached a topic she called "the elephant in the room": the location of a permanent command center for the so-called World Trade Center campus. The speaker, Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1, invoked the fate of the city's last crisis command center at the location, a bunker on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center that was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks. The destroyed center had served the entire city, while the one that concerns Ms. Menin would be for just the trade center and areas nearby. "I know from conversations that a location has not been absolutely identified," Ms. Menin said of the plans for a permanent command center for the 16-acre area. But let me, once again, go on record as saying I 100 percent oppose locating the center directly on the World Trade Center site, and the reason why is I don't believe we should repeat the mistakes that were made in the Giuliani administration when the command center was clearly located right by the site and we saw with devastating consequences what that meant. Richard Daddario, a former federal prosecutor who has been the Police Department's top counterterrorism official since 2010, did not answer questions at the hearing. In prepared remarks, he said the purpose of the department's security plan was to protect against a vehicle-borne explosive device, like a car or truck bomb, while ensuring the kind of openness that is "hospitable to remembrance, culture and commerce." He did not address the topic of the permanent command center. In a 32-page report on the World Trade Center campus, the police have said that the entire project - buildings and street construction - is scheduled to be completed and occupied by 2019. Ms. Menin said that in a "private briefing" two weeks ago with police officials, she was told that they were "seriously considering" locating the command center at 4 World Trade Center, though they had not reached a decision. "If the command center is located, for example, in Tower 4, or one of the other towers," she said, "we are then repeating the exact same mistakes that the Giuliani administration did where Giuliani, despite all of his advisers" saying do not locate the command center at 7 World Trade - his advisers said to locate it at Brooklyn MetroTech - they located right at 7 World Trade Center - which was the No. 1 terrorist target in the world. The Force's Own Norman Rockwell Patrolman Charles Harrold was known as the Norman Rockwell of the New York Police Department for the covers he drew and painted for the department's internal magazine, Spring 3100. Now, some of his covers, drawn between 1930 and 1948, are being readied for electronic display on the second floor of 1 Police Plaza. Spring 3100 has been a favorite among police officers and their families for generations, cataloging the inner doings of the department - the transfers, promotions and policy developments that might seem mundane to outsiders. Some officers have stacks of the magazines at home. When someone in the family follows a father or mother or uncle or other relative onto "the job" of policing, that newly minted officer might inherit a cherished pile of Spring 3100 magazines as well. To look at the covers is to see how policing in New York has changed over the years. One captures the artistic reflection of the start of the departmental motorcycle unit. Another cover shows when officers first got radios - a communication now deemed so elemental in police work. In the war years, one cover depicted American troops. Another encouraged the purchase of war bonds. Even the title of the magazine is a throwback: SPRing 3100 was the phone number New Yorkers once called for police service, when the department had its headquarters on Centre Street in Manhattan. On the second floor of the current police building at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, a display of Spring 3100 covers stood for years until it was removed around 2008 during renovations. The new exhibit will go up on display monitors that have since been installed. No opening date for the exhibit has been set. Al Baker, police bureau chief for The New York Times - and the son of a police lieutenant - brings you inside the nation's largest police force every week.