The most effective anti-terrorism weapon we have are the cops on the beat. I have been saying this for years. They are involved in their communities, they see familiar faces, are familiar with patterns of behavior and movement, and notice subtle things that are out of the ordinary.
In May, a Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle officer stopped a car for speeding. He noticed that the driver was sweating and gripping the steering wheel nervously, while refusing to answer basic questions.
That matched a profile the officer had just learned about as part of a program to identify behaviors associated with terrorism. Information that once might have gotten lost in the shuffle now had a destination: The officer reported the driver's international license information via the department's program, and learned the man was "an individual of interest" in a terrorism investigation.
"That was huge," said Cmdr. Joan McNamara, the No. 2 counterterrorism official for the LAPD. "It was a tremendous piece of the puzzle."
The LAPD program that gave the officer the skills he used to identify that threat and bring him in was built by the ground up, and is built on pattern analysis of suspicious behaviors, as well as training street cops how to recognize them. In the eight months the program has been active, a thousand reports of suspicious activities have been filed, and led to several arrests as well and more solid loeads for federal terrorism investigations.
It's all about connecting those dots we have all been bitching about since those guys all got somebody's attention in flight school at one time or another...but nobody connected the dots.
The model is gaining attention all over the country, and the metro D.C., police department plans to implement a version of the program next month, in advance of Inauguration Day.
While the LAPD common-sense, street level approach takes hold, the DHS program is an unholy mess. Multiple runs have been made at integrating the disparate threads of information, to no avail. The communications technology not interfacing property is infuriating beyond the ordinary users ability to cope. Agency end users have thrown up their collective hands and cried "Uncle!" in unison. Last month, the White House asked DHS to put their version on hold because it is too difficult to use. They also suspended spending on an $160 million alert system that failed at every level as well.
It's the difference between top-down and bottom up. Bottom up is definitely the more successful approach. But I have a whole different outlook on terrorism and effectively combating it than most of my fellow Americans, because it has been flashing prominent on my personal radar for nearly 30 years. I was an Air Force wife in the 80's, for Christ's sake. Hello? Rome Airport, anyone? And lets just say that lots of American couples never went out dancing when they were billeted in Germany, either, and leave it at that.
Back then, spouses and children routinely took a different commercial flight to an overseas billet than the service member who was required to fly in uniform. I have the utmost respect for the European law enforcement community that stemmed those problems back then.
Europe has been dealing with terrorism, and doing so effectively, for many years now, and they have done so with common-sense security measures and with good, old-fashioned police work. For decades they have been showing us that the way to effectively fight terrorism is law enforcement, not blowing shit up, invading countries that didn't attack us, and terrorizing the citizens of said country.
Could it be we are finally admitting that those ghastly socialists have been right about how to combat this problem all along? |
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Best New SoapBlox - 2008
