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There aren't nearly enough counterterrorism experts to instruct all of America's police. So we got these guys instead.
No matter what size the department may be, though, police need clear guidelines. Officers have to make decisions every day about when and how to apply the law, and when guidelines are bad or lacking, officers can go astray. In 2005, for instance, the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division of the Maryland State Police began secretly infiltrating a wide variety of activist groups—death penalty opponents, bicycle lane advocates, even a citizens group protesting utility rate hikes. Though not a single member of these groups was ever found to pose a security threat, troopers labeled dozens of them as “terrorists” and placed their names and files in a database shared by other regional law enforcement agencies. Perhaps worse, a subsequent state investigation found that no one in the Maryland State Police chain of command “gave any thought whatever to the possibility that its covert surveillance of these groups … was in any way inappropriate.” It is not hard to imagine that under the new Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, countless innocent Muslim Americans could similarly wind up being questioned, documented, and even arrested by local and state authorities, and their names, fingerprints, and other personal information entered into FBI databases, where they would sit for years.
This is a civil liberties issue, but it is also a matter of police effectiveness. As Bill Bratton, who headed up the police departments of both New York and Los Angeles, explains, “There is a real risk as you educate people that you do not, in fact, educate—whether it is law enforcement officers or community—to the degree that you misinform or create a fear or bias that should not be there.”
Indeed, having a bunch of ill-trained local cops sleuth around for jihadists could jeopardize the very counterterrorism efforts the government is supposed to be conducting. For one, it is likely to generate a lot of white noise, forcing analysts to spend precious time sifting through useless information. It could also “dry up important sources of information,” warns Matthew Waxman, an associate professor of law at Columbia University, who has written extensively on the role of local and state law enforcement in counterterrorism.
In counterterrorism, as in most areas of intelligence and law enforcement, vital information often comes from those closest to the suspected perpetrators—from neighbors, friends, even family members. It was an anonymous handwritten note from an Arab American in Lackawanna, New York, a small city outside Buffalo, that led the FBI to arrest six men accused of comprising a sleeper terrorist cell in that city in 2002. In another case last fall in Portland, Oregon, a tip from the Muslim community led federal authorities to arrest in a sting operation a nineteen-year-old Somali-born American for intent to set off a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Ham-handed and overly aggressive behavior by local police toward the Muslim community could break the trust necessary for this kind of information to flow.
The demands placed on police will only increase in the coming years. The Nationwide Suspicious Activities Reporting Initiative asks law enforcement to interpret everyday incidents and decide whether they are indicators of terrorist activity. These decisions are then fed into a nationwide system. Merle Manzi, from the Michigan State University Intelligence Program, argues that requiring line officers to specify that a suspicious activity is probably related to terrorism doesn’t make sense: “The thing about checking a box about terrorism is that, is the officer on the street going to know it is about terrorism? Or will they just know that it is a peculiar thing, something out of the ordinary?”
None of this is to say that state and local police and other first responders cannot play a role where terrorism is concerned. It’s crucial that they be well trained to cope with terrorist incidents once they occur—for instance, to detect and cordon off areas that have been hit by radiological weapons. But intelligence gathering is another matter. Paradoxically, the best thing the police can do in the struggle against terrorism may be to not do “counterterrorism” but simply perform the duties they are already mandated to perform: serve the communities they live in, keep their eyes open for suspicious activities of all sorts, and build the links that result in tip-offs like the one that led to the arrest of the men in Lackawanna.
But regardless of what role cops on the streets should or should not play in fighting terrorism, the fact is that rivers of federal training dollars are already flowing, many of them straight into the pockets of instructors like Sam Kharoba. The training system clearly needs reform. Again, federal control is not the solution, but a first step would be for the federal government to issue voluntary guidelines on how states can best reform their oversight of counterterrorism training—since the most robust reforms will need to happen at the state level. State accreditation should be made mandatory for counterterrorism training courses—it often isn’t—and the accreditation process itself must also be toughened. There should be subject-matter experts who evaluate courses, and they should sit in on classroom sessions anonymously. If such a system of state-based oversight worked properly, then bad trainers would have their state accreditation revoked, and they would no longer be allowed to teach in the state. If states agreed to share lists of bad trainers, then the trainer would effectively be banned nationwide.
Time is of the essence. Within the next year, the Department of Justice plans to implement the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative nationwide, and this will amplify the effects of the bad training being provided—unless the system is reformed quickly. It also behooves us to ask the fundamental question of what role beat cops should play in counterterrorism. But instead of a broader discussion, what we have now is a system that fails to police the ranks of those who train our frontline officers, while no one is paying attention. Apart, that is, from the police.