An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) calls for more aggressive tactics in interdicting terrorists plots, the most recent of which failed to achieve its lethal aims when the Times Square car bomb failed to explode:

After a succession of recent terrorist incidents inside the U.S., often involving so-called home-grown jihadists, it is evident that we should be willing to err on the side of being aggressive in surveilling and catching such people before their bombs begin to smolder. It is not possible to catch all of them. It should be possible to ensure that the odds of protecting the American public are as strong as we are able to make them. Lady Luck is a nice colleague, but she won't protect us from all the terrorism coming our way.

It is reasonable to assume that some sites in Los Angeles are every bit as tempting to terrorists as Times Square, which would seem to call for added vigilance on the part of the Los Angeles Police Department. Incredibly, the very unit within the LAPD responsible for such vigilance was quietly disbanded not long ago, with its personnel reassigned to more mundane duties.

Given this close brush with disaster in New York, perhaps some in the LAPD are having second thoughts about where those officers would be best utilized.