Local Police in Homeland Security

¶ … Local Police in Homeland Security

STATE and LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT in HOMELAND SECURITY

On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered the loss of almost three-thousand citizens in the largest terrorist attack on the American homeland in its history. Very shortly afterwards, intelligence analyses revealed that U.S. authorities had been in possession of sufficient information to prevent the World Trade Center attack, but that the crucial information failed to garner the attention of those in position to act on it, primarily because information collected by various federal agencies involved in counter-terrorism was not shared with other agencies. Likewise, federal agencies responsible for analyzing threats to American interests failed to communicate those threats to some of the agencies in possession of intelligence linked to those threats (the 9/11 Commission Report, 2004).

President Bush announced the formation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the same month, appointing Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to the newly established cabinet position of Office of Homeland Security Director. Since then, the 2004 9/11 Commission Report detailed the extent of intelligence failures and the immediate need for effective central oversight and interagency coordination of intelligence among forty-one major recommendations for improving homeland security..

In the six years since the 9/11 attack, coordination between all fifteen national security agencies has been realigned, under the National Security Council, headed by the Director of Central Intelligence, who is responsible for interagency cooperation and answers directly to the President as his chief intelligence advisor. Likewise, state and local law enforcement agencies have increased their homeland security-related responsibilities by identifying and securing high-value terrorist targets, initiating programs to harden soft targets and to deter terrorist attacks on them through a variety of means.

Many local police agencies now assign officers and resources to joint terrorism task forces modeled after the first FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City. According to several respected security experts and international terrorism authorities, joint law enforcement task forces are a necessary but wholly insufficient first step toward effective incorporation of local law enforcement into homeland security. Chief among their concerns is the fact that local resources are not being properly distributed, trained, and funded to fill some of the very functions for which their preparation is vital in their homeland security capacity.

Identifying the Appropriate Focus of State and Local Law Enforcement Resources:

Experts like Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans, Graham Allison and retired Air Force Colonel Randall J. Larsen, Director of the Institute for Homeland Security, (and others) believe that nuclear, chemical and biological attacks are the most dangerous terrorism threats to this country. Undoubtedly, state and local law enforcement agencies can play a vital role in protecting the United States from the potential for damage posed by these threats. However, at present, most local law enforcement resources are assigned to what Larsen describes as a "goal-line defense" that does not contribute effectively to decreasing those threats, and which amounts to a diversion of local resources from areas where they might fulfill crucial roles in connection with protecting the country from terrorist attacks.

To illustrate the failure to properly distinguish between what local law enforcement can reasonably be expected to do and what it cannot do to fill the most necessary role within homeland security, Larsen recounts the story of one of his recent visits to Washington to advise Congress on counter-terrorism strategy. On arriving at the Capitol, he passed through a gamma detector at the building's entrance, intended to prevent terrorists from entering the building with a nuclear weapon.

During his presentation to members of Congress, Larsen explained that such a goal- line defense is a waste of tax money and manpower, because once a nuclear device is within the downtown Washington area, it is already too late to protect the Capitol Building, notwithstanding its state-of-the-art gamma ray detector (Larsen, 2007).

In similar fashion, the New York Police Department (NYPD), the largest in the country - and the local law enforcement agency responsible for safeguarding one of the premier terrorism targets of Al Qaeda and other anti-American terrorist groups - has issued handheld radiation detectors to patrol officers, at considerable expense to the city. Unfortunately, these efforts are more wasteful than helpful and contribute to little else but maintaining a false impression of securing the City against nuclear attack.

The fact of the matter is that there is little that local law enforcement agencies can do to prevent a nuclear-armed terrorist organization from initiating a catastrophic attack at the operational level for much the same reason as a gamma detector at the entrance to a high-value target is useless.. The most likely scenario for any nuclear terrorism in New York City would come, not from a suitcase carried into a building or even from a truck driven over a bridge between Manhattan and the outer boroughs.

Such an attack would come from a transatlantic ocean vessel or overhead from a private aircraft authorized to land at one the airports nearby (Larsen, 2007).

Similarly, NYPD officers have all been issued anti-chemical agent hoods, which they are now required to carry on their duty belts. Their purpose is to enable all NYPD officers to fill the role of first responders in the event a chemical or biological attack takes place in their sector. The problems with this use of local law enforcement personnel and resources are numerous: (1) any attack necessitating the use of such equipment will also trigger mass panic in the immediate area, and the protective hoods will likely be ripped off isolated officers by mobs of civilians; (2) biological agents, much like nuclear weapons, are far more likely to be disbursed by aircraft over an entire borough or city; and (3) there is little that police officers can do to help those already exposed to biological agents. Throughout the country, local law enforcement agencies have reinforced their security efforts and response times in connection with attacks on high-value targets, and some have followed the NYPD's lead in pioneering high volume emergency response "surges" of officers in force deployed to highly visible potential soft targets. While these tactics may have some deterrent value for small- scale attacks in the nature of suicide bombings witnessed throughout Israel, they too ignore the most valuable allocation of state and local law enforcement in the counter- terrorism capacity.

Refocusing State and Local Law Enforcement Priorities:

The fundamental distinction state and local law enforcement agencies must make in their counter-terrorism planning is the difference between attack prevention and damage containment (Larsen, 2007). Attack prevention is a perfectly appropriate focus for protecting soft targets like sports stadiums and shopping malls from isolated conventional terrorist attacks like suicide bombings. Checkpoints and maintaining a series of concentric perimeter rings is a tactical role in which state and local police officers may be deployed very effectively.

However, the approach of most local and state law enforcement organizations with respect to large-scale unconventional attacks of the type that pose the greatest danger (i.e. nuclear, chemical, and biological) are not able to prevent tactically. To illustrate the difficulty of training police agencies to prevent even small scale biological attacks, Randall Larsen describes one of his visits to the White House only nine days after 9/11, when security was at the highest level possible: Larsen proceeded through all the checkpoints, including the one where uniformed Secret Service police officers asked about the surgical mask in his briefcase. They never challenged him about the glass vial that he purposely removed from one pocket and inserted into a different pocket in front of the officers watching him. That vial contained enough weaponized (but harmless) Bacillus globigii, to kill thousands of people, had it been the nearly identical Bacillus anthracis (anthrax), and Larsen managed to carry into the Oval Office, where he showed it to Vice President Cheney (Larsen, 2007).