The New York Police Department will extend its global presence to Australia on January 1, the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, told The New York Sun yesterday.

A New York detective from the intelligence division will be a permanent liaison to the New South Wales Police in Sydney, and in exchange, an Australian police officer will be assigned to work stateside, the commissioner said in an interview.

The placement in Australia, whose prime minister warned the same day that it is a terrorist target, expands the network of NYPD operatives overseas that gather terrorist-related information to convey back home. The New South Wales police officer will join officers from Jordan and Toronto who have permanent stations in New York. An NYPD lieutenant was recently assigned to Amman and one officer each has a fixed post in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Toronto; Montreal; Singapore; London; Interpol headquarters in Lyons, France, and Tel Aviv, Israel, in addition to temporary assignments in other cities around the world.

“These places all have significant value for us,” Mr. Kelly said. The overseas officers are particularly valuable because they “ask the New York question,” he said. “Did New York come up in any investigation going on?”

Mr. Kelly explained this strategy while sitting at the head of a long table dotted by digital, analog, and satellite telephones, in his executive command center on the 14th floor of One Police Plaza. Four televisions played NY1, CNN, Fox News, and Al-Jazeera silently in the background, and nine digital clocks hanging on a wall indicated the time in Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; Tokyo; Tel Aviv; Islamabad, Pakistan; Paris; London; Los Angeles, and New York. A map of New York City hung on the wall, and a map of the Middle East was posted on an easel close to where Mr. Kelly sat.

Based in strategic locations, the overseas operatives can collect and disseminate terrorism-related information to the Police Department with greater speed, Mr. Kelly said. He can find out about terror threats without worrying about layers of bureaucracy. After the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, he said, “we knew that day how the bombs were put together, where the bombs were put together.” Then the day of the London bombings in July this year, the detective assigned there was able to relay quickly important bombing details to the Police Department.

While terrorists may seem to belong to one group, Mr. Kelly said Al Qaeda is actually more of a movement or philosophy, and there are 800 derivative terrorist groups on the Police Department’s radar. “They’re all over,” he said.

The police commissioner explained that the cosmopolitan nature of New York City actually helps the NYPD to handle these international assignments.

“We have the largest police department in the country,” Mr. Kelly said. “This is probably the most diverse city in the world.” So the NYPD is becoming more diverse, he said.

One hundred and forty recognized languages are spoken in the city, Mr. Kelly said, and children from 199 countries attend city schools. The department boasts 460 certified linguists that speak languages including Arabic, Hindu, Farsi, and Urdu. That number, Mr. Kelly said, likely represents the greatest number of languages spoken by personnel in any law enforcement agency in the country.

Overseas assignments are funded by the police foundation, and each one costs an average of $4,000 per month. That amount is on top of the officer’s city-paid salary.

The Police Department has about 1,000 officers assigned to various terrorism-related duties. While those posted overseas receive country-specific training through the intelligence division for about one month, the 1,000 officers learn about radical Islamic ideology through a primer, “The Evolution of Militant Sunni Ideology.” The booklet is “a review of the ways in which religious concepts have been twisted and misappropriated in order to promote and justify terrorists’ strategies and tactics,” Mr. Kelly wrote in the foreword.

For the NYPD officers here at home, anti-terrorism precautions have been increased under Operation Atlas. And the department runs practice drills twice a day, once each in the morning and afternoon, where the intelligence division choreographs maneuvers in which 30 to 100 vehicles carrying police officers converge on a sensitive location. The deployments “cover those locations and practice our ability to mobilize,” Mr. Kelly said. This ability to react quickly and in a coordinated manner proved useful the day of the 2003 blackout when officers fanned throughout the city.

It might seem that transforming an urban police department into an international presence could cause tension with other law enforcement agencies, but Mr. Kelly said no problems have materialized. At the very least, he said, “it hasn’t manifested itself to me.”

But protecting the city has not always been easy. The state has stymied efforts, Mr. Kelly said. Federal funding allocated for New York City is sent to the executive branch in Albany for dispersal to the city, but rather than send it, “Albany takes 20% off the top,” he said.

The commissioner stood by Mayor Bloomberg’s decision last month to alert the public about the terrorist threat against the subway system.

When asked about specific threats to New York City, Mr. Kelly said that he remains concerned about the vulnerability of the expansive subway system, comprised of 468 stations and 600 miles of track. The city is “a target-rich environment.”

Nonspecific threats, when someone maybe walks into an embassy in another country and says something will happen in New York City, are the norm, numbering a few per week, Mr. Kelly said. Asked whether the terrorists would strike the city again, Mr. Kelly said, “It’d be a statement if they came back a third time.”