Hard Won Lessons: The New Paradigm? Merging Law Enforcement and Counterterrorism Strategies

Introduction: Hometown Security in an Age of Global Threats

State and local police operate today in a new and strangely dangerous world. Law-enforcement officers confront threats more technologically complex, and geographically diverse, than any they have ever faced. Although militant Islam is the most widely publicized new threat, it thrives within a wider dissatisfaction with American values, brought home to Main-Street America by globalization.

Globalization is a trend with many gurus; not all have been wise. Some, writing during the economic euphoria of the Clinton years, predicted that global trade would translate into global peace. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, Thomas Friedman even dismissed terrorists like Ramzi Youssef, architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as ineffectual "Yahoos" who were not the wave of the future. We know now that the Ramzi Youssefs of the world are not ineffectual; that they will threaten us for decades to come; and that they will seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them against us.

We know too that globalization is a permanent fact. The international economy is the engine of our nation, and the source of our wealth. This means more for law enforcement than is generally realized, even now. It means more than just police working new beats like container security, seaport security, airport security. It means that all the physical and conceptual walls associated with the modern, sovereign state—the walls that divide domestic from international, the police from the military, intelligence from law enforcement, war from peace, and crime from war—are coming down. It means, in short, that police response to the new threats must be shaped by globalization, as surely as are the threats themselves.

The realities of globalization can be seen in something as simple as the investigation of a car crash. If a patrolman investigated a fatal accident in the 1970s, the victims and the witnesses were both likely from the local community; and if the officer climbed into the wreckage, to look for some malfunction in the vehicle, he would probably see from the serial numbers that the car was made in the U.S. He could put all that together, and make his case.

But let's fast-forward to recent times, and consider the crash that killed Lady Diana. This accident involved an English princess, with an Egyptian boyfriend, crashed in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian, who was drunk on Scotch whiskey, followed closely by Italian paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, and finally treated with Brazilian medicines by an American doctor. In this case, even leaving aside the fame of the victims, a mere neighborhood canvass would hardly have completed the forensic picture, as it might have a generation before.

Yet the change runs deeper still. The very notion of a local community is being transformed. Thirty years ago, few police chiefs had to protect multinational corporations in their municipalities. Today, many chiefs must secure the underpinnings of the most sophisticated economy on earth. The vast majority of this economy is not only in private hands, but also protected by private hands. If the need for police to partner with the private sector is therefore clear, the forms of these partnerships are still being forged. If sending a police cruiser to drive by DuPont headquarters won't do much to prevent a terrorist attack, then what exactly should police be doing to protect Dupont? How should they be working with DuPont's own security element? What questions should officers be asking to assess the new threats to this newly configured community? What methods should they be using to glean the answers?

The difficulty of meeting these new challenges underscores an old dynamic. Police are really supposed to be doing one thing, protecting the public. But to do that one thing, police must actually do, and be, many things. The expectations placed on officers have never been closer to what August Vollmer, the early 20th-century police chief in Berkeley, California, famously said about what the citizenry expects of police: The patience of Job, the diplomacy of Lincoln, the tolerance of the Carpenter of Nazareth, and an intimate knowledge of every branch of natural, biological and social science. If an officer has all these things, the saying goes, he just might be a good policeman.

How does a local police officer get all these things and use them in an age of global threats? For three years, under the aegis of the Safe Cities Initiative, law enforcement leaders throughout the United States have been meeting to consider this question. This document distills what they have learned. It describes how state and local police are merging crime-control and counterterrorism models in their daily work, creating a new paradigm for policing. Ed Flynn, chief of the Massachusetts State Police, calls it "hometown security."

The New Paradigm

The causes of terrorism are certainly far beyond the capacity of American law enforcement to address. The question is, what can state and local police do about terrorism in practice? What can they do to alter the environment that must exist in order for an act of terrorism to occur?

Dr. George Kelling has persuasively argued that police can prevent terrorism with many of the same mechanisms they've developed over the last twenty years to prevent crime. Among these mechanisms are problem solving, intelligence-led policing, environmental design, community policing, and public-private partnerships.

Problem Solving

"Police prevention in counterterrorism, as in other areas, should be systemic," says Major Timothy Connors, Director of the Center for Policing Terrorism. Terrorism should be viewed, not as a set of isolated incidents to be responded to, but as a special class of problem, which police activity must be organized to prevent and pre-empt.

Intelligence-Led Policing

Israeli policing offers a useful case for emulation. Many U.S police chiefs have sent officers to Israel, to ride on traffic stops and investigate crimes with the Israeli National Police in Tel Aviv. U.S. police observers have been impressed to find that "investigation of the incident" is secondary to the number one goal—which is gathering intelligence. For instance, when they raided a bordello, where the patrons were primarily Arabs from different parts of the region, Israeli police were less concerned about the criminal activity, than with preparing intelligence reports on who these people were, and how they got into Israel. "They put this all into a system and are able to collate it," notes an observing officer from the LAPD.

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