As the New York City Marathon looms, the city’s top cop is planning for crises from hostage situations to overturned tankers.  Girding for the annual spectacle, with the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013 still fresh on his mind, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton will deploy 1,800 cops, thousands of barricades and an untold number of undercover counterterrorism officers.  “Terrorism always remains a concern although there’s no specific threats we’re looking at at this time,” Bratton said Thursday at a Central Park news conference. “In addition to (the cops), there will be a lot of what you don’t see behind the scenes.”  Meanwhile, at 1 Police Plaza, NYPD brass and other agencies, including the FBI and FDNY, conducted tabletop exercises in which various commanders discussed how they would respond to a series of worst-case scenarios.  Officials ran events from a gas tanker overturning on the Verrazano Bridge just before the race to a madman driving a minivan into a crowd of spectators, then stabbing 10 people before running off and sparking fears that a bomb was left in the vehicle.  Other madeup crises included an Upper East Side shootout that ended up in a hostage drama at a coffee shop.  More than 50,000 people are expected to participate in Sunday’s race.  “We’re prepared, and we’re looking forward to it,” Bratton said, joking that the next few days will be a “typical weekend in New York.”  “We’ve got two World Series games, we have Halloween down in Greenwich Village, we have the Marathon, and oh, by the way, we have the President coming on Monday,” he said.  But policing Friday’s World Series game at Citi Field will be no special challenge, Bratton said.  “There’s no city in the United States that has more experience with the World Series than New York,” Bratton boasted.  “We’re pretty good at it — very frequently for the Yankees, but this time for the Mets.”
Runners participating in Sunday’s New York City Marathon will be sprinting past a sea of blue, the NYPD’s top cop said Thursday.