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Police helicopters will be able to read license plates. Officers will carry backpacks designed to detect dirty bombs. And blimp-like detectors may hover over the city, scanning for chemical and other threats.

Those are some of array of high-tech gadgets that will help secure the city against terrorism, the Police Commissioner said yesterday.

“There is no environment across the nation that compares to New York City,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said at a Manhattan forum hosted by the firm CIT Aerospace. “We have the highest number of critical assets in the smallest amount of physical space.”

The September 11 attacks and more recent scares - such as a plot to blow up the aviation fuel system at John F Kennedy International Airport — have cemented a belief at the nation’s largest police department that “technology must match the actual problems we face,” Kelly said.

The New York Police Department has been developing mobile radiation detectors that can be mounted on cars or bicycles to alert officers to evidence of a dirty bomb, an explosive designed to contaminate areas with radioactive dust and debris.

Another version would be worn like a backpack by officers “who are patrolling large venues like Yankee Stadium or the United Nations,” Kelly said.

The Police Department has recently unveiled a new helicopter “loaded with the most comprehensive high-tech surveillance and tracking equipment on the market,” including infrared cameras and a GPS satellite navigation system, he said.