Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security (Cambridge Studies in Criminology)

CR IMINOLOGISTS ON TER ROR ISM A ND HOMEL A ND SECUR IT Y

This volume presents eighteen original essays addressing what is widely regarded as the most serious problem confronting America today and for years to come – terrorism – from the unique perspective of criminology. The chapters collected here address such issues as the prevention of terrorism, the applicability of community policing and routine activities models of crime to the problem of terrorism, how to balance liberty and security, and how to think about and manage the fear of terrorism, as well as the coordination of federal and local efforts to prevent and counter terrorism. Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security will interest anyone concerned about violence prevention in general and terrorism in particular, as well as policing, prosecution, adjudication, sentencing, and restorative justice. Brian Forst joined the American University faculty after twenty years in nonprofit research, including positions as research director at the Institute for Law and Social Research and the Police Foundation. He is the author, most recently, of Terrorism, Crime, and Public Policy (Cambridge, 2009); After Terror (with Akbar Ahmed, 2005); Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources, and Remedies (Cambridge, 2004); and The Privatization of Policing: Two Views (with Peter Manning, 1999). He is a member of the American University Senate and chairs the Department of Justice, Law, and Society’s doctoral program. He is also a voting member of the Sentencing Commission for the District of Columbia. Jack R. Greene is Professor and former Dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, where he led academic and research programs focused on matters of criminology and justice policy (1999– 2008). He is one of the country’s leading scholars in the field of policing. Greene has published five books, the two-volume Encyclopedia of Police Science , and more than 100 research articles, book chapters, research reports, and policy papers on matters of policing in the United States and internationally. Professor Greene has consulted for various agencies and organizations and is a Fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. James P. Lynch is Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, on leave from his position as Distinguished Professor at John Jay College in New York. He is the coauthor of Understanding Crime Statistics (Cambridge, with Lynn A. Addington); Understanding Crime Incidence Statistics: Why the UCR Diverges from the NCS (with Albert D. Biderman); and Immigration the World Over: Statutes, Policies, and Practices (with Rita J. Simon). Professor Lynch has published in many journals, including Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Justice Quarterly.

C A MBR IDGE STUDIES IN CR IMINOLOGY Editors Alfred Blumstein H. John Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University David Farrington Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge

Recent books in the series: Legacies of Crime: A Follow-Up of the Children of Highly Delinquent Girls and Boys , by Peggy C. Giordano Errors of Justice , by Brian Forst Violent Crime , by Darnell F. Hawkins Rethinking Homicide: Exploring the Structure and Process Underlying Deadly Situations , by Terance D. Miethe and Wendy C. Regoeczi Situational Prison Control: Crime Prevention in Correctional Institutions , by Richard Wortley Prisoner Reentry and Crime in America , edited by Jeremy Travis and Christy Visher Choosing White-Collar Crime , by Neal Shover and Andrew Hochstetler Marking Time in the Golden State: Women’s Imprisonment in California , by Candace Kruttschnitt and Rosemary Gartner The Crime Drop in America (revised edition), edited by Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman Policing Gangs in America , by Charles M. Katz and Vincent J. Webb Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld , by Bruce Jacobs and Richard Wright Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform , by Ronald Weitzer and Steven Tuch What Works in Corrections: Reducing Recidivism , by Doris Layton MacKenzie Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives , edited by David Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America , by Marie Gottschalk Understanding Crime Statistics: Revisiting the Divergence of the NCVS and UCR , edited by James P. Lynch and Lynn A. Addington Key Issues in Criminal Career Research: New Analyses of the Cambridge Study of Delinquent Development , by Alex R. Piquero, David P. Farrington, and Alfred Blumstein Drug-Crime Connections, by Trevor Bennett and Katy Holloway

The editors dedicate this book to the late Jean-Paul Brodeur, one of the contributors who made the book possible. He was an extraordinary scholar and friend, and a delight to work with: effective yet considerate, profound yet accessible, responsive and prompt yet thorough. He was an inspiring leader and a patient, reliable team player. A philosopher, J.P. had the rare capacity to make serious points with a light touch. His chapter is foundational, about how to reason in the face of complexity. He has contributed significantly to this work; he has contributed more fundamentally to our ability to think clearly.

Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security Edited by Brian Forst American University

Jack R. Greene Northeastern University

James P. Lynch John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Cambridge University Press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521899451 © Cambridge University Press 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Criminologists on terrorism and homeland security / [edited by] Brian Forst, Jack R. Greene, James P. Lynch. p. cm. – (Cambridge studies in criminology) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-89945-1 (hardback) 1. Terrorism. 2. Terrorism – Prevention. 3. Internal security. 4. National security. I. Forst, Brian. II. Greene, Jack R. III. Lynch, James P. (James Patrick), 1949– IV. Title. V. Series. hv6431.c7624 2011 363.325–dc22 2010039405 isbn 978-0-521-89945-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

About the Authors Preface 1.

2.

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Introduction and Overview – Brian Forst, Jack R. Greene, and James P. Lynch

part i

page ix

1

nature of the problem

Manifestations of Aggression: Terrorism, Crime, and War – David Klinger and Charles “Sid” Heal

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The Etiology of Terrorism: Identifying, Defining, and Studying Terrorists – Wayman C. Mullins and Quint C. Thurman

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Balancing Counterterrorism Strategies: Lessons from Evolutionary Ecology – Bryan Vila and Joanne Savage

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5.

Gangs, Crime, and Terrorism – G. David Curry

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6.

Women Terrorists – Rita J. Simon and Adrienne Tranel

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3.

4.

part ii 7.

strategies for intervention

Is Crime Prevention Relevant to Counterterrorism? – Cynthia Lum and Christopher S. Koper

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contents

8. Implications of Opportunity Theory for Combating Terrorism – James P. Lynch

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9. Soldiers and Spies, Police and Detectives – Tomas C. Mijares and Jay D. Jamieson

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10. Community Policing and Terrorism: Problems and Prospects for Local Community Security – Jack R. Greene

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11. Go Analyze! (Connecting the Dots) – Jean-Paul Brodeur

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12. Managing the Fear of Terrorism – Brian Forst

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13. Should Profiling Be Used to Prevent Terrorism? – A. Daktari Alexander

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14. Federal-Local Coordination in Homeland Security – Edward R. Maguire and William R. King

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15. Liberty and Security in an Era of Terrorism – John Kleinig

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16. Regulating Terrorism – John Braithwaite

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part iii

thinking about tomorrow

17. Using Open Source Data to Counter Common Myths about Terrorism – Gary LaFree

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18. Criminal Justice and Terrorism: A Research Agenda – Brian Forst

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Index

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About the Authors

A. Daktari Alexander is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Seattle University. His primary research interests are in the fields of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice, police-juvenile interaction, race, crime and justice, prisoner rehabilitation, and criminological theory (especially special and general strain theory and social disorganization theory, and how these theories apply specifically to race). Dr. Alexander earned his PhD in crime, law, and justice from Pennsylvania State University in 2004 and was on the faculty of the American University Department of Justice, Law, and Society from 2004 through 2006. Before attending graduate school, Dr. Alexander worked as a legislative aide and was a political fundraiser for several local, statewide, and national campaigns. John Braithwaite is Federation Fellow with the Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of numerous books and articles on restorative justice and on regulation. The latest is Regulatory Capitalism (Edward Elgar, 2008). He is also editor of the journal Regulation and Governance . He received his PhD from Queensland University. His other works include “Corporate Crime in the Pharmaceutical Industry” (1984); Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice (1990); Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989); Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (2002); Global Business Regulation (2000); Information Feudalism (2002); and Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue (2005). His chapter in this volume is a substantially revised and updated version of a 2005 essay published in Current Issues in Criminal Justice. ix

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Jean-Paul Brodeur was Professor of Criminology and Director of the International Center for Comparative Criminology at the University of Montreal at the time of his untimely death on April 26, 2010. He received degrees in philosophy from the Universities of Paris and Montreal. In 1978, he was director of research for the Commission of Inquiry into police operations in Québec. Since then he led numerous other government research projects. He wrote several books and articles on the sociology of policing, including Comparisons in Policing: An International Perspective (1995), Violence and Racial Prejudice in the Context of Peacekeeping (1997), and How to Recognize Good Policing: Problems and Issues (1998). He also published a frequently cited article on the study of informants. G. David Curry is Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1976. He has focused extensively on organized violence over the course of more than thirty years of research. His books include Confronting Gangs: Crime and the Community (2002, with Scott Decker) and Sunshine Patriots: Vietnam and the Vietnam Offender (1985). His articles and book chapters deal with gangs and delinquency, military service, hate crime, and domestic violence. Most recently he has been studying programs that aim to reduce youth violence. Brian Forst is Professor of Justice, Law, and Society at American University’s School of Public Affairs, in Washington, DC. He came to American University in 1992, after three years on the faculty at the George Washington University. Prior to that, he was research director at the Institute for Law and Social Research (1974–1985) and research director at the Police Foundation (1985–1989). His research on policing, prosecution, and sentencing, the deterrent effect of the death penalty, errors of justice, and terrorism is widely cited by scholars and criminal justice practitioners. Recent books include Terrorism, Crime, and Public Policy (Cambridge, 2009); Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources and Remedies, named book of the year for 2006 by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (Cambridge, 2004); After Terror: Promoting Dialogue Among Civilizations, coedited with Akbar Ahmed (Polity

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Press, 2005); and The Privatization of Policing: Two Views, coauthored with Peter Manning (Georgetown University Press, 1999). He has BS (statistics) and MBA (quantitative methods) degrees from UCLA, and a PhD (information and decision systems) from the George Washington University. Jack R. Greene is Professor and former Dean of Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice in Boston. He became dean in 1999, having served as chair of graduate and undergraduate programs at Temple University’s Department of Criminal Justice and director of Temple’s Public Service Management Institute. A 1973 magna cum laude graduate of Northeastern’s College of Criminal Justice, Professor Greene is today recognized as one of the country’s leading scholars of policing. He has published four books, five monographs, and dozens of journal articles and book chapters, and he has consulted for numerous organizations, including the Philadelphia and Los Angeles police departments, the Justice Department, the National Institute of Justice, and the RAND Corporation. Charles “Sid” Heal is a retired commander of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, with more than thirty years of service with the department. Most of his law enforcement experience was in special and emergency operations. He served also for thirty-five years in the Marine Corps Reserve, including four combat tours. He is the author of Sound Doctrine (Lantern Books, 2000) and more than 100 articles on various law enforcement topics. He holds a bachelor’s degree in police science from California State University, Los Angeles; a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California; and a master’s degree in management from California Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is also a graduate of the FBI’s National Academy and the California Command College. Jay D. Jamieson teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the Department of Criminal Justice at Southwest Texas State University. He served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps and has law enforcement and corrections experience in the states of Texas and

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Louisiana. Dr. Jamieson holds a BA degree in economics from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee; and MA and PhD degrees in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Dr. Jamieson’s current research and publishing interests include deviant behavior, comparative criminal justice, and police problem solving. William R. King is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas. He received his PhD in criminal justice from the University of Cincinnati in 1998. His research focuses on the application of organization theory to criminal justice. His published research has examined structure, innovation, and inertia in criminal justice organizations. John Kleinig is Professor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics there. He teaches also in the doctoral programs in philosophy and criminal justice at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He received his PhD in philosophy in 1968 from the Australian National University. In 2004 he accepted appointments in policing ethics at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and in criminal justice ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics in Canberra, where he spends six months each year. Since 1987 he has been editor of Criminal Justice Ethics . He has authored six books, edited several others, and written more than 100 articles and book chapters. Among his books are Punishment and Desert (Nijhoff, 1973); Paternalism (Rowman & Allanheld/Manchester University Press, 1984), which received the 1984 Annual Book Award from the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics, New York; Valuing Life (Princeton University Press, 1991); and The Ethics of Policing (Cambridge, 1996). In 1990–1991, he was a Fellow in professional ethics, in what was then called the Program in Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University. In 1997–1998, he was Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at The University Center for Human Values of Princeton University. Support for his essay in this volume was provided by the National Science Foundation (Research Grant #0619226).

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David Klinger is Senior Research Scientist at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC, and Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Professor Klinger worked as a patrol officer for the Los Angeles and Redmond (WA) police departments. He received his BA in history from Seattle Pacific University, an MS in Justice from American University, and a PhD in sociology from the University of Washington. He has written numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries that address arrest practices, the use of force, how features of communities affect the actions of patrol officers, and terrorism. His book on police shootings, Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force , was published by Jossey-Bass in 2004. Christopher S. Koper is Director of Research at the Police Executive Research Forum, a police membership and research organization based in Washington, DC. He holds a PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland and has worked for several universities and research organizations, including PERF, the University of Pennsylvania, the Urban Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Police Foundation. He has directed or codirected numerous projects for the U.S. Department of Justice and written extensively on issues related to policing, firearms, research methods, and federal crime prevention. Dr. Koper is also a research associate of the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University and a former scholar in residence of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Gary LaFree is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD in sociology from Indiana University in 1979. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, Dr. LaFree served as the Chair of the Sociology and Criminology Department at the University of New Mexico and as the Director of the New Mexico Criminal Justice Statistics Analysis Center. He was appointed by the governor of New Mexico to chair the State Crime and Juvenile Justice Coordinating Council. Dr. LaFree received the G. Paul Sylvestre Award for outstanding achievements

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about the authors

in advancing criminal justice statistics in 1994, and the Phillip Hoke Award for excellence in applied research in 1994 and 1998 from the Justice Research Statistics Association. LaFree has written more than sixty articles and book chapters and three books, including Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in the United States (1999). Cynthia Lum is Deputy Director, Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. Within the center, she directs its Evidence-Based Policing Research Program. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on policing, evidence-based crime prevention, evaluation research and methods, democratization and justice systems, crime and place, and counterterrorism. She received her PhD in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Maryland in 2003. James P. Lynch is Distinguished Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He came to John Jay after twenty years on the faculty at American University’s Department of Justice, Law, and Society in Washington, DC. Professor Lynch received his master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago and his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has written extensively on the measurement of crime, including Understanding Crime Incidence Statistics: Why the UCR Diverges from the NCS , coauthored with Albert Biderman (Springer), and Understanding Crime Incidence Statistics: Revisiting the Divergence of the UCR and NCVS , coedited with Lynn Addington (Cambridge). He is also author of numerous articles and book chapters on theories of victimization risk, international comparisons of crime and sentencing, immigration, and the role of coercion in social control. Edward R. Maguire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society at American University in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in criminal justice from the University at Albany in 1997. His professional interests cover a wide range, but most of his work focuses on three topics: police organizations, violent crime, and social science measurement. He has written or edited three books

About the authors

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and more than thirty articles and chapters on these and related themes. He has been on the faculty at George Mason University and the University of Nebraska and held positions at the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Nations. Tomas C. Mijares is Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. He joined the university in 1991, after retiring from the Detroit Police Department. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree from the University of Detroit while serving as a full-time police officer assigned to tactical operations. He has also served as a member of the training advisory committee for the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association. He is the lead author of The Management of Police Specialized Tactical Units (C.C. Thomas, 2000). His research has been published in more than thirty articles in professional and academic journals. He was a commentator for The History Channel and appeared as an expert witness on law enforcement tactics in the Branch Davidian civil trial. Wayman C. Mullins is Professor of Criminal Justice and director of graduate studies at Texas State University. He has published many books, book chapters, and articles on criminal justice policy and research methods, and several on terrorism and crisis management, including Crisis Negotiations: Managing Critical Incidents and Hostage Situations in Law Enforcement and Correctional Settings (with M. J. McMains, Anderson Press, 1996, 2001); Terrorist Organizations in the United States: An Analysis of Issues, Organizations, Tactics, and Responses (Charles C. Thomas, 1988); and “Prosecuting Domestic Terrorists: Some Recommendations” (with T. C. Mijares) in H. W. Kushner (editor), The Future of Terrorism: Violence in the New Millennium (Sage, 1998). Professor Mullins received his PhD from the University of Arkansas in 1983. Joanne Savage is Associate Professor in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society at American University, where she teaches courses on the history and philosophy of criminology and justice research methods. She has published numerous articles and book chapters, as well as two recent books: The Development of Persistent Criminality (Oxford, 2009)

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and Sentencing Handbook: Sentencing Guidelines in the Criminal Courts (coedited with Anthony Edwards, The Law Society, 2009). Professor Savage is an authority on a variety of criminological topics, in particular, violent crime (cross-national variation in crime rates, gun control, the role of the family in the development of violent behavior, the impact of violent television and film viewing on violent crime rates, etc.). Her interest in interdisciplinary integrational theory and empirical research has drawn her to collaborate in the development of Bryan Vila’s general evolutionary-ecological paradigm and in the empirical evaluation of its consequent lagged nurturance hypothesis. Rita J. Simon is University Professor at American University, with joint appointments in the Department of Justice, Law, and Society in the School of Public Affairs and at the Washington College of Law. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1957. Professor Simon has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. She has also taught as a visiting Professor at Hebrew University. Professor Simon is the author or editor of sixtyfive books covering topics as diverse as immigration, law, women’s issues, and transracial and intercountry adoption. She has edited the American Sociological Review and Justice Quarterly and is currently editor of Gender Issues. In 1968, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Professor Simon is President of Women’s Freedom Network. In 2000, she established The Shula Ankary Foundation. Quint C. Thurman is Professor of Criminal Justice and Department Chair at Texas State University–San Marcos. He was previously on the faculty at Washington State University–Spokane and Wichita State University. His publications include seven books and more than thirty-five refereed articles. His recent book credits include Police Problem Solving (2005, with Jay Jamieson) and Community Policing in a Rural Setting (2005, with Edmund McGarrell). He earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1987. Adrienne Tranel is an attorney with the law firm of Kator, Parks and Weiser in Washington, DC, and a member of the Maryland and District of Columbia bars. Her areas of practice are civil rights, civil

About the authors

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service, employment, and general litigation at the administrative, trial, and appellate levels. Ms. Tranel clerked in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia upon graduating cum laude from American University Washington College of Law. Ms. Tranel has published articles on international law in the American University International Law Review. Bryan Vila is a professor of criminal justice at Washington State University and director of the Operational Tasks Simulation Lab in its Sleep and Performance Research Center. Prior to joining WSU, he directed Crime Control and Prevention Research for the U.S. Department of Justice for three years and was an associate professor at the University of Wyoming and the University of California. Before he became an academic, Dr. Vila served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine, then as a law enforcement officer for seventeen years – including nine years as a street cop and supervisor with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, six years as a police chief helping the emerging nations of Micronesia develop innovative law enforcement strategies, and two years in Washington, DC, as a federal law enforcement officer. He has published three books – Tired Cops: The Importance of Managing Police Fatigue, The Role of Police in American Society, and Capital Punishment in the United States – and several dozen research articles. His fourth book, Micronesian Blues, was published in fall 2009.

Preface

DESCR IPTION, R ATIONA LE , A ND SCOPE

This is a book of original essays addressing what is widely regarded as the most serious problem confronting America today and for years to come – terrorism – from a unique perspective: that of criminology. The literature on terrorism is framed typically from a geopolitical perspective and using ethnographic narratives, based on case studies that provide essential information about specific terrorist groups, their agendas, how they operate, and how they arise from and influence external political forces. Although scholarly and useful, these conventional approaches to thinking about terrorism overlook a well-developed body of knowledge on the nature and sources of aggression generally and crime in particular, and what can be done to prevent both. The criminological perspective thus provides a potentially useful complement to the standard literature on terrorism. Criminology has amassed a rich body of literature ranging from individual motivations toward crime and antisocial behavior, smallgroup dynamics in cultivating and reinforcing deviant subgroups, organized and networked crime syndicates and their use of technology to create and exploit criminal opportunities, and more broadly defined cultural orientations toward the social order. Criminology has also studied policies and programs to prevent and respond to crime, as well as ones aimed at mitigating the consequences of criminal behavior. This book explores the prospect of putting this alternative perspective to service to help understand terrorism and develop policies to prevent or mitigate its effects.

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Terrorism is, to be sure, an extraordinary manifestation of aggression and crime. Still, it has more in common with conventional forms of crime than is widely acknowledged. Like crime generally, terrorism is produced predominantly by young, alienated males with little stake in legitimate society, operating typically in small groups. It is geopolitical, but it is also a crime in the jurisdictions in which it occurs. It is no coincidence that the burden of protecting the public against hostile aggressors has shifted from the Department of Defense and the military to the Department of Homeland Security and the police. In important ways all terrorism is local in terms of impact. The central organizing principle of the book follows this essential logic: Effective programs have been developed to prevent acts of crime based on our understanding of its sources, and we have done little to ask the extent to which this body of knowledge is relevant to the problem of terrorism and, to the extent that it is not relevant, what is needed to fill the information gaps so that terrorism can be prevented and, when acts of terrorism do penetrate the shield of prevention, societies can respond to and recover from it more effectively.

This book aims to fill that void. Its chapters are organized in three parts. The first part focuses on the nature of terrorism and what it has in common with, and how it differs from, aggression generally and crime in particular. The second part addresses strategies and policies for intervening against terrorism, with a focus on means of preventing it by protecting targets and intervening against aspiring terrorists. The third part looks forward, asking what sort of data and thought are needed to advance our body of knowledge on the problem of terrorism.

HOW THIS BOOK A DVA NCES THINK ING A BOUT TER ROR ISM

Although this anthology takes a distinctly criminological perspective, it is nonetheless fairly broad and applied, with the intent of making the material accessible to students of criminology and criminal justice. It is directed at students and teachers, scholars and practitioners alike interested in such issues as the prevention of terrorism, the

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applicability of community policing and routine activities models of crime to the problem of terrorism, how to balance liberty and security, and how to think about and manage the fear of terrorism, as well as the coordination of federal and local efforts to prevent and counter terrorism. It is a collection of readings by some of the world’s most respected criminologists, designed for the classroom, for scholars, and for practitioners and policy makers. It can serve as a primary or complementary text for undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology and criminal justice policy and administration, and as an academic contribution to criminology and the already large and rapidly growing field of terrorism studies. It should also be of interest to researchers on violence prevention, policing, prosecution, adjudication, sentencing, and restorative justice. The Editors

chapter one

Introduction and Overview brian forst, jack r. greene, and james p. lynch

INTRODUCTION

The spectacular attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 brought with it an explosion of books and articles on terrorism in both the academic and popular print media. These writings have focused on political and religious aspects of terrorism; the vulnerability of domestic targets; intangibles like the ethics of preemptive wars to remove governments that support terrorism and ethical aspects of conducting the War on Terror and defending the homeland; and sensational tangibles: dominant figures like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein; bombings of buildings, trains, buses, places of worship, and public markets; assassinations, videotaped beheadings, and other carnage. These vivid images and narratives on terrorism occupied center stage in the presidential election campaigns of 2004 and 2008 and have dominated discussions at the United Nations and other international forums, as well as in major news media venues. Vivid images and sensational narratives capture the public’s attention, but they stifle the objective, comprehensive discussion essential to the process of informed democratic choice and the preservation of legitimacy of governmental action. The accumulated writings and discussions on terrorism have been strikingly deficient in one important respect: Although often acknowledging that acts of terror are acts of crime in most places where they occur, most writings overlook the substantial body of pertinent knowledge that has been produced over the past several decades by criminologists and criminal justice scholars on the nature and sources of crime and aggression, and what

1

2

introduction and overview

works to prevent crime and intervene effectively against it. This book aims to help address that deficit. Terrorism – the use of force against innocent people, usually with a political or religious motive, and typically aimed at producing widespread fear – is fundamentally an extreme form of aggression. Criminologists may not speak with the same authority as political scientists on political aspects of terrorism, but terrorism manifests in every civil society as crime. We would do well to attempt to understand how assessments of policies aimed at preventing terrorism and responding to it can benefit from the substantial body of knowledge that has accumulated on the causes of aggression and crime – and how terrorism differs from other expressions of aggression and types of crime. In doing so, we can be aware of the limits of knowledge about aggression generally and establish programs for building a coherent and comprehensive base of knowledge about terrorism. The more fundamental aspects of terrorism related to aggression may in fact be more powerful and useful in helping us understand terrorism and terrorists than the political and religious explanations that have dominated the discussion to date.

OVERVIEW

The book is organized in three sections. The first addresses the nature of terrorism and what it has in common with – and how it differs from – aggression generally and crime in particular. The second section addresses strategies and policies for intervening against terrorism, with a focus on means of preventing it by protecting targets and intervening against aspiring terrorists. The third section takes a forward-looking perspective, asking: What sorts of data and thinking are needed to advance what we currently know about the problem of terrorism? Any discussion of terrorism cannot escape the vexing definitional question: Precisely what is terrorism? The simple fact is that there is no single universally agreed-upon definition of “terrorism” or “terrorist”. We have provided a fairly general definition – again, the use of force against innocent people with a political or religious motive, typically aimed at producing widespread fear – but we must emphasize that

introduction and overview

3

this does not settle the matter. Indeed, several of the chapters that follow consider alternative definitions of terrorism, and each arrives at a slightly different place. This might be unsatisfactory for an agency with a particular responsibility for terrorism, but the consideration of alternative definitions is a question of central interest to any thoughtful inquiry into terrorism, same as with crime in general. Thorough understanding of terrorism and the effects of responses to it must include an inquiry into how agents responsible for protecting against terrorism choose among alternative definitions of terrorism, how those choices affect agency behavior, and how alternative intervention strategies affect terrorism in different ways. Several of the chapters address these questions, and it is both interesting and useful to see what results from the various approaches. In the next chapter, David Klinger and Charles “Sid” Heal set a foundation for the volume by noting fundamental commonalities and distinctions among various forms of aggression: crime, terrorism, and warfare. They observe that indiscriminate use of the term “terrorism” obfuscates meaningful discussion and jeopardizes the prospects for effective policy. Klinger and Heal then draw on a range of examples – from interpersonal conflict to conflicts between nation states – to examine how different manifestations of aggression pose different challenges for scholars who seek to better understand the nature of aggression and for policy makers who aim to find ways of preventing the various forms of aggression and minimizing its social harm when it does occur. They recognize that terrorism has morphed into a form of aggression that defies conventional frameworks for dealing with it, and suggest that a serviceable old international framework for dealing with violence be revitalized. In Chapter 3, Wayman Mullins and Quint Thurman address the meaning and causes of the pathology of terrorism and how to identify it, which, they argue, are the first steps in assessing, predicting, and ultimately intervening effectively against terrorists – much as the successful physician treats medical pathologies by first identifying them and understanding their sources. The problems in thinking about terrorism begin with disagreement on definition; with variation as to whether threats without actual violence should be included; whether the emphasis should be on motives or behaviors, the selection of targets

4

introduction and overview

or the nature of offenders; whether an act in question is a crime or an international political matter; and many other factors. Most definitions agree that terrorism involves violence against noncombatants, committed by nongovernmental actors, operating in groups or individually, usually with an intention to intimidate whole communities or societies with the threat of more violence to follow, to serve a political agenda. The authors argue that the choice of definition can drive the implications for how to intervene, and different agencies with different roles and strengths will settle on different definitions to serve their own agendas. This creates conceptual confusion, but it also creates institutional flexibility that may bring more than compensating benefits. Some distinctions are without a substantive difference, but not all. The key is to ensure that important decisions, ones that alter policy or commit resources, are mindful of the distinctions among terrorism definitions, especially when those are substantive. In Chapter 4, Bryan Vila and Joanne Savage use an ecological perspective to help understand terrorism. Noting that terrorism is often portrayed as fundamentally different from other crimes, they observe that such a distinction is unwarranted from the perspective of the evolutionary ecological school of criminology, which treats all crime as the use of behavioral strategies involving force, fraud, or stealth to obtain valued resources. They hold that characterizing terrorism as beyond crime is even dangerous: It may foster the mistaken belief that only the most drastic measures can counter terrorism. The evolutionary ecological perspective deals systematically with biological, social, and cognitive factors that influence human development over the life course at both micro and macro levels. It also explains why effective long-term crime control strategies must strike a balance between opportunity reduction, deterrence, and developmental interventions. Vila and Savage use this framework as a basis for developing an array of theory-driven counterterrorism policies. Using a game-theoretic model, they argue that terrorism can be effectively controlled using the same balanced approach that works for countering other types of crime. The approach considers the sources of the terrorist’s motivation, how the costs and consequences of employing terrorist strategies are assessed, and the dynamics that create opportunities for committing terrorist acts. The authors argue that overdramatizing terrorist

introduction and overview

5

threats and overemphasizing punitive and protective counterstrategies without addressing the root causes of terrorism is counterproductive; that wars on terror, like wars on crime and drugs, are likely to fail because the metaphor is inconsistent with human behavior and with human nature. Chapter 5, written by gangs authority David Curry, considers the similarities and differences between gangs and terrorist cells. Noting the long academic tradition of research on gangs, Curry observes that gang crime is situated somewhere between terrorism and crime more generally defined, and that social control theories on the formation of terrorist groups and gangs reveal an etiological kinship. Both types of groups spring from social settings where personal ties dominate instrumental ties. Distinctions are no less significant. Terrorist organizations and street gangs are not equivalent in their respective capacities for collective action. Gang organizational resources do not make them desirable allies for terrorist groups. An “alliance” model envisages a formal or functional link between terrorist groups and street gangs as groups. An alternative model for links between terrorist organizations and gangs is a “recruitment” model, in which street gang members constitute a pool of potential recruits for terrorist organizations or networks. The typical law enforcement response to gangs has been founded on an overestimate of the organizational capacity of gangs. Curry recommends an alternative to the related tendency to overreact to benign groups: create institutional structures that induce more positive, less punitive intervention strategies. Chapter 6, by Rita Simon and Adrienne Tranel, addresses the role of women in terrorism in light of the dramatic changes that have occurred globally in the status of women in legitimate affairs and in the technology and politics of terrorism. Considering contemporary research, aggregate data, and individual stories and accounts of female terrorists, Simon and Tranel find women active in terrorist groups and with more reasons than in earlier times to join these organizations. They examine the roles that women play in terrorist groups today and their common demographic characteristics. They find a myriad of reasons for this participation, including societal marginalization, individual choice, the need to avenge the deaths of loved ones, and active recruitment by terrorist organizations, among other

6

introduction and overview

factors. Although research on the role of women in terrorism is scant, Simon and Tranel provide case study insight into how women adopt roles in terrorism. Their analysis points to the need for research and policy specialization on women in terrorism. Part II of the anthology, discussing intervention strategies against terrorism, opens with Chapter 7, on the applicability of crimeprevention strategies to terrorism, by Cynthia Lum and Christopher Koper. They consider the similarities and differences between crime and terrorism, and between crime prevention techniques and terrorism intervention, as well as the legal and constitutional concerns about applying preventive techniques to counterterrorism and the costs and benefits of such endeavors. They identify a major barrier to the application of conventional crime prevention strategies to terrorism: the extreme rarity of terrorist events and enormous social consequences of successful attacks, which distort the cost-benefit calculus and render many of those strategies inappropriate for the development and deployment of counterterrorism efforts. In spite of these limitations, Lum and Koper see a sufficiently large overlap between terrorism and crime – terrorism, after all, involves serious crimes – to regard many crime prevention approaches to be applicable to the problem of terrorism. They go about this search for relevance by organizing the primary aspects of crime prevention in a matrix, categorizing the wide array of programs that qualify as crime prevention, and then exploring whether, where, and when counterterrorism efforts might correspond and what sort of guidelines should be used to determine the appropriateness of the fit. Chapter 8, by James P. Lynch, describes opportunity theory – an important model for crime and crime prevention programs – and its relevance to the problem of terrorism. He begins by noting that opportunity theory is a framework for thinking about crime that is more applicable to crime prevention than prior criminological theories, which focused more narrowly on the motives and behaviors of offenders. Opportunity theory expands the analysis of crime by addressing targets of opportunity over time and place. Lynch sees opportunity theory as limited in preventing ordinary crime, and to have even more limited applicability for preventing terrorism, largely because of greater difficulties in predicting individual acts of terrorism.

introduction and overview

7

Noting the centrality of fear to terrorism while being an unintended consequence of most street crime, Lynch sees prospects for using opportunity theory to make terrorist targets less attractive by making greater use of fear-reduction strategies, to study more carefully the relationship between opportunity reduction and the fear of terrorism. These prospects are enriched by discontinuities between fear and risk of victimization, namely the fact that fear is often high where risk of victimization is low. Unlike acts of terrorism, the relative rarity of which limits research opportunities, there is an abundance of fear, more than enough to study using opportunity theory and other frameworks of analysis. Chapter 9, by Tomas Mijares and Jay Jamieson, focuses on fundamental distinctions and similarities between domestic police and military forces in terms of both their intelligence and enforcement operations. They observe that domestic policing has been designed constitutionally to be distinct from the military and subject to different systems of accountability, but that historically, external pressures – legal, cultural, technological, political, and other – have induced adjustments to make each institution more responsive to new and emerging threats. Vietnam brought changes in security institutions and policies in the 1960s and 1970s, and terrorism is doing the same today. Mijares and Jamieson describe the dominant influences that are inducing changes in policing and the military, and how each is responding. They observe that increasing mutual dependencies necessitated by terrorism can be fruitfully managed without damaging the firewall that separates domestic responsibilities for security from military ones. In Chapter 10, Jack Greene discusses developments in policing initiated in the 1980s and 1990s, especially community-oriented policing (COP) and problem-oriented policing (POP), and how these developments intersect with the era of terrorism that burst forth on September 11, 2001. Noting that, like politics, all terrorism is ultimately local, he observes that COP and POP may help relieve some of the new burdens that have fallen on municipal police departments as they have added to already unreasonable expectations – imposed by notions of zero tolerance, wars on drugs and crime, and so on – new responsibilities for protecting the homeland against terrorists.

8

introduction and overview

In the process, police now must attempt to reconcile the dilemmas of the means and ends of community- and problem-oriented policing with the new challenges posed by terrorism: local versus federal core interests, security versus liberty, crime versus extra-criminal aspects of terrorism, and intelligence gathering and analysis, among others. Greene observes that the greatest threat of terrorism to policing in America may be to police legitimacy. He concludes that the opportunities for COP and POP to relieve this constellation of burdens and elusive goals are limited, but that prospects for productive applications of enlightened, democratic policing are nonetheless viable and more than worthwhile pursuing. Especially pertinent is the need to clearly specify federal versus state and local roles in policing for terrorism. Whereas federal agencies have the mandate for and general acceptance of an intelligence role, local police do not, and exercising such a role has implications for local police civic legitimacy. Alternatively, local police have important roles to play in responding to federal intelligence and in mitigating terrorism events once they happen. In Chapter 11, Jean-Paul Brodeur lays bare the problems, both conceptual and institutional, of “connecting the dots” of security intelligence data. He observes that in the domain of terrorism prevention, the dot-connection metaphor is both apt and misleading. Security intelligence – much like the information gathered by criminal investigators – is derived from bits of disparate data, not homogeneous dots, often collected from a myriad of sources. It is then analyzed so that the signals of relevant information can be separated from the noise of the erroneous and irrelevant, and so that sense can then be made of the remaining signals about particular threats. The challenge is to establish which dots are pertinent, how they relate to one another, and the implications of these associations. The intelligence process involves the collection of the data and establishment of its reliability, the analysis needed to make connections between related items of information and assess the threats, and then the sharing of these assessments with the people on the ground who need to and can act on the information. Brodeur recognizes the 20–20 hindsight fallacy: Even under an ideal intelligence system, using perfect logic and the best information available, retrospective analysis of intelligence failures tends to

introduction and overview

9

overlook the impossibility of protecting all targets, that with a virtually infinite array of vulnerable targets, a sufficiently large number of carefully planned attempts to attack them will guarantee that a few will succeed under “perfect storm” conditions. He goes on to argue that some major intelligence failures of recent years are different, including 9/11. Intelligence lapses that have allowed for calamitous terrorist attacks derive first from failures in basic problem formulation and logic skills, as well as differences in the cultures and respective roles of policing and national security intelligence. The former is a public process that prizes transparency, and the latter is a secret process that prizes security. The result is unwillingness of federal intelligence authorities to share essential intelligence information with other agencies, including guardians on the ground who need the information. The problem is exacerbated by failures to make effective use of the information that is shared. Chapter 12, by Brian Forst, addresses the “demand” side of terrorism: fear. He observes that most of the public attention and policies on terrorism are directed at terrorists and extremists – how dangerous and evil they are and how vulnerable we are to attack. Little attention is paid to the prospect that we may attract terrorist attacks, first by fearing terrorism well beyond the extent to which we fear other, more dangerous hazards, and then by behaving in ways that provoke previously benign groups to be inclined to support or participate in terrorism against the United States. Criminologists have learned that fear of crime may impose costs on society that exceed those of crime itself, and that this fear is manageable. Fear is a goal of terrorism and may, when provoked, stimulate incentives for extremists to commit further acts of terrorism. This aspect of terrorism makes the management of fear more critical than in the case of other crimes. Hence it is essential that we understand the anatomy of fear and develop tools for managing the public’s fear of terrorism. Forst reviews the literature on our understanding of the nature and sources of fear. Noting that fear may be excessive or insufficient, he considers its relationship to objective and subjective risks, how subjective assessments of risk can become greatly misaligned with objective assessments, and the social costs of the misalignments. He then considers the role of media and politics in creating and perpetuating

10

introduction and overview

the misalignments and explores the prospect of a public policy focus on fear that might satisfy both liberals (by reducing overemphasis on hard power, which may create more terrorists than it destroys) and conservatives (by reducing misallocations of scarce resources induced by fear). He concludes by speculating as to how public and private institutions may be induced to better manage public fear through revamped systems of accountability and data, and what research is needed to support such systems. In Chapter 13, A. Daktari Alexander raises critical questions about ethnic profiling associated with the war on terror: What are the bases for racial and ethnic profiling? Are they legitimate? How does profiling work? What can be said about its effectiveness? Its fairness? How does it affect the persons profiled? He identifies a set of important hypotheses that are testable and very much in need of scrutiny. He concludes by noting the disturbing lack of transparency associated with racial and ethnic profiling, and the need to learn more about the full effects of racial and ethnic profiling on the well-being of minorities and on our collective security. In Chapter 14, Edward Maguire and William King address the daunting challenges of coordinating some 700,000 local police officers with 12,000 FBI agents and several thousand more federal law enforcement agents within the Department of Homeland Security umbrella. Noting the considerable differences in culture, role, training, skills, and experience between federal and local law enforcement agents, the authors address the practical administrative and logistical realities that interfere with the goals of effective communication and cooperation among counterterrorism networks. Maguire and King observe that the job of homeland security gets done through a complex mix of networks – horizontal and vertical; local, national, and international; public and private. They offer frameworks of organization theory and social network theory to help sort out and overcome the barriers to effective interagency coordination. They conjecture that the explosion of interagency and intergovernmental task forces in law enforcement since 9/11 could represent a fundamental shift in the structure of American law enforcement, especially as local police are siphoned off to participate in joint counterterrorism task forces and indoctrinated away from local community needs.

introduction and overview

11

The authors conclude that this shift may nonetheless be essential to preventing terrorism, that an effective terrorism network can be defeated with a more effective network of counter-deterrent agents. In Chapter 15, John Kleinig takes on one of the most contentious issues of the “war on terrorism”: the declared need to balance the interests of security with those of liberty. He begins by noting that the attack of 9/11 set off a wave of measures to restrict liberty in the name of national security that are as draconian as any since the wholesale internment of American citizens of Japanese heritage during World War II: the torture of detainees, surveillance of suspected terrorists, ethnic profiling, and further restrictions under provisions of the Patriot Act. He observes that ordinarily, there need be no conflict between liberty and security: Security protects our freedom, and freedom enlightens our security. Still, circumstances occasionally arise presenting a moral necessity to give one precedence over the other. Indeed, he notes, security is essential for ensuring the social conditions of liberty and fostering “human flourishing” both individually and collectively, and a lack of security can breed fear and, in turn, a loss of freedom. But the restrictions that have followed 9/11 have fallen disproportionately on selected minorities for the sake of giving the majority a false sense of security. He speculates that the result may well be the opposite of the claim – in fact, to diminish security over the long haul by alienating the very people most needed to change the climate that breeds incentives to commit acts of terrorism. He notes that the 9/11 attacks were a product of mismanaged security, not too much liberty. Kleinig maintains that the real war may be over the metaphors we use and the question of whose metaphor will prevail in the public rhetoric on terrorism. Security cannot be balanced against liberty, as the two are incommensurable. The metaphor of a tradeoff is preferable, for it recognizes that when we act to increase security, we often sacrifice liberty. Both, however, obscure the risk that enhanced security will not come with constrained liberty unless the mechanisms of security are themselves efficiently managed. Like the rhetorical wars on drugs, crime, and terrorism – and like a proclaimed “era of terrorism” – these metaphors may do more to obfuscate than to illuminate, to divert our attention from failures of management. And if

12

introduction and overview

we do need to make hard choices, we are better served by developing a theory of sound judgment. Next, in Chapter 16, John Braithwaite offers an antidote to several of the problems raised in previous chapters. Rather than think of terrorism as a matter that calls for retaliative deterrent force, he argues that we might do better to think of terrorism as a public health problem and to respond to it based on a model that offers prospects for reducing the threat of terrorism by cooling the flames of emotion that feed it in the first place, by containing it rather than retaliating with overwhelming force. He begins by observing that the problem of terrorism does not lend itself neatly to either the war model or the criminal justice model. Policy makers are inclined to establish counterterrorism policies based on the theory of deterrence, but this model makes dubious assumptions about the incentives of people who commit acts of terrorism, ignoring the prospect that retaliatory strikes done in the name of deterrence are likely to have an opposite effect by stimulating defiance in the group targeted, especially if they feel that their way of life is under attack. An alternative, regulatory model is advanced that overlays the public health concepts of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention with other, older ideas of containment (of injustice) and enlargement (of justice). Braithwaite argues that support for pre-emptive wars on terrorism is grounded not in evidence-based principles, but rather in other public philosophies, notably retribution. He proposes instead that an interconnected web of controls might enable an overdetermined prevention of terrorism that, in spite of its redundancy, could be more cost-effective than the war model, because the principle of responsiveness means parsimony in resort to expensive coercion. He raises the possibility of an empirically based approach to regulating rare events like 9/11 terrorism by applying the principles of evidence-based regulation to micro-elements that are constitutive of macro-disasters. Part III of the book begins with Chapter 17, by Gary LaFree, on the START Project and the lessons learned from the research sponsored under that project. Observing that too much of the literature on terrorism is based on conjecture and too little on empirically valid information, he provides some important glimpses of what can be learned from the Global Terrorism Database, a data resource consisting of

introduction and overview

13

over 80,000 terrorist incidents reported in the open-source media from 1998 to 2006. LaFree offers a rare analysis of terrorism based on real data, one of the first by a criminologist. Especially noteworthy are statistics and graphs revealing considerable skewing effects in several important variables: the number of people killed per attack, number of attacks per country, and years of operation per terrorist group. The chapter is cast around the idea that misconceptions about terrorism are important. They can lead not just to bad policy, but to policies that leave us less secure – ironically, in the name of security. The book concludes with Chapter 18, by Brian Forst. He reviews the collection of perspectives of the contributors to the anthology, together with information from other sources, to identify research needed to further advance our understanding of terrorism and how best to prevent it and respond to it. He observes that despite formidable barriers to the empirical analysis of terrorism, which he describes in some detail, there are generic dimensions that distinguish certain types of terrorists, terrorist groups, and terrorist acts from others. These dimensions can help to inform policies to prevent and respond to terrorism. He then identifies specific problems that lend themselves to analysis, emphasizing the importance of multiple perspectives for a more thorough understanding and effective prevention of terrorism.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The vast majority of scholarly work on terrorism has been written by political scientists who have examined the role of political institutions and power in generating the motivation to engage in terrorist acts. Meanwhile, the official response to terrorism has focused more immediately on the prevention of violent acts and the reduction in damage resulting from those acts: enhanced security in airports and public buildings, limitations on the availability of materials that can be used to perpetrate violence, and restrictions on the movement of violenceprone populations. There is, then, a disjuncture between conventional scholarly discourse and public policy regarding terrorism. This book attempts to improve the fit between theory and practice by drawing on theories found in criminology and criminal justice research.

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introduction and overview

By making explicit the criminological theories that underlie our most prevalent antiterrorism policies and reviewing the criminological literature on the appropriateness of these theories, we may be able to make more informed judgments about the ultimate wisdom of these policies. Moreover, we believe that the range of criminological theory that can be brought to bear on understanding terrorism and the prospects for developing policies that show promise in its prevention or mitigation are broader than those currently in use. Crime theories have evolved from the individual to the life course, small groups and communities, and multilevel explanations of criminal behavior, and crime policies have similarly ranged from emphasizing individual deterrence to reintegration and the mitigation of social harm and fear. By having a wider theoretical and policy field of vision for terrorism, future efforts aimed at prevention, response, and mitigation can be more clearly focused, as has been the case with crime. The reader will note that a wider field of scholarly vision brings diversity with it. The authors do not agree on all issues. Many suggest that the war metaphor is inapplicable to the problem of terrorism (a few, including John Braithwaite, Joanne Savage, and Bryan Vila, say so quite explicitly) whereas others do not (Klinger and Heal embrace the concept of fourth-generation warfare as a key to successful counterterrorism policy). Some are clearly concerned that counterterrorism interests could erode the Constitutional firewall between policing and military operations (e.g., John Kleinig); others see terrorism as a problem that requires convergence of these two distinct systems of security (e.g., Tomas Mijares and Jay Jamieson). These are healthy debates, and they will continue. The assessments and prescriptions contained in these chapters do not resolve the problem of terrorism, but they may offer a set of perspectives for thinking about it that complement more orthodox perspectives. This conversation will move forward as empirical evidence comes to light that supports, contradicts, and otherwise refines the ideas put forth here. We will watch this conversation unfold and change as events change too. One can only hope that they will change for the better.

Part one

NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

chapter two

Manifestations of Aggression Terrorism, Crime, and War David Klinger and Charles “Sid” Heal

INTRODUCTION

One of the key challenges of our time is dealing with the threat posed by terrorism, and a key challenge when it comes to dealing with terrorism is the absence of a single, widely agreed-upon definition of the term. All definitions of terrorism include some mention of violence and the desire of those perpetrating the violence to influence the behavior of those they target,1 but there is limited agreement beyond these points of commonality. The lack of clarity on the meaning of the term is exemplified by Schmidt and Jongman (1988) report that a survey of academics who studied terrorism disclosed more than one hundred different definitions of it. The definitional problem extends beyond the academic realm and into the realm of governmental and international bodies, as exemplified by the following two official definitions of terrorism, by the United States and the United Nations, respectively: “[T]errorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (Title 22 USC)2 [A]ny action … that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such 1

2

Some commentators argue for a definition of terrorism that would include violence directed at destroying entire populations (and even all of humanity) with weapons of mass destruction (e.g., Laqueur, 1999). This legal definition is not the only one used by the U.S. government, as many different departments and entities within the federal government have different definitions (see, e.g., Thomas, 2004: 92 for a discussion).

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nature of the problem

an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act. (Untitled Document, 2005)

Consideration of these two definitions indicates that, beyond the idea that terrorism involves violence intended to influence the behavior of others, conceptions of terrorism are often explicit about aggregates – that the violence is perpetrated by groups that seek to influence large segments of a population or specific social institutions. However, some conceptions of terrorism address actors and intentions of a much smaller scale, as the term is sometimes used in reference to situations in which a single individual uses or threatens to use violence to alter the behavior of another individual, as in the case of an abusive husband who beats his wife in order to prevent her from leaving (Johnson and Leone, 2005). Finally, some definitions of terrorism include acts of violence by single actors who hope to affect large-scale social changes, as with the explosive packages sent by Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski over the course of nearly two decades (Chase, 2003) and the string of bombings perpetrated by Eric Rudolph in Georgia and Alabama in the late 1990s (Mattingly and Schuster, 2005). In sum, terrorism is an amorphous term that has been (and is) used to refer to a wide variety of sorts of aggressive action by human beings against others. The lack of conceptual clarity about what constitutes terrorism is a challenge both to scholars who study the phenomenon and to police, military, and other practitioners whose job descriptions include the mandate to deal with it. In the academic arena, the definitional issue makes it difficult to circumscribe the sorts of actions that constitute the subject matter that scholars seek to study, which hinders the development of a cogent body of terrorism scholarship. In the public policy arena, the fact that there exists no clear-cut agreement about what constitutes terrorism has profound ramifications for how societies organize to deal with terrorism, the sorts of means societies employ in hopes of preventing terrorist attacks, and how societies respond to attacks that are not thwarted. One of the reasons for the conceptual fog surrounding terrorism is that the concept is tied closely with two other terms whose subject

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matter includes violent conflict between humans: crime and war. The term “crime” refers to the commission of acts that are forbidden, or the omission of acts required, by law and for which offenders are liable to be punished if convicted in a court of law (e.g., Adler, Meuller, and Laufer, 1998). Thus, the concept of crime presupposes the existence of an organized state in which laws have been enacted and some apparatus for enforcement has been instituted. Among the numerous sorts of acts forbidden by various legal codes are those that involve the infliction or threatened infliction of physical harm against human beings – assault and murder, for example – which are commonly known as “violent crimes.” Because acts of terrorism by definition involve violence (though not always directed against people; see later), and because the violence involved often (but not always; again, see discussion later) violates legal statutes, the overlap between crime and terrorism is evident. Where violent crimes are acts of aggression by individuals that organized states forbid via their legal code and respond to with their criminal justice systems, war is violence in which the state itself is a belligerent, either as an aggressor or as the object of attack by some other party. Wars in the modern era come in two basic varieties or forms: (a) conflict between two or more states; and (b) conflicts between a state (or states) and a nonstate collective enterprise of some sort. The first of these is the classic notion of modern war in which nation-states use armies to project violence against another state to attain some political objective – Hitler’s Germany seeking to expand its territory at the expense of other nations and the other nations resisting the Reich’s efforts, for example. War of the second sort involves either violence between the military of a nation-state and members of its own citizenry – insurrection or civil war – or violence between a state’s military and some collective that emanates from outside its borders – the U.S. Marines and the Barbary pirates doing battle in and around North Africa two centuries ago, for example (Forester, 1953).3 In either of these types of conflict, the violent acts undertaken against a nation-state might violate the laws of the country so attacked, but the legal status of the violence is incidental to 3

See the discussion of the four generations of modern war.

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nature of the problem

the fact that it is motivated by a larger design to impose the political will of the attacking party on the nation so attacked. Of course, because nonstate actors cannot have laws as the term is commonly used, attacks on them that could be understood as criminal acts within the legal framework of a nation-state would not constitute crimes within the common understanding of the term. Consideration of the various sorts of violence that have been dubbed terrorism indicates that some of them clearly bear no relation to the concept of war. Take “terroristic” domestic violence (Johnson and Leone, 2005) for example. When one partner physically attacks the other, it is an act of personal aggression that in no way involves actions by or against a nation-state. It is thus clear that such behavior is not warfare. As one moves away from the individualistic aggression of domestic violence and into forms of group-based violence that have been labeled as terrorism, however, the use of the term “war” becomes an increasingly apt descriptor. When small bands of radicals seek to alter their nation’s political landscape by sowing fear among the population at large through kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations, for example, their actions bear more than a passing resemblance to war (indeed, the term “guerilla warfare is often used to describe this sort of violent activity; e.g., Joes, 1996). And the use of the term war would seem to be even more appropriate when nonstate actors carry out mass-casualty attacks such as al Qaeda’s airborne assaults on New York and the Washington, DC area on September 11, 2001; the 2004 school takeover and massacre in Beslan, Russia perpetrated by Chechen rebels; and the ongoing missile salvos, sapper incursions, and suicide bombings by various Palestinian groups against Israelis in the most recent Intifada. Not everyone would agree with the notion that mass-casualty attacks by nonstate actors are acts of war, however. Some people prefer to view such incidents through the prism of crime, for, as noted, such actions do violate the laws of the targeted nations (e.g., those forbidding murder; see discussion later). In the wake of the September 11 attacks by nineteen members of the al Qaeda organization, consideration of what to call terrorist attacks – particularly those intended to create large numbers of casualties – has become an increasingly salient concern in the United States. The labels applied to them have

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considerable ramifications for how our nation has (and will) respond to these sorts of attacks, approach the threat posed by future attacks by Islamist terrorists, and treat combatants (and their sponsors and supporters) that we capture. The rest of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the competing perspectives of mass-casualty attacks such as military-style assaults, suicide bombings, and other aggressions as criminal incidents and as acts of war, and the implications of these labels for both how scholars might approach terrorism as a topic of study and how our nation might deal with the threat posed by Islamofascist terrorism.

TERRORISM AS CRIME

The idea that mass-casualty terrorist attacks are crimes fits well with the zeitgeist of Western industrial democracies such as the United States because the rule of law is a pillar of the modern social order. As a modern nation-state, the United States has a well-developed legal system that defines criminal conduct in written statutes, prescribes rules of procedure for enforcing criminal codes, and dictates the treatment of those adjudicated guilty of law violations. In our system of governance, the core actions involved in mass-casualty terrorist attacks – such as killing, maiming, destroying property – have been forbidden by various statutes since the dawn of the republic (and before that in common law) and would currently violate both federal law and longstanding provisions of the legal code of any state in which an attack might take place. State Laws Each of the fifty states has numerous laws that could be violated in the course of a terrorist attack within its borders. Given the scope of the relevant law across fifty sets of law books, it is not possible to present a comprehensive discussion of state law vis-à-vis terrorism. For simplicity’s sake, we will limit our discussion of the criminal face of terrorism to the statutes of a single state: California. The reader should keep in mind, however, that the general legal principles involved are addressed in the criminal codes of other states, and that we could have just as easily chosen some other state as our exemplar.

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nature of the problem

We begin our discussion of the state statutes with consideration of how state law would view any deaths resulting from a successful masscasualty attack carried out by a terrorist cell. The legal codes in each of the fifty states have always made murder a crime. Although each state takes a slightly different approach, they all forbid premeditated murder. California, for example, codifies this prohibition in sections 187 through 189 of the state penal code, stating in Section 187 that “[m]urder is the unlawful killing of a human being … with malice aforethought.” Section 188 explains what constitutes the mental state of malice, and Section 189 specifies that murders occurring in certain types of circumstances constitute first-degree murder, whereas all other murders constitute second-degree murder. Among the sorts of circumstances that make unlawful killings in California first-degree murder are perpetration “by means of a destructive device or explosive, a weapon of mass destruction … or by any other kind of willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing.” The California homicide statutes include the two core elements of any crime: the act itself and the mental state of the perpetrator – or in legal parlance, actus reus and mens rae. In the case of murder, the first element is, of course, the killing of a human being that is not otherwise permitted by law (e.g., justifiable or excusable homicide), the “unlawful killing” mentioned in Section 187. With regard to the perpetrator’s mental state, Section 188 specifies that the “malice aforethought” mentioned in Section 187 may be express or implied. It is express when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature. It is implied, when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart. When it is shown that the killing resulted from the intentional doing of an act with express or implied malice as defined above, no other mental state need be shown to establish the mental state of malice aforethought.

Given that the al Qaeda organization has clearly stated its intentions to use mass-casualty attacks as a means to influence the foreign policy of the United States (and other nation-states),4 it should be apparent 4

A collection of statements from al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden that lay out the organization’s terrorist philosophy – including his “Declaration of War Against

manifestations of aggression

23

that any attacks by al Qaeda would be done with what California law calls “express” malice. Should some other group that has not declared its purposes carry out a mass-casualty attack (and does not do so afterward), the lack of concern for the welfare of the victims manifest in the nature of the assault would, on its face, be sufficient to “show an abandoned and malignant heart.” Thus, if anyone were to die in a mass-casualty terrorist attack in California, both the actus reus and mens rae requirements of the crime of murder would be present. Further consideration of a hypothetical mass-casualty attack by al Qaeda (or similar) terrorists in California indicates that any resulting deaths would be considered instances of first-degree murder under the relevant state statutes. First, it should be apparent, given al Qaeda’s repeated declarations that they wish to kill people, that the deaths would be instances of the general category of “willful, deliberate, and premeditated killings” mentioned in Section 189. Second, the fact that a mass-casualty attack would require some amount of planning means that an attack of this sort by any group would also meet this standard. Finally, should the attackers utilize explosives (which al Qaeda has done on numerous occasions)5 or a weapon of mass destruction (which al Qaeda has threatened to use),6 the specific provisions of Section 189 regarding such devices would obtain. In sum, deaths from a mass-casualty terrorist attack – whether they resulted from explosive devices, gunfire, weapons of mass destruction, or any other instruments – would be considered first-degree murders under California law. Beyond the ultimate crime of murder, mass-casualty terrorist attacks could involve several other crimes, such as assault, battery, and property destruction. Sections 240, 242, and 245 of the California Penal Code, for example, cover the crimes of assault, battery, and assault with deadly weapons, respectively. Penal Code Section 240 reads, “[a] n assault is an unlawful attempt, coupled with a present ability, to

5

6

the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” can be found at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/edicts.html. Perhaps the most notable of these attacks were the twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7th, 1998. See, e.g., http://www. globalsecurity.org/security/ops/98emb.htm. See, e.g., again, Bin Laden’s statements at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ binladen/who/edicts.html.

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commit a violent injury on the person of another.” Section 242 reads, “[a] battery is any willful and unlawful use of force or violence upon the person of another.” Section 245 includes a laundry list of specific circumstances in which an assault might be carried out with a deadly weapon or the victim might otherwise be subject to great bodily injury. These laws (especially Section 245) could apply to terrorist attacks in two instances. First, in any attack in which no one died, they would likely serve as the basis for specifying the most serious crimes that occurred. Second, the assault laws would identify the crimes committed against survivors of attacks in which some victims perished. With regard to property destruction, two likely sources of damage in a mass-casualty attack are explosions and fire (which may or may not be the result of an explosion). Two California laws that would obtain here are Penal Code Section 12303.3, which outlaws the use of destructive devices or explosives to “wrongfully injure or destroy any property,” and Section 451, which states that “[a] person is guilty of arson when he or she willfully and maliciously sets fire to or burns or causes to be burned … any structure … or property.” These laws could be used to bring criminal charges in two sorts of instances: first, as additional crimes in attacks that resulted in deaths, injuries, or both; and second, as the primary crimes in an attack that did not kill or injure someone, for example, in a bombing attack in which the target location was successfully evacuated prior to detonation. In sum, because the actions that terrorists would take during mass-casualty attacks would create many violations of state law, it is clear that one could view such attacks as criminal conduct. The things that terrorists might do that could be considered criminal acts under state law are not limited to what occurs during an attack, however, as states have numerous laws forbidding various actions that would be necessary prior to carrying out many sorts of terrorist acts. One crime that would be relevant to any attack involving more than a single terrorist would be conspiracy. Staying with our California example, Penal Code Section 182 states that it is illegal for “two or more persons to conspire to commit any crime,” with Section 184 of the Penal Code specifying that an act must be carried out that somehow furthers the ultimate commission of the agreedupon illegal act. Given that most mass-casualty attacks involve two or

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more principals (i.e., attackers) and support personnel, some sort of planning to commit a crime(s) that involves both the principals and support personnel (e.g., the selection of target[s], the selection of means of attack, and the selection of a means of reaching the target[s]), and acts that further the achievement of the agreed-upon plan (e.g., obtaining explosives, scouting of targets, training of principals), state conspiracy laws would clearly obtain in California. Beyond this are a variety of state laws forbidding specific things that terrorists might do in preparation for an attack. California law, for example, forbids the possession of “any substance, material, or any combination of substances or materials, with the intent to make any destructive device or any explosive without first obtaining a valid permit to make such destructive device or explosive” (Penal Code Section 12312). Because it is quite doubtful that terrorists who desired to build an explosive device for an attack in California would seek the necessary permit before obtaining the needed materials, the mere possession of said materials would quite likely constitute a crime. Similar laws forbid the possession of other sorts of weapons that terrorists might use in mass-casualty attacks (e.g., automatic weapons [Section 12220] and booby traps [Section 12355]). Finally, in recent years many states have added to their statutes laws specifically devoted to preventing the most dangerous sort of mass-casualty attacks, those involving weapons of mass destruction. California’s primary contribution to this body of state law is the Hertzberg-Alarcon California Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed in 1999, which, among other things, forbids the possession, development, manufacture, production, transfer, acquisition, or retention of a variety of specific sorts of weapons of mass destruction (e.g., certain chemical, radiological, and nuclear agents).7 Federal Law In terms of federal law, recent decades have seen a massive increase in federal criminal jurisdiction over the core behaviors involved in mass-casualty attacks. During the first two centuries of our republic, jurisdiction over crimes such as murder, assault, and property destruction were almost the exclusive province of the states. For a variety of 7

The act also forbids the use of these weapons.

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reasons, however, the federal government has exerted more and more dominion over these (and other) so-called “common law” crimes since the 1970s (e.g., Richman, 2000). Within the current federal legal corpus are a variety of homicide statues that could be relevant in a mass-casualty attack in which people died. In addition to the general federal murder provision found in 18 USC 1111, there are specific federal homicide laws covering murders during hostage incidents (18 USC 1203), as the result of purposeful train wrecks (18 USC 1992), as the result of purposely destroying aircraft (18 USC 32–34), and many other specific circumstances. And there are federal laws forbidding other core crimes that might be involved in mass-casualty attacks, such as assault (18 USC 113) and arson (18 USC 81). As was the case with state law, the federal criminal code outlaws a variety of actions that would be needed to carry out mass-casualty attacks and has specific provisions that deal with terrorism. Federal law, for example, includes both a general conspiracy statute (18 USC 371) and specific statutes forbidding the planning of particular acts (e.g., murder, 18 USC 1117). Federal law criminalizes the possession of specific weapons such as machine guns (18 USC 922) and certain explosive materials and devices (18 USC 842) when the person in possession is not among those few persons statutorily permitted to have them. Where specific terrorism statutes go, the U.S. Code includes an entire chapter (113B) that addresses a variety of matters including the use of weapons of mass destruction (section 2332a), bombings of public venues (section 2332f), harboring and concealing terrorists (section 2339), providing material support to terrorists (sections 2339a and b), and financing terrorism (section 2339c). Chapter 113b of the U.S. Code has been in effect since the 1990s, reflecting the fact that the federal government was concerned about the threat of terrorism, and viewed it (at least partially) as a criminal justice problem long before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Federal interest in anti-terror legislation peaked notably in the wake of the attacks. Just over a month after the 9/11 attacks Congress passed and President Bush signed into law H.R. 3162 – the USA PATRIOT Act8 – a sweeping bill that revised many sections of federal law regarding 8

Officially titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.”

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terrorism and added fresh anti-terror provisions. The language of the PATRIOT Act that most clearly demonstrates Congress’s perspective that terrorism should still be viewed as a form of criminal behavior after 9/11 can be found in the title of Title VIII, which reads, “Strengthening the Criminal Laws Against Terrorism.” The forgoing overview of the state and federal law indicates that there is a strong basis for the perspective that mass-casualty attacks by terrorists can properly be viewed as criminal activity. From the common-law crimes forbidden by state statutes, to state law provisions that specifically criminalize terrorist attacks, to federal statutes that address the common-law crimes that were originally the purview of the states, to federal anti-terror laws that antedated the 9/11 attacks, to the strengthening and expansion of these laws in the wake of the attack, criminal codes in the United States are replete with laws that identify as criminal behavior the various actions that would be involved in mass-casualty attacks. The existence of these laws does not mean that terrorist acts are just crimes, however. For as the next section shows, there are strong reasons also to view the mass-casualty attacks that are the focus of this chapter as acts of war.

TERRORISM AS WAR

The same modern mind-set that makes it easy for those in the West to understand acts of terrorism as crimes can be a roadblock to understanding terrorism as a form of warfare. Traditional Western conceptions of warfare are rooted in the modern notion of national militaries doing battle with one another as an application of foreign policy. In this framework, war is something that uniformed soldiers do on behalf of their nation in an international system that includes a set of largely agreed-upon rules of combat (e.g., Clausewitz, 1976). Suicide bombings, commandeering and then flying commercial aircraft into buildings, taking over schools and slaughtering children, and various other forms of mass-casualty attacks carried out by individuals and groups who do not don the uniform of any nation do not fit well within this framework. However, students of warfare have a well-developed framework for viewing acts of terrorism such as these as acts of war (e.g., Lind

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et al., 1989; Lind, 2004). The starting point for this framework is a recognition that the modern conception of war that animates most Americans’ approach to the matter is a fairly recent development, something less than four centuries old. Commonly referred to as the “first generation” of modern war, it came into being in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War and marked the advent of state monopoly on war fighting (at least in Europe). Warfare of this sort was carried out by uniformed armies with strong and rigid hierarchies, who faced one another in formation with individual weapons (primarily crude firearms) on clearly defined battlefields. First-generation warfare dominated armed conflict until the midnineteenth century, when technological advances in small arms such as the mini-ball, rifled barrels, and breech-loading firearms used in the U.S. Civil War led to a level of carnage theretofore unseen, a result that showed the inherent weakness of the first-generation approach to warfare in the face of changes in the instruments of conflict.9 The full implications of the problem of fighting wars with the first-generation framework were not realized, however, until the First World War, when the French used mass fire from artillery batteries to attack specific points from afar, policed the battlefield with ground troops, and then occupied the area that had been cleared of enemy troops. Although this “second-generation” sort of war fighting represented a major step toward the accommodation of new technologies into the tactics of war, the tactics of massing fire, policing the battlefield, and occupying space require a high degree of coordination. It consequently left largely intact the first generation’s emphasis on rigid hierarchy and centralization of command. Hints of a third generation of modern war were also observed during the First World War. The German army, drawing on their Prussian roots, moved away from the static firing platforms evident in secondgeneration warfare and used mobility to try to out-maneuver their adversaries. Maneuver warfare required a move away from a strong, centralized command hierarchy that was characteristic of first- and second-generation warfare, because officers and troops had to be 9

Some commentators date the unveiling of the weakness in first-generation war to the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century (e.g., Hammes, 2005).

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flexible and use initiative in order to successfully adapt to the changes that maneuvers wrought in the battlefield. This third generation of warfare was not fully realized in the First World War, as Germany was defeated before they could fully implement it. Third-generation war came into full blossom, however, during World War Two in the form of the German blitzkrieg that rolled over Poland, France, and much of the rest of Europe in the opening months of the conflict. Second- and third-generation war represent evolutionary shifts from first-generation war. Fourth-generation war represents a radical departure from it. One of the biggest points of departure is that the first three generations of war are all rooted in the political system of nation-states and represent conflicts between such states, whereas fourth-generation war is a form of warfare that can and does exist outside the nation-state system. According to Lind, fourth-generation warfare can (and often does) involve nonstate actors such as criminal cartels, radical religious groups, and ideological confederates, in addition to nation-states. Nonstate actors do not have the same power as states to impose their will on others, so they seek to leverage what power they do have through organizational structure and combat tactics that will work to their advantage. Terrorism thus consists of smaller groups using unconventional means to wage war against opponents who would otherwise destroy them in any sort of first-, second-, or third-generation confrontation (e.g., Lind, 2004). Among the unconventional means such groups will use to wage war are mass-casualty attacks such as suicide bombings, hijackings, and military-style assaults by small groups – in other words, terrorism. Though no modern nation has ever been defeated solely by terrorists, terrorism provides an effective means for a small faction to have a major impact. In this respect, it is easy to understand acts of terrorism as a “poor man’s battle.” This is because terrorism is the most economical mode of political violence ever devised. It requires no standing army, no large arsenal, and no expensive military hardware. Because it is entirely offensive in nature, it requires almost no fixed installations and nearly no vulnerable supply dumps. Neither does it look for decisive engagements, but rather protracted campaigns that seek to weaken an adversary’s will to persevere. Because terrorists lack the traditional destructive combat power of nation-states, they rely on

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disruption of the supporting systems and infrastructure that provide the quality of life that the populace has grown accustomed to expect. Thus, “high value targets” are not an adversary’s military power, but rather the infrastructure that “makes life worth living,” such as communications, transportation, fuel and power, water supplies, the economy, and most of all, a sense of safety and well-being. An understanding of these basic factors reveals the first of four underpinning strategies upon which terrorism is based, called “bond relationship targeting” (Bunker, 2006). In its simplest terms, bond relationship targeting can be understood as an attempt to degrade, disrupt, alter, or separate the bonds and relationships that exist between a populace and its government. Though this is oversimplified and the concepts and applications are far richer, this basic definition will serve for this chapter. Because terrorists cannot win a “stand up” battle, these vulnerable targets are not only appealing on a tactical level, but they gain strategic importance when a population that depends upon their government to protect them becomes increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied with failures. When considering that the most fundamental reason of existence for any government is the protection of its people, it is easy to see how quickly this bond can be degraded. Likewise, terrorism provides another advantage over more traditional modes of warfare in that it is far more economical. Consider the implications in a scenario where a terrorist spends twenty-five cents to phone in a false bomb threat that results in a $100,000 response! Though this may sound like an exaggeration, consider the responses to the anthrax scares after September 11 or the many times airports have shutdown while investigating a potential breach in security. So successful are these threats, and so lopsided are the responses to them, that even without specific intelligence there is a global “ripple effect,” as when the U.S. mass transit systems were put on a higher alert after the July 2005 bombings in London, England. Long after a threat has dissipated, increased security measures continue to add to the target’s cost of “doing battle.” It goes without saying that in any protracted engagement, the most frugal gains a decided advantage. The third underpinning is that by nature and necessity, terrorism relies on asymmetric strategies, because disruption is far easier to

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achieve and far more difficult to defend against than destruction. Because terrorists are incapable of surviving, much less succeeding, in a pitched battle, they refuse battle with conventional forces; rather, they concentrate on the vulnerable targets that provide an infinite number of opportunities for attack and whose numbers make them impossible to completely defend. Most often, these are civilian targets such as mass transportation, public gatherings, economic and communication nodes, and so forth. Finally, because winning decisively is unattainable, terrorists must rely on a protracted campaign that erodes the will of the people to continue to resist. Indeed, members of al Qaeda describe an ideology that has identified objectives out to the year 2020 (Musharbash, 2005). When considered in this light, even small concessions are seen by terrorists as enabling objectives in a continuing successful struggle. The concessions thus bolster the morale and determination of terrorists, while eroding and discouraging the people. Furthermore, though terrorists expect setbacks, the people – especially Americans – are extremely intolerant of them, often demanding redirection or even withdrawal. Given all this, it is clear that the Islamic terrorists who threaten us view mass-casualty attacks (as well as other forms of terrorism) as a war-fighting tactic – as a means to further specific political objectives as part of their broader geostrategic goals.

IMPLICATIONS OF CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES FOR DEALING WITH TERRORISM

It is clear from the foregoing discussion that terrorism can legitimately be viewed through prisms that call for both military and criminal responses. The intentional infliction of deaths, injuries, and other forms of destruction through mass-casualty attacks are clearly crimes according to both federal and state law (as well as the common-law tradition from which our legal order flows). At the same time, when foreign entities seek to alter the policies of our nation through the force of arms, the actions clearly constitute acts of war in the common meaning of the term, although not the formal meaning. One could thus simply say that terrorism calls for both criminal sanctions and

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military responses. From this perspective, members of the criminological community might be satisfied to stop the definitional exegesis and say that because terrorism is a form of crime, it is, by definition, something that fits squarely within the purview of the discipline of criminology. It can thus simply be studied with an eye toward understanding the forces that give rise to terrorist attacks. Although embracing terrorism as a dependent variable worthy of criminological attention is a sound idea, stopping there would be a mistake for two related reasons. The first is that such an approach would unnecessarily limit the scope of criminological inquiry into terrorism. As one of the founding fathers of the discipline (Sutherland, 1934) noted, criminology is not merely the study of rule breaking, but of rule making and reactions to rule breaking as well. Given that the proper purview of criminology includes how societies define things as criminal and respond to criminal actions, criminologists would do well to count these two matters among those things worthy of attention when it comes to the study of terrorism. As the foregoing discussion of the state of the law regarding terrorism makes abundantly clear, the rules applicable to terrorist actions (and planning, support, etc.) have evolved in recent years to move beyond the classic common-law crimes of murder, assault, and so on, to include specific provisions that directly address terrorism. It is a virtual certainty that the laws regarding terrorism are not now set in stone, that we will see additional changes in legal codes as our society seeks to use the law as a tool to address the threat posed by terrorism. Given this, it would behoove the criminological community to keep an eye on the evolution of terrorism law so that we might be able to shed empirical light on these processes, and thus enhance the level of understanding of how the rules governing terrorism are made. With respect to reactions to rule breaking, we are in a state of flux similar to that evident in the arena of rule making. Among the key issues that have already received prominent attention since 9/11 regarding the matter of reactions to terrorism are the proper role of the military in dealing with terrorist attacks (e.g., Klinger and Grossman, 2002), how individuals who are suspected of engaging in terrorism should be treated when captured (e.g., Feldman, 2001),

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and how much force the police should use to stop suspected terrorists (e.g., Bunker, 2005). Different people and groups have different perspectives on each of these matters (as well as many others in the realm of counterterrorism), so it is not at all clear how various institutions of social control will react to terrorist activity. Given this state of affairs, criminologists would do well to count social reactions to terrorist activity as a topic worthy of study. The second reason we should consider the definitional issue is that how we define terrorism has substantial implications for public policy. This matter is closely tied to the criminological issue of rule breaking, for among the key public policy issues are matters such as how to deal with attacks when they occur, how to respond in the aftermath of attacks, how to treat individuals that we capture (either in the wake of attacks or when they are discovered in the planning stage), and the methods to be used to try to prevent attacks in the first place. How we define terror has major implications for which institutions of government might be called upon to prevent attacks, deal with attacks as they unfold, and seek out those responsible in the wake of attacks. As a legal matter, if one were to view terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as purely criminal matters, then only law enforcement entities such as state and local police departments and the FBI could be involved in attempting to interdict, take action against, and seek the capture of those perpetrating mass-casualty attacks. A Reconstruction-era law known as the Posse Comitatus Act (18 USC 1385) generally forbids the use of U.S. armed forces to enforce domestic laws, subjecting those who violate it to both monetary fines and imprisonment for up to two years.10 Investigating crimes in their incipient stages, responding to them as they occur, and arresting perpetrators are all aspects of law enforcement. It follows under the “terror as crime” conceptual rubric, therefore, that under current federal law, military personnel are not permitted to be involved in investigating terrorist plots, directly engaging terrorists during unfolding attacks, or pursuing attackers (and/or 10

The law (18 USC 1385) specifies the Army and Air Force. Defense department policy extends the prohibition to the Navy and Marines. There are some exceptions to Act’s prohibition on military involvement in domestic law enforcement, but there is presently no terrorism exception (Klinger and Grossman; Schmidt and Klinger).

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those who supported them) in the wake of attacks.11 Only civilian law enforcement can legally do these things. If one were to view mass-casualty attacks as acts of war, on the other hand, the Posse Comitatus Act would not apply, and military assets could be brought to bear to deal with terrorist attacks in the United States. The U.S. Constitution and various federal statutes give the president and military commanders a good deal of latitude when it comes to using the military to deal with armed incursions, insurrections, and other emergency situations that threaten life and limb (Schmidt and Klinger, 2006). Under the “terror as a federal and military matter” framework, both the military and civilian law enforcement could be brought to bear to investigate, engage, and pursue terrorists. A second key policy consideration concerns what to do with suspected terrorists upon capture. The terrorism-as-crime model would require that suspected terrorists be handled by the relevant (state or, most likely, federal) criminal justice apparatus. The detention of the suspected terrorist would be defined as an arrest, and the purpose of the arrest would be to enable the state to prosecute the suspected terrorist for the crimes allegedly committed and, ultimately, to mete out a punishment consistent with the statute(s) that the state asserts were violated. It would follow, therefore, that suspected terrorists taken into custody would be granted all of the rights afforded any other criminal suspect. They would have to be read their Miranda rights prior to questioning about the acts they were suspected of having perpetrated, they would be entitled to legal counsel, and their captors would have to cease questioning if they invoked their right to remain silent. They would have access to civilian courts, knowledge of the crimes for which they are being held, trial by jury, the right to appeal convictions, and all of the other rights all other defendants have in U.S. courts. In short, the logical result of defining terrorist attacks as crimes would be to treat those suspected of committing such crimes as common criminals who are subject to sanction, but with all the rights and privileges any other criminal suspect would enjoy before, during, and after trial. 11

In Tennessee v. Garner (1985) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that shooting a suspect constituted a “seizure,” subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

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If terrorism is defined as war, on the other hand, then an entirely different sort of protocol for dealing with captured terrorists would obtain. Suspected terrorists would be viewed not as criminal suspects, but as prisoners of war. They would not be charged with crimes. They would not be subject to criminal sanction for their actions. And they would not have access to U.S. courts. The key reason for this differential treatment is that the purposes of detention in the contexts of criminal conduct and war are quite different. Within the rubric of the criminal law, detention serves first to ensure that defendants will appear for adjudication of the charges leveled against them, and second, as a form of punishment following a guilty verdict. Within the rubric of war, detention of combatants is simply to ensure that those captured do not return to the battlefield against the forces that seized them. Because there is no intent to prosecute and punish, prisoners of war are not questioned to develop evidence against them. And because the purpose of civilian courts is to adjudicate guilt or innocence within the framework of enumerated rights, access to such courts is moot where prisoners of war are concerned. Although the legal differences between criminal suspects who are arrested and individuals who are prisoners of war are quite clear, the modalities of terrorism blur the distinctions and have given rise to considerable debate since the attacks of September 11, 2001, about how to treat suspected terrorists upon capture (Feldman). The key issue is that the international agreements that govern the treatment of prisoners of war – most notably the Geneva Conventions12 – were developed to deal with warfare between nation-states carried out by uniformed members of national militaries. As noted earlier, however, with the advent of fourth-generation warfare, combatants and their sponsors are not so clearly delineated. It is unlikely that terrorists bent on carrying out mass-casualty attacks will be acting clearly on the behalf of any specific nation-state, and they will almost certainly not be wearing the uniform of any nation. Given all this, the dictates of the Geneva Conventions and other international protocols relevant to the treatment of prisoners of war do not automatically apply to captured terrorists. 12

See, e.g., “Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War” adopted August 12, 1949, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm.

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One of the more visible aspects of the ongoing controversy regarding the treatment of individuals apprehended in anti-terror operations concerns the legal process to which they are subject. President Bush claimed that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Joint Resolution enacted by Congress following the attacks of September 11, 2001, gives the president sweeping authority to, among other things, designate individuals (including U.S. citizens) who have taken up arms against the United States as “enemy combatants,” and have them detained indefinitely in military custody. Individuals who have been detained pursuant this purported presidential prerogative have challenged their detention, claiming in federal court that they should either be charged with specific crimes or released from custody. The courts, however, have so far upheld the president’s power to designate and detain enemy combatants (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld; Padilla v. Hanft). Wrangling regarding the legal status of those suspected of being involved in terrorist activities is by no means over, however, as there are many issues regarding enemy combatants and other definitional concerns that have yet to be resolved in our courts.13 With the arrival of the Obama administration, some changes in how the executive branch views the role of the courts when dealing with suspected terrorists are emerging.

CONCLUSION

The legal state of affairs is emblematic of the larger conceptual confusion about how best to define terrorism in the modern world, in which law is a dominant institution. The rubric of crime frames much understanding of aggressive action, and the face of military action is moving from clear battles between nations to murky fights between and among a wide variety of actors. As criminologists, practitioners, 13

In November of 2001, for example, President Bush issued a Military Order regulating the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism,” which holds that noncitizens whom the president has “reason to believe” are involved in terrorism may be subject to military detention and tried by military tribunals for violations of “applicable law.” This order was quickly condemned by various individuals and groups as running counter to long-standing American (and international) legal tradition. U.S. Courts have yet to rule on the legality of the order.

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and the public at large cast about seeking a way out of the conceptual fog, we believe that it is appropriate to think outside the somewhat narrow war/crime framework that has dominated consideration of this matter. One of the more creative treatments we have seen can be found in Doug Burgess’s intriguing 2005 essay, “The Dread Pirate Bin Laden: How Thinking of Terrorists as Pirates can Help Win the War on Terror.” In it, Burgess argues that rather than trying to develop a fresh framework for terrorism, we should look back into history where we will find a well-developed legal framework for both defining and dealing with terrorists: international law regarding piracy on the high seas. We did not address international law in our discussion of terror as crime for the simple reason that international law does not clearly define terrorism as a crime. Burgess asserts that this situation should be rectified, because international law is the place to properly legislate against terror, as it truly is an international phenomenon. In his argument for such law, he notes (a) that piracy was outlawed under Roman law, with pirates defined as hostis humani generis, or “enemies of the human race”; (b) that after the fall of Rome, piracy – which by definition is carried out by nonstate actors – flourished for several centuries as both a tool to express the political desires of pirate groups and as an instrument of foreign policy by nations who sponsored pirates to act against their enemies; and (c) that it was outlawed by the European powers in the Treaty of Paris in 1856 when they realized that pirates presented a grave threat to international order. He goes on to note that the international consensus against piracy has driven the practice into the shadows to the point where it no longer poses a major threat to international order. If international law were similarly to forbid terrorism and hold to account nations who sponsor it, Burgess argues, we would see the threat posed by terrorism abate in a similar fashion. It is an open question whether an international consensus against terrorism can be developed and used to declare terrorists “enemies of the human race,” and then to give rise to an international regime to move against terrorists. Whatever the case, Burgess’s argument shows that creative thinking can help us view terrorism beyond the narrow confines of the war/crime box, and thus arrive at potential solutions

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to it. It is our hope that this chapter prompts others to engage in creative thought that will help us better understand the manifestation of aggression known as terrorism, and ultimately to develop means to massively reduce the threat that it poses to our way of life.

REFERENCES Adler, Frieda, Gerhard O.W. Meuller, and William S. Laufer, Criminology, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998). Bunker, Robert, “Suicide Bombers: Part I. Training Key #581” (Alexandria, VA: International Association of Chiefs of Police, 2005) http://www. theiacp.org/pubinfo/IACP581SuicideBombersPart1.pdf. Burgess, Douglas, “The Dread Pirate Bin Laden,” Legal Affairs (July/ August 2005). Chase, Alston, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (New York : W.W. Norton, 2003). Clausewitz, Carl von, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, introductory essays by Peter Paret, Michael Howard, and Bernard Brodie, with commentatry by Bernard Brodie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) Originally published in 1832. Feldman, Noah, “Choices of Law, Choices of War,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Volume 25, Number 2 (2002), pp. 457–485. Forester, Cecil, The Barbary Pirates (New York: Random House, 1953). Hammes, Thomas X, “Insurgency : Modern Warfare Evolves into a Fourth Generation,” Strategic Forum, Number 214, 2005. Joes, Anthony James, Guerilla Warfare: A Historical, Biographical, and Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996). Johnson, Michael P., and Janel M. Leone, “The Differential Effects of Intimate Terrorism and Situational Couple Violence: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey,” Journal of Family Issues, Volume 26, Number 3 (2005), pp. 322–349. Klinger, David, and Dave Grossman, “Who Should Deal with Foreign Terrorists on U.S. Soil: Socio-Legal Consequences of September 11 and the Ongoing Threat of Terrorist Attacks in America,” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Volume 25, Number 2 (2002), pp. 815–834. Laqueur, Walter, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York : Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Lind, William, “The Four Generations of Modern War,” 2004, http:// www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind26.html. Lind, William, Keith Nightengale, John F. Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton, and Gary I. Wilson, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” Marine Corps Gazette (October 1989, pp. 22–26). Mattingly, David, and Henry Schuster, “Rudolph Reveals Motives: Pleads Guilty to Four Attacks, Including 1996 Olympic Blast,” 2005, http:// www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/13/eric.rudolph/. Musharbash, Yassin, “What al-Qaida Really Wants,” 2005, http://service. spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,369448,00.html. Richman, Daniel C., “The Changing Boundaries between Federal and Local Law Enforcement. Boundary Changes in Criminal Justice Organizations,” Criminal Justice 2000, Volume 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2000). Schmidt, Alex P., and Albert I. Jongman, Political Terrorism (Amsterdam: Transaction Books, 1988). Schmidt, Christopher, and David Klinger, “Altering the Posse Comitatus Act: Letting the Military Address Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil,” Creighton Law Review, 2006. Sutherland, Edwin, Principles of Criminology, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1934). Thomas, Michael J., “Counteracting Terrorism: Group Design and Response Modalities,” in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives, edited by Mathieu Deflum (Oxford: Elsevier, 2004).

CASES CITED Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004. Padilla v. Hanft, 2005. Tennessee v. Garner, 1985.

chapter three

The Etiology of Terrorism Identifying, Defining, and Studying Terrorists Wayman C. Mullins and Quint C. Thurman

Identification is the first step in assessing, predicting, and ultimately intervening effectively in terrorist actions. To date, there has been limited success in identifying who terrorists are and where they can be found, tracking their activities, and then preventing them from engaging in attacks in the future. Despite successes by law-enforcement authorities at intercepting terrorists, whether reported to the public or not, a single unrestrained terrorist group or individual who succeeds in an attack can render devastating consequences. Just as Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City and al Qaeda in New York demonstrated, even overlooking one terrorist or terrorist cell can have significant, deadly societal and political ramifications. But how were terrorists in the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11 allowed to slip through the cracks? Sophisticated intelligencegathering capabilities, state-of-the-art investigative procedures, and other threat-analysis techniques seemingly failed in these instances. What specifically went wrong? Or did anything go wrong that was preventable? Why were we not able to identify these terrorists? Had they been identified, could we have stopped them from committing acts of mass murder against a helpless civilian population? This chapter will address the fundamental issues of defining terrorism and terrorists, and examine our ability to understand these phenomena. It will further examine the challenge of collecting data concerning the threat terrorism poses to public safety.

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DEFINING TERRORISM

One of the most significant difficulties in the identification of terrorism and terrorist individuals or groups is that of multiple definitions of basic terms. There seem to be nearly as many definitions of terrorism – ranging from simplistic to overly complex – as there are authorities studying them and agencies responsible for defending the country against them. Defining terrorism is a challenge that precludes a unified approach for combating terrorism. If agencies, law enforcement, researchers, and others cannot reach agreement on what terrorism is or is not, there can be little hope of establishing an adequate data base from which to study and effectively defend against it. One of the oldest definitions still used today is Thornton’s: “Terrorism is a symbolic action designed to influence political behavior by extranormal means entailing the use or threat of violence.” Approximately a decade later, Sobel (1975) defined terrorism as “almost all illegal acts of violence committed for political purposes by clandestine groups.” According to Krieger (1977): “Terrorism is nongovernmental public violence or a threat performed by an individual or small group and aimed at achieving social or political goals that may be subnational, national, or international.” Lodge (1981) wrote that terrorism was “an organized pattern of violent behavior designed to influence government policy or intimidate the population for the purpose of influencing government policy.” Friedlander (1981) defined terrorism as “the use of force, violence, or threats thereof to attain political goals through fear, intimidation, or coercion.” Wardlaw emphasized the political dimension in his definition. For him, “political terrorism is the use, or threat of use, of violence by an individual or a group, whether acting for or in opposition to established authority, when such action is designed to create extreme anxiety and/or fear-inducing effects in a target group larger than the immediate victims with the purpose of coercing that group into acceding to the political demands of the perpetrators.” Similarly, Combs (2000) defined terrorism as “a synthesis of war and theater, a dramatization of the most proscribed kind of violence – that which is perpetrated on

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innocent victims – played before an audience in the hope of creating a mood of fear, for political purposes.” But Combs’s is one of the few definitions that require actual violence to be committed, rather than either actual or threatened violence. Howard and Sawyer defined terrorism as the “deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change.” Cooper’s (2004) definition treats terrorism as “the intentional generation of massive fear by human beings for the purpose of securing or maintaining control over other human beings.” In Poland’s view, terrorism is “the premeditated, deliberate, systematic murder, mayhem, and threatening of the innocent to create fear and intimidation in order to gain a political or tactical advantage, usually to influence an audience.” One of the most frequently cited definitions of terrorism has been posited by Brian Jenkins of the RAND Corporation: “the use or threatened use of force designed to bring about political change.” According to Jenkins (1975), terrorism is a unique form of combat because it identifies noncombatants and then directs attacks against them, whereas the true victims are the people watching the act. Along with actual violence, the threat of further violence was considered an essential aspect of terrorism. Federal agencies have developed their own definitions of terrorism. In some cases, even units within the same agencies (e.g., branches of the military within the Defense Department, or the ATF and FBI in the Department of Justice) have different definitions of terrorism. The U.S. Air Force has defined terrorism as “the culturally unacceptable use or threat of violence directed toward symbolic targets to influence political behavior either directly through fear, intimidation, or coercion, or indirectly by affecting attitudes, emotions, or opinions” (1985). The Department of Defense definition of terrorism focuses on the goals of the terrorist. They claim terrorism is “the unlawful use – or threatened use of – force or violence against individuals or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives” (Howard and Sawyer). In 1986, a U.S. vice-presidential task force defined terrorism as “the unlawful use or threat of violence against persons or property

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to further political or social objectives. It is usually intended to intimidate or coerce a government, individuals, or groups, or to modify their behavior or politics” (Simonson and Spindlove, 2004). The U.S. State Department (2002) uses a legalist definition of terrorism, using the definition in Title 22, United States Code, Section 2656f(d): “Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” Within government and law-enforcement circles, the FBI definition of terrorism appears to be the one most often used. The 1986 FBI definition of terrorism is still in use today: “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (2005). Though this definition has received some widespread use, it is not universal. Even when terrorists commit acts that fit the definition, local police agencies may classify the act as criminal rather than terroristic (White, 1991). Also, even the FBI does not classify an act unless a specific group claims responsibility (Smith). Some argue that of the governmental definitions of terrorism, the Department of Defense definition is preferable to any of the others, as it deals with the threat of terrorism as well as acts of violence. It includes a focus on targeting societies as will as governments, and it considers religious and ideological acts as terrorism (Howard and Sawyer). Unlike the FBI definition, however, it does not consider the social aspects of the act. The previous paragraphs have provided merely a sampling of definitions. The most comprehensive listing of definitions, which has grown substantially since 9/11, was provided by Schmid. Even over a decade ago, Schmid discovered over one hundred definitions for terrorism. An analysis of those definitions revealed twenty-two repeated dimensions. Some of the most common dimensions included in the covered definitions was the use of violence or force (83.5 percent of the definitions), political goals or outcomes (65 percent), fear or terror in a population (51 percent), the threat of violence (47 percent), produce psychological reactions (41.5 percent), differentiation between victim and target (37.5 percent), and the act

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being organized, planned, systematic, and one with a purpose (32 percent). Other dimensions mentioned in approximately one-third of the definitions were the methods of action (strategy, tactic – 30.5 percent), outside of normal human constraints and outside accepted rules of combat (30 percent), and use of coercion or extortion (28 percent). Less common were dimensions of publicity (21.5 percent), indiscriminate attacks (21 percent), civilians and noncombatants as victims (17.5 percent), use of intimidation (17 percent), innocence of victims (15.5 percent), group of terrorists rather than individuals (14 percent), and attack as demonstration or symbolism (13.5 percent). A few definitions mentioned unpredictability and unexpectedness (9 percent), covertness (9 percent), ongoing or serial campaign of violence (7 percent), criminality of act (6 percent), and demands made to third parties present (4 percent). Simonson and Spindlove identified five categories of definitions. According to their schema, terrorist definitions could include a simple definition (“Violence or threatened violence intended to produce fear or change”), a legal definition (“Criminal violence violating legal codes and punishable by the state”), an analytical definition (“Specific political and social factors behind individual violent acts”), a state-sponsored definition (“National or other groups used to attack Western or other interests”), and a state terrorism definition (“Power of the government used to repress its people to the point of submission”). Whittaker summed up the various definitions of terrorism as including illegitimate force for a political objective used against innocent civilians, a strategy of violence to produce fear in the public, and use of force or threatened force to cause political change. Martin summarized the common features of formal definitions as illegal use of force, subnational terrorists, unconventional methods, political motives, targeting of civilians or passive military, and acts to affect a watching audience. The elements listed by Whittaker and Martin do not seem to have wide consensus. In the world of terrorism today, some elements may not be applicable, most notably those dealing with targets. As has been seen in Iraq, terrorists are not hesitant to attack an active, well-prepared, and heavily armed military to attempt to sway public opinion against the war, thus falling outside the passive military parameters listed by Martin.

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In examining the listed definitions (and the summary of Schmid, 1988), a few common threads emerge, but these tendencies are far from universal (Mullins). First, violence is a tool used by terrorists, not a goal of terrorism. Second, terrorism involves violence or threatened violence. Third, terrorism is political. Even when terrorists profess a religious basis, their ultimate aims are political. The Christian Identity movement in the United States, for example, wants to remove what they believe is a Zionist Occupational Government (ZOG) because it is a government preventing the second coming of Christ. This religious belief translates into a political goal. Specialinterest or single-issue terrorists are similar. Rallying around the goal of saving animals, animal-rights activists that resort to terrorism want the laws dealing with animal-human interactions changed. Fourth, inducing fear in the audience is the goal of terrorism. Fifth, violence is directed at those who might be watching. Victims are chosen for the impact they might have on the target population (Weinzierl). Governments and laws are changed by the people (at least in the United States). Producing fear in a population ultimately leads to political change. Trying to avoid some of these definitional problems, Bolz, Dudonis, and Schulz have tried to identify common elements that were shared by all terrorists rather than developing a specific definition. To them, terrorism is a form of theater that (1) uses violence to persuade, (2) selects targets for their maximum propaganda value, (3) engages in unprovoked attacks, (4) conducts attacks that provide maximum publicity with minimum risk, (5) uses surprise to foil countermeasures, (6) uses threat, harassment, and violence merely as tools rather than means to an end, (7) has no regard for women and children as victims, (8) uses propaganda to maximize the effects of violence, and (9) sanctions loyalty to no one but the group itself. Recognizing and identifying these threads, however, does not bring closure to the definitional problem, and does not get us any closer to answering the question of what terrorism is or is not. With any definition one wishes to use, many acts of terrorism can be omitted, and many nonterrorist acts can be included. As Simonson and Spindlove point out, terrorism is a special type of violence that is also a criminal offense. They argue that moral beliefs and “sociological-political

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mumbo-jumbo” is not necessary to understanding the term. Historically in the United States, terrorism has not been illegal per se. Individuals engaging in terrorism have been tried under criminal statutes for the criminality of their acts. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (Oklahoma Federal Building bombers) were charged federally with violation of civil rights for each person they killed, and with multiple counts of murder by the State of Oklahoma. Only since 9/11 has there been federal legislation making terrorism an illegal act (sedition has always been illegal under federal statutes, but proving a person’s intent to overthrow the government because of what he or she believes or talks about has, in several cases, proven impossible). Even classifying certain acts as terrorism, however, does little to resolve these issues. Even recognizing certain acts as “terrorism,” the FBI still classifies these acts in the Uniform Crime Report as criminal (White, 2006). Likewise, most law-enforcement agencies do not consider such acts as terrorist, preferring instead to place them under the rubric of criminal activity. The inability to adequately define the phenomenon sets the stage for our inability to understand anything that follows. If one cannot define a phenomenon, how then can one understand it, identify the actors, or engage in meaningful analysis, threat assessment, planning and prediction, or successful intervention? Those researchers and government agencies that adopt a specific definition and try to categorize and provide a chronology of terrorist acts have to make a subjective judgment about every single act they examine for inclusion or exclusion. Chronologies vary by completeness and tend to have a moderate degree of overlap. The problem has become so acute that the U.S. Department of State discontinued publishing their annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report amid controversy over incidents reported. Their last report featured incidents occurring in 2003 (U.S. Department of State, 2005). In it, they listed 190 cases, thus laying claim to the lowest total since 1969. Officials later said the report was full of methodological errors (caused by its definitional problems) and that the department had greatly underestimated the total number of terrorist attacks (Reid). The National Counterterrorism Center data set, discussed in a later section, has replaced the Department of State report.

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Another issue concerning our ability to define terrorism concerns the changing nature of terrorism over time. To take just the United States as an example, there are major shifts in terrorist groups every couple of decades. In recent history, the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by activities of the so called Marxist-leftist groups such as the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), Weather Underground, United Freedom Front, and M-19 (to name only a few). The black power movement was loosely allied with that movement. Groups like the Black Panthers, Black Liberation Army, and New Afrikan Freedom Fighters shared resources, intelligence, membership, and tactics with the other leftist groups. In the 1980s, as we saw those groups recede from policy space (primarily due to arrest by law enforcement), the far-right extremist movement took center-stage and grabbed the headlines with their violence. Race-hater groups, neo-Nazis, compound dwellers/survivalists, skinheads, and the Christian Identity movement became part of the terrorist vernacular and held sway. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), United Klans of America, American Nazi Party, Elohim City, and Aryan Nations were at the forefront of terrorism in America (Freilich, 2003). Within that movement, terrorists come from so many varied backgrounds and conduct such varied actions that development of a predictive model is virtually impossible, even with adequate data. Just as our law-enforcement efforts at controlling their violence began to pay dividends (along with Father Time – several of the key leaders like Richard Butler, Rick Redfairn, and William Pierce died of natural causes, and they were pretty much the glue that held the movement together), America was attacked by al Qaeda. Since that time, the major domestic terrorist threat has been special-interest or single-issue terrorism. Groups like ALF (Animal Liberation Front) and ELF (Environmental Liberation Front) have become the most violent domestic terrorists in America, and are considered by the FBI to be the number-one domestic terrorist threat in our country (Richardson, 2005). Since 1996, AFL and ELF have engaged in over six hundred terrorist acts, resulting in over $43 million in damages. But, it is worth noting, that prior to 9/11, the FBI (by their definition) did not consider these groups terroristic. Because of the concern with international terrorism, the activities of these singleissue groups has been virtually ignored.

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Throughout American history, instances of terrorism have been evident in the maturational development of the country. From the founding militia groups that fought the British (Sons of Liberty) to the range wars of the 1800s, and from the anarchist/socialist movement of the early 1900s to the labor movement of the 1910s and 1920s, terrorism has played a role in our history and ethos. The U.S. government resorted to terrorism (depending on how broadly one defines it) to eliminate the American Indian threat in its efforts to expand westward. As early as the 1810s, the government was supplying smallpox- and influenza-infected blankets to the Missouri Valley, Ozark Mountain American Indian tribes (and some believe as many as 12 million were killed by disease). General George Armstrong Custer was reviled by American Indians for his tactics of terrorism against their tribes (and also for using disease-infected blankets). In the 1960s, it could be argued that Operation Phoenix in Vietnam was a government-sponsored terrorist operation against the North Vietnamese. The point of this discussion is not to confess guilt or assign fault, but to point out that terrorism has many manifestations that must be understood in the context of time, social variables, political factors, economic conditions, and other group/societal dynamics. Would an American Indian of 1812 equate the actions of the federal government passing out smallpox-infected blankets to those of al Qaeda on 9/11? As in the United States, the international nature of terrorism is changing. The breakup of the Soviet Union, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, technological advances, and centralization of American infrastructures all have contributed to changes in international terrorism (Bolz, Dudonis, and Schulz, 2002). These changes affect our ability to adequately define terrorism.

TERRORIST ACTORS

Given the problem of defining what terrorism is, it should be no surprise that there also is a lack of consensus concerning what a terrorist is. A common typology of terrorism has proven to be as elusive as an adequate definition of terrorism. In part, a typology might be useful

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for understanding what motivates terrorists to commit acts of terrorism. Given a motivation, we can begin to predict future activities, types of targets, types of attacks, and then ultimately the development of counter- and anti-terrorism strategies. For example, classifying a terrorist as an eco-terrorist allows some degree of prediction and planning about what types of targets will be selected, what types of operations will be conducted, and what needs to be done to prevent those operations. But, even when a typology is this clear and straightforward, some ambiguity, uncertainty, and unpredictability remains. Consider that many eco-terrorists also might be involved in animalrights terrorism. In addition, this overlap in typology increases the difficulty in understanding and researching these groups. Far-right terrorists can be identified as Christian Identity, compound dwellers/ survivalists, neo-Nazis, race haters, and militias (Mullins, 1997). Many of the groups on the far right reflect several or all of these types. Even the largest, most violent, and most well-known group, the Aryan Nations, has elements of all these typologies. Primarily a Christian Identity movement, they also teach and practice neo-Nazi beliefs (their uniforms and “salute” reflect a Nazi influence), they are compound dwellers and survivalists (apocalyptic beliefs), race haters (KKK influence and element), and militia-oriented. This is part of the reason that each type of group has no common methodology. Members within the Christian Identity movement, for example, have engaged in acts ranging from simple assaults on minorities to longterm standoffs with federal authorities (Ruby Ridge siege in Idaho, but not the Branch Davidians in Waco, who were a cult), and from mass murder (Buford Furrow in California) to bombing attacks, making plans to conduct widespread chemical-agent attacks (The Order), and disrupting social and political order. It could be asked what kind of terrorist was Timothy McVeigh? According to the media, he was associated with the militia movement. Among his belongings, a large body of KKK and Christian Identity literature was found. In interviews, he professed beliefs in neo-Nazism. Typologies of international terrorists have not been overly helpful. Most have been subjective in nature, too broad in descriptive power, and less than helpful in explaining terrorist behavior and actions. This is not surprising given the lack of definitional consistency. Many

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typologies are little more than loose descriptors that could apply to a wide range of groups and people, terrorist or not. The problem becomes even more acute when considering the individual as terrorist (Arena and Arrigo, 2005; Corley, Smith, and Damphousse, 2005). Thornton (1964) classified terrorists as enforcement (governmental terror) or agitational (organized group against a government). Agitational terrorists conducted operations to right some perceived wrong or to arouse a population against their government. May’s typology (1974) considered terrorists as regime- (government conducted) or siege-oriented (similar to Thornton’s agitational form). A typology used by Hacker (1978) classified terrorists as crusaders (idealistic, wanting political change), criminals (persons who commit terrorist acts for personal gain), and crazies (emotionally disturbed). Schmid and deGraaf (1982) considered terrorists as insurgents (terrorism against a state), as having repressive or state origins (government terrorism), or vigilantes (terrorism directed against nonstate persons). Further, they distinguished insurgent terrorism according to social revolutionary (terrorism to cause worldwide revolution), separatist/nationalistic/ethnic (terrorism against one part of society, not government as a whole), and single-issue groups (terrorism to grant privilege to a specific group). Gregor (1983) argued that terrorists are instrumental (impair functioning of state), demonstrative (fear in entire populations), prophylactic (preparatory for resistance or rebellion), or incidental (criminal incidents that effect innocents). Wilkinson (1977, 2000) classified terrorists as criminal (for financial or material gain), psychic (magic beliefs, superstitions, myths fed by fanatical religious beliefs), oriented toward war (elimination of enemy by any means), or political (political goals); and political terrorists could be subclassified as revolutionaries (causing revolution), subrevolutionaries (political motives other than government overthrow), and repressive (directed against a specific group to suppress or restrain). Bolz et al. (2002) developed a typology that included minority nationalists, Marxist revolutionaries, anarchists, neo-fascists/right-wing extremists, pathological groups/individuals, religious groups, and ideological mercenaries. Poland (2005) classified terrorists as political, criminal, pathological (motivated by some psychological aberration or other emotional state), labor (workers against bosses or companies), and

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war (military use of terrorism). Post, Ruby, and Shaw (2002) expanded on a typology proposed by Schmid and Jongman (1988). They classified terrorists as national-separatist or ethno-nationalist (establish state based on ethnicity), social revolutionary (left-wing), religious fundamentalist (apocalyptic), religious extremist (closed cults), and right-wing (racial supremacist). These represent only a fraction of the typologies listed in the literature (see Mullins, 1997 for a more comprehensive listing). Many of the categories of terrorists in these typologies make little sense in the abstract, and may even serve to obscure terrorist motivations rather than illuminate them. Typologies are dependent in large part on the definition of terrorism the writer has chosen. As do terrorists, motivations change over time, which means even the best of typologies are time limited. As terrorists change, the names we use to identify them and the names they use to describe themselves changes over time. Some names are chosen to signify a military affiliation (Army of God or 1st Brigade, Texas Militia), some to denote a freedom or liberation movement (United Freedom Front), some to signify a self-defense movement (White Aryan Resistance), some to show a cause of righteous vengeance (Covenant, Sword, and Army of the Lord), or some a neutral name (Shining Path) (Howard and Sawyer, 2003). Some chose names to signify several “unified movements” (Symbionese Liberation Army), some to show separation from established states or governments (Aryan Nations), and some select a name because of the fear it induces in future victims or the population watching. Any group who adopts the KKK as part or all of its name likely does so in part because of the violent historical connotations the Klan name carries. The very name, even in the absence of any violence, produces fear and panic. Many of the typologies that have been developed are ones that indicate the typology creator’s moral viewpoint. Terrorist and terrorism are terms we give to enemies that do not fit a clear categorization of criminal or war opponent. We label people and groups as terrorists to simplify a complex problem and disparate group of enemies of the United States. We use the term to understand a behavior that cannot be understood, a set of motivations that are alien to our sense of order, and a hatred of a way of life that we enjoy and take for granted.

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At some level, our inability to define terrorism, understand the motivations and causes of terrorism, or psychoanalyze terrorists becomes an academic exercise.

MYTHS BROUGHT ABOUT FROM PROBLEMS WITH DEFINITION AND TYPOLOGY

First and foremost, it should be recognized that, as a general rule, the media gets it wrong. The media often does not understand terrorism, terrorists, or the actual threat that terrorists pose. Read virtually any media report (or listen to any news report) about a terrorist act and within that one article, the term “terrorist” or “terrorism” will be freely interchanged with terms like fundamentalist, extremist, guerrilla, resistance fighter, reactionary, commando, and insurgent. Terrorists are terrorists. They are not fundamentalists, extremists, insurgents, or any other term they are labeled. The oft-described “insurgents” in Iraq and Afghanistan that have placed IEDs that killed American military personnel and local civilians are terrorists who are trying to create fear and sway public opinion in the United States. They may hold fundamentalist or extremist beliefs, have those motivations, and may perceive themselves as guerrilla fighters waging war. But it is their behavior rather than their beliefs or perceptions that define them. By focusing on what may or may not be their motivations for violence rather than the destructive nature of their attacks, the media makes it easier for terrorists to operate and harder for us to defend against them. From an academic perspective, there have been an incredible number of books, published articles, and other research analyses by terrorism “experts” and researchers. Prior to 9/11, terrorism sources were rare, hard to find, and out of the mainstream. Since 9/11, a flood of information has been published relating to terrorism, and the number of “experts” who have appeared on the scene have proliferated. Some of the information contained in these sources will be explored in this chapter. However, we choose not to reference the specific source of these myths so as not to embarrass anyone working in earnest to better understand this phenomenon. Suffice it to say, that we, like any researcher, scientist, data analyst, have had our share

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of mistakes when trying to learn about a relatively rarely studied subject. Rather, our intent in this section is to help the reader avoid past mistakes and advance the learning curve. It is our intent to explore some of the mythology that has been published concerning terrorism to illustrate the difficulty in studying and analyzing terrorism. One author has attributed the beginning of terrorism to the hashashin (assassins) of the Middle Ages. Actually, terrorism is much older. Terrorism has been around as long as societies have been around. Moses used terrorism against the Pharaoh of Egypt to free the Israelites. Regardless of the definition used, terrorism has been a tool of governments, autonomous groups, and individuals since the earliest days of civilization. Individuals, tribes and clans, societies, and almost all governments ever in existence have used terrorism to further political goals. Terrorism is not a Middle Ages, Near-east, Asian, African, or Western European phenomenon. Several accounts have characterized 9/11 as the first time Americans have experienced terrorism on the home front. Earlier, mention was made of several historical antecedents of terrorist activity in the United States. A chronology of all terrorist activity in this country since discovery by Columbus would fill several volumes. International terrorists have conducted actions and have been arrested in the United States prior to 9/11. One author even stated that 9/11 was the first instance of terrorism in the nation. We suspect he simply forgot about the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing that killed 169 innocent people. Terms such as “horrifying,” and “terrifying” are routinely used to describe “weapons of mass destruction” and their use by terrorists. Apocalyptic scenarios are presented that would suggest the end of civilization as we know it. The use of any of the chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBN) weapons is presented as a doomsday scenario that is unsurvivable. In the mid-1990s, the descriptor NBC for these weapons began to be replaced with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The assumption was that the release of any of these weapons would result in massive casualties. Researchers and writers spoke of casualty rates in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions. These weapons were believed to be true doomsday weapons. Many readers, in fact, may remember in spring of 2004 when the

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government elevated the threat level due to fears of a chemical or biological weapon being released. Many home supply stores saw a significant increase in the sale of plastic sheeting and duct tape. Not only were these fears fueled by the media, they were also fed by “experts” selected by the media to present mass-casualty scenarios and produce unnecessary and unreasonable fear in the public. Even before this, however, the reality of these weapons was proven different. The anthrax mailings in fall 2001 clearly demonstrated the reality of NBC weapons (nuclear, biological, chemical – or CBNR, chemical, biological, nuclear, radiological – various acronyms are used and all are acceptable). They are not necessarily “weapons of mass destruction.” They are difficult to prepare, difficult to deploy, and once deployed, have limiting effect (the detonation of a nuclear device would be the exception). Preparedness scenarios and exercises being conducted by the government and law-enforcement agencies stress the limiting nature of destruction, and contain plans to deal with the mass panic that would ensue with the release of a chemical, biological, or radiological agent. There is a responsibility by the “experts” to inform of the true nature of these weapons. Language today is reverting back to the NBC descriptor. It has been frequently stated that one man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot or freedom fighter. Although both are involved in destructive activity, terrorists are distinguishable in terms of their respective purposes, targets, motivations, and goals. Nor are terrorists guerrillas. Guerrilla groups are larger, operate more as a military unit or army, operate in the open, attempt to take and hold territory, and maintain political control over captured territory or people (Howard and Sawyer, 2003). This myth (and use of interchangeable terms) continues to exist and to be published as some “Holy Grail mantra” to cover a host of sins against humanity. In a similar vein, hate crime is often referred to as terrorism. Hate crime can be committed by terrorists (either deliberately or as a consequence), but it is a specific type of crime, not a type of terrorism. Hate crime is a legal term and specific legal violation (White, 2002). Another author presented a chronology of terrorist incidents against Americans in the decade of the 1980s. It was not entirely clear whether or not this was intended to be a complete chronology or a sample, but

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it appeared the intent of the author was to provide a complete chronology. The author listed seventeen incidents! A quick perusal of any one of the yearly U.S. Department of State annual reports (Patterns of Global Terrorism) or any other chronology would quickly show the inaccuracy and gross underreporting of this chronology. One author stated that terrorism is more effective today than ever before. We would argue that the opposite is the case, that the emphasis given by government agencies, the military, and local law enforcement has made terrorism less effective than ever before. Fewer terrorist acts are being committed than in past years, more terrorists are being identified and arrested than ever before, and more plots uncovered and halted than in the past. Public awareness is higher than it has ever been, and people are aware of the threat and are cognizant of their role in preventing terrorism and taking action to help the government and law enforcement prevent terrorism. It is much more difficult today to engage in terrorism than at any point in our nation’s history. This is true regardless of whether one is an international or domestic terrorist. Still another author wrote that terrorism is not a random or impulsive act of violence, but well planned and organized. Terrorists routinely engage in random and impulsive acts. One of the more noteworthy and notorious examples of this was the 1987 case of Michael Donald, a Mobile, Alabama teenager who was abducted, beaten, killed, and mutilated by two members of the United Klans of America (Kornbluth, 1987). Another spur-of-the-moment attack that illustrates the randomness of terrorism was evidenced in the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. James Byrd was walking home one evening when three white supremacists, who had been drinking heavily and were cruising around looking for trouble, saw him and dragged him behind their truck until his head separated from his body. It has been written that the military is ineffective against terrorists. Similarly, the same author suggested that terrorists avoid attacking military forces. Our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq should be sufficient to lay this myth to rest. Terrorists routinely attack our military forces, especially in Iraq. The favored tactic is the use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) as booby-traps. For every IED

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that does explode, killing or wounding soldiers, hundreds are found and defused. The terrorists responsible are being discovered and neutralized. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, leftist terrorists in Europe routinely selected military personnel and military bases for attack. Puerto Rican terrorists have been targeting the American military in Puerto Rico even longer.

DATA ISSUES

The claim has been made by some that terrorism does not follow any behavioral pattern. Accordingly, this unpredictability is the limiting factor in our ability to analyze, plan, predict, and intervene in terrorist activities. Though specific terrorist events are not predictable, absent reliable intelligence, they do tend to follow behavioral patterns, and their actions can be analyzed and predicted to some extent. The issue becomes one of how the analyzer defines terrorism and the terrorist. This has been a significant, limiting factor in our analysis of terrorist activity rather than our inability to analyze data. As with definitional issues, the question of what exactly to analyze is a core issue. For any of the published analyses of terrorist activities, the definition adopted and subjective interpretations made by the researcher have been the limiting factors in effectively organizing data. For example, in an early chronology by Marcia McKnight Trick covering the years 1965–76 (Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism [NACCJSG], 1976), she omitted any acts committed by individuals not associated with a group and any acts where a group did not claim responsibility. One of the better nongovernment chronologies produced by Hewitt (2003) used various data sources, including Trick’s chronology, the FBI Annual Reports, Annual of Power and Conflict, newspaper reports, magazine articles covering terrorist and criminal activity, and other published reports. He omitted acts of spontaneous mob violence and trivial attacks of vandalism and arson of less than $1,000. His chronology included acts committed by foreign and domestic groups. Foreign groups were subdivided into international and émigré. Domestic groups were classified by ideological type into antiabortion extremists, black militants, the Jewish Defense League, revolutionary leftists, and white supremacists. He did not include acts by eco-terrorists or animal-rights terrorists.

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Chronologies prepared by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) include hate crime, bias crime, and other criminal activity, while ignoring all other types of terrorism. They classify abortionclinic bombings as hate crime, not as single-issue terrorism. Many of the activities they list, in fact, are more criminally oriented than they are terroristic. This is not to say the SPLC chronology is bad or flawed, but is a product of their definition, motivations, and interests (as are all others). Federally, the FBI and Department of State have published annual chronologies of terrorist activity. The FBI Annual Reports includes all acts of terrorism occurring in the United States, regardless of whether the perpetrators are international or domestic terrorists. The Department of State’s data set cover international events outside of the United States that in anyway might threaten the security of U.S. nationals or national security. With both data sets, however, incidents for inclusion or exclusion depends upon the definition used by the agency. Although the FBI began publishing their terrorist chronology in 1980, many acts of political violence were not included. Abortion clinics bombings were not part of the FBI data set (Ross, 1993). It was not until after 9/11 that ecological or animal-rights terrorist activities were included. These datasets are not inherently wrong or misleading, but their incompleteness can be harmful. They may force us to expend manpower and effort in “looking under the wrong rocks” for terrorists, while the real threat goes unnoticed. Resources often are not allocated or are misallocated. Faulty data collection, analysis, and dissemination allowed the 9/11 terrorists to remain virtually undetected until it was too late (and to further illustrate an earlier point, many writers, researchers, and analysts still refer to them as “hijackers”). All are aware of the stories of the eighty-five-year-old, wheelchair-bound airline passenger subjected to a full body search because of the purchase of a one-way ticket, or whose name was pulled randomly by a computer; all have heard of the infant prevented from flying because his or her name came up on a watch list. Financial resources may be misspent and expended in low-threat areas or arenas. In a striking example of the cart leading the horse, AIR Worldwide Corporation developed a computer model that identified potential terrorist targets nationwide (over 300,000 targets). For each target selected,

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an assessment was made as to what might be the result if the target was actually attacked by various means. Finally, they had a group of counterterrorist subject-matter experts rate each target by type of attack and make a probability model. Using this target-probability model, they matched homeland security monies spent in the area by target-attack probability. What AIR Worldwide discovered was that the least-populated areas in the United States were receiving disproportionate shares of homeland security money. Wyoming, for example, was identified as one of the least likely target areas in the United States, but had been one of the states receiving the most homeland security money per capita. Conversely, New York was one of the most likely targeted areas, but had received the least money on a per capita basis (Ripley, 2004). Efforts have been under way and are ongoing to significantly improve the identification and reporting of terrorist incidents that affect Americans, both domestically and internationally. Formed in 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency manages the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). Representatives from various government agencies and the military daily sift through 5,000–6,000 pieces of incoming intelligence daily, analyzing the data to identify and disseminate terrorist intelligence (Burger, 2004). Their data is used for the Presidential Daily Briefing on terrorist activity. The most comprehensive and complete effort to date is a new (2005) government database, the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Now online and available for use by any researcher, the NCTC data set is the most comprehensive database for terrorism, both international and domestic, ever developed. More significantly, it is a database that is fluid and can be changed to reflect problems, biases, and changes in the nature of terrorism. According to the NCTC (2005), they will adjust and improve their methodology, and maintain an “ongoing dialogue with experts inside and outside the government to further our collective goal of a meaningful compilation of terrorism incident data.” For example, initially the Department of State listed only one of two Russian airliners destroyed in flight by Chechen rebels in 2004, because on one plane (the unlisted plane) all of the passengers were Russian (the other was listed because one of

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the passengers was Israeli) and did not meet the currently used definition of international terrorism. Because the other plane had at least one foreign national on board, it did meet the criteria for reporting. NCTC changed their definition of terrorism and then included the other plane (Reid, 2005). Under the old definition, the Department of State reported 651 international terrorist incidents for 2004, with over 9,000 victims. Using their definition, the NCTC counted 3,192 worldwide attacks that injured, killed, or kidnapped 28,433 people. The definitional change the NCTC made was to include politically motivated attacks conducted by an extremist group carried out against citizens of their own country, and aimed at producing political change in their own government’s policies (the Department of State definition required at least one victim to be a citizen of another country). They also dropped a requirement that the act cause more than $10,000 in damage or cause serious injury. Each potential incident for inclusion in the NCTC database must get approval from an Incident Adjudication Board, which is composed of terrorism experts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security. This methodology reduces the importance and impact of any specific definition of terrorism or specific motivation or typology of the terrorist. A panel of review eliminates any individual biases arising from definitional issues and should make the resulting dataset the most useful and complete to date. Using the NCTC database, researchers can search by region, country, state/province, city, event type (i.e., armed attack, bombing, hijacking, sabotage, etc.), perpetrator (Christian extremist, neo-Nazi/ fascist/white supremacist, tribal/clan, etc.), target, and/or victim statistics (total victims, fatalities, wounded, hostages), or any combination of multiple variables. In a target search, the researcher can specify facility type (aircraft, bus, checkpoint, etc.), facility characteristics (Buddhist, Jewish, Western, American, etc.), facility nationality, facility damage, victim type (ambassador, clergy, educator, etc.), victim characteristic (Buddhist, Muslim, Sunni, not American, Western, etc.), and victim nationality. In sum, the NCTC database of terrorist incidents promises to overcome many of the problems discussed previously. It is the most

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comprehensive and complete data set ever developed, maintained, and shared. Using this data set, the researcher or analyst can select incidents that fit their criteria and definition, and isolate types of incidents for study.

CONCLUSION

Our difficulty in building an adequate predictive model for terrorism largely centers on our inability to adequately define terrorism and to understand who is a terrorist. We lack a usable, basic definition for terrorism upon which we can agree. Furthermore, we seemingly cannot develop an accepted typology for identifying terrorists and cannot agree on who the actors are. It is then not surprising that we have inadequate predictive models in place that can be used by anti- and counterterrorist agencies to help prevent terrorism. Hoffman (2004) suggested that we may be asking the wrong questions and looking for the “nuclear bomb in the haystack” instead of looking for the most common attack pattern. According to Hoffman, “Many academic terrorism analyses – when they venture into the realm of future possibilities if at all – do so only tepidly. In the main, they are self-limited to mostly lurid hypotheses of worst-case scenarios, almost exclusively involving CBRN weapons as opposed to trying to understand why – with the exception of September 11 – terrorists have only rarely realized their true killing potential.” Hoffman argues that we should be looking at what has not happened; that the middle group is where the United States is most vulnerable and where our predictive efforts should focus. He suggests that some attack possibilities that need consideration include (1) SAM (surface-to-air missile) attacks against airplanes (which the British SAS regularly prepares for); (2) simple weapons like RPGs (rocket propelled grenade launchers) used to attack planes while landing or taking off; (3) use of ultra-light planes or unmanned drone aircraft to attack heavily defended targets (an FAA scenario and ongoing concern); (4) mass-coordinated attacks using conventional weapons (as seen in the London bombings in July 2005); (5) disruptive attacks on mass-transit systems or cyberspace (a scenario that became reality in June 2005 in London when terrorists attacked the subway system and a bus); (6) marine attacks against

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passenger liners or explosive ships such as liquid natural gas (LNG) ships (one domestic terrorist group in the United States, The Order, planned to conduct such an attack in the mid-1980s on an LNG ship in Seattle’s harbor – an attack some experts said would be equivalent to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II); (7) agricultural or livestock attacks using biological or chemical weapons (Texas A&M University has established a center to research agricultural or livestock terrorist attacks); (8) using the threat of CBNR to produce panic, or conducting a limited attack using those weapons for the purpose of producing mass panic; and (9) conventional weapon attacks on industrial or chemical plants to produce a Bhopal-type incident. We would add the scenario of the lone suicide bomber entering a mall, crowded shop, restaurant, or other public gathering and detonating an explosive device. Laqueur (1977, 1987, 1999) believes we have been looking at the wrong groups. Instead of terrorists, Laqueur argued that we should examine extremist movements that are larger, provide a more adequate database, and provide the fuel that keeps terrorists operating. He has argued that terrorist groups are too small for social scientists and historians to systematically observe, that they do not represent mass movements that easily lend themselves to explanation. Although we might agree that terrorists are a difficult group to study, we disagree that they are not a fruitful source of study whose activities can be analyzed, better understood, and predicted. The fact that many terrorists operate outside of the support network of extremist movements suggests the need to study the full spectra of terrorist groups. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are the perfect example of this kind of isolation. Terrorist belief structures are at the end of larger continuums and can be analyzed attitudinally and statistically (George and Wilcox, 1992). Ellis (2005) has suggested that an analytical framework for understanding and predicting terrorism would examine the nature of their motivation, level of organization, and level of technical sophistication. He believes the problem with our ability to collect data and study terrorism is the changing nature of terrorism itself. Terrorists today are more network-oriented, more complex and fluid, and have less organizational structure. Though we agree with Ellis in part, an analysis using

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his framework would not account for the “lone wolf cell,” the model Timothy McVeigh and many of the Middle Eastern suicide bombers follow. It certainly is true that terrorist networks of communication have become more sophisticated and less prone to intelligence interception. Communications via computers have presented their own set of challenges for intelligence agencies. However, it is not necessarily the case that terrorists have gotten more technologically sophisticated (as individuals). On one hand, defining terrorism remains problematic and just as elusive as terrorists themselves. On the other, it may be that our lack of ability to reach consensus on a common definition or typology of terrorism may prove somewhat beneficial if this discourse eventually leads to a clear, usable, and common definition. Having a lot of people approach the problem from a variety of viewpoints may ultimately even produce a more comprehensive database than having one “correct” data source that everyone can access. In addition, there now is a much larger number of researchers interested in exploring the problem of terrorism. After all, prior to 9/11 terrorism was not a significant concern in research, military, or government circles, and as a result, not much effort was expended on this topic. This lack of interest and limited intelligence gathering contributed to our unpreparedness for 9/11 and its immediate aftermath. For a time since, we have been involved with playing “catch-up” because initially there were too few researchers involved in the game. Now that we are catching up a bit, part of the solution to terrorism is to build an adequate database, engage in accurate analyses, and establish predictive models. Doing so requires getting more of the most talented players onto the field.

RE F E RE N CE S Arena, M.P. & Arrigo, B.A. (2005). Identity and the terrorist threat: An interpretative and explanatory model. In Snowden, L.L. & Whitsel, B.C. (Eds.). Terrorism: Research, readings and realities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Bolz, F., Jr., Dudonis, K.J. & Schulz, D. P. (2002). The counterterrorism handbook: Tactics, procedures, and techniques (2nd Ed.). NY: CRC Press. Burger (2004). Threat analysis: Decoding the clutter. Time, March 29, 28–29.

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Combs, C.C. (2000). Terrorism in the twenty-first century (2nd Ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Cooper, H.H.A. (2004). Terrorism: The problem of definition revisited. In Martin, G. (Ed.). The new era of terrorism: Selected readings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Corley, S.H., Smith, B.L., & Damphousse, K.R. (2005). The changing face of American terrorism. In Snowden, L.L. & Whitsel, B.C. (Eds.). Terrorism: Research, readings, and realities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Ellis, B. (2005). Countering complexity: An analytical framework to guide counter-terrorism policy-making. In Bradey, T.J. (Ed.). Annual editions: Violence and terrorism (8th Ed.). Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill/ Duskin. FBI. (2005). http://www.fbi.gov. Freilich, Joshua D. (2003). American militia: State-level variations in militia activities. New York: LFB Scholarly LLC. Friedlander, R.A. (1981). Terrorism and the law: What price safety? Gaithersburg, MD: IACP. George, J. & Wilcox, L. (1992). Nazis, communists, klansmen, and others on the fringe. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. Gregor, A.J. (1983). Fascism’s philosophy of violence and the concept of terror. In Rapoport, D.C. & Alexander, Y. (Eds.). The Morality of Terrorism: Religious and Secular Justifications. NY: Pergamon Press. Hacker, F.J. (1978). Crusaders, criminals, crazies: Terror and terrorism in our time. NY: Bantam. Hewitt, C. (2003). Understanding terrorism in America: From the Klan to Al Qaeda. NY: Routledge. Hoffman, B. (2004). Rethinking terrorism and counterterrorism since 9/11. In Martin, G. (Ed.). The new era of terrorism: Selected readings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Howard, R.D. & Sawyer, R.L. (2003). Terrorism and counterterrorism: Understanding the new security environment. Guilford, CT: McGrawHill/Duskin. Jenkins, B.M. (1975). International terrorism: A new mode of conflict. Los Angeles: Cresent. Krieger, D.M. (1977). What happens if? Terrorists, revolutionaries and nuclear weapons. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 430, 44–57. Laqueur, W. (1977). Terrorism. Boston, MA: Little Brown. (1987). The age of terrorism. Boston, MA: Little Brown. (1999). The new terrorism: Fanaticism and the arms of mass destruction. NY: Oxford Univ. Press. Lodge, J. (1981). Terrorism: A challenge to the state. Oxford: Martin Robertson.

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Martin, G. (2003). Understanding terrorism: Challenges, perspectives, and issues. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. May, W.F. (1974). Terrorism as strategy and ecstasy. Social Research, 41, Spring, 277–298. Mullins, W.C. (1997). A sourcebook on domestic and international terrorism: An analysis of issues, organization, tactics, and responses (2nd Ed.). Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. National Advisory Committee of Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, Task Force on Disorder and Terrorism (BACCJSG, 1976). Disorders and terrorism. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Poland, J.M. (2005). Understanding terrorism: Groups, strategies, responses (2nd Ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Post, J.M., Ruby, K.G., & Shaw, E.D. (2002). The radical group in context: Identification of critical elements in the analysis of risk for terrorism by radical group type. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 25, 101–126. Reid, T. (2005). The 28,000 victims of terrorism. Times Online: World News, August 17. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0..3– 1684077.00.html. Richardson, V. (2005). FBI targets domestic terrorists. In Bradey, T.J. (Ed.). Annual editions: Violence and terrorism (8th Ed.). Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill/Duskin. Ripley, A. (2004). How we got homeland security wrong. Time, March 29, 34–37. Ross, J. (1993). Research on contemporary oppositional terrorism in the United States. In Tunnell, K. (Ed.). Political crime in contemporary America. NY: Garland Publishing. Schmid, A.P. (1983). Political terrorism: A research guide to concepts, theories, data bases, and literature. New Brunswick, CT: Transaction Books. Schmid, A.P. & de Graaf, J. (1982). Violence as communication: Insurgent terrorism and the western news media. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Schmid, A.P. & Jongman, A.J. (1988). Political terrorism: A new guide to actors, authors, concepts, data bases, theories, and literature. New Brunswick, CT: Transaction Books. Simonson & Spindlove. (2004). Terrorism today: The past, the players, the future (2nd Ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Smith, B. (1994). Terrorism in America. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Sobel, L.A. (1975). Political terrorism. NY: Facts on File. Thornton, T.P. (1964). Terror as a weapon of political agitation. In Echstein, H. (Ed.). Internal war: Problems and approaches. NY: Free Press of Glencoe. U.S. Air Force Special Operations School. (1985). Hurlburt Field, FL.

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U.S. Department of State. (2002). Patterns of Global Terrorism. Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. Printing Office. U.S. Department of State. (2005). Patterns of Global Terrorism – 2003. http://www.state.gov/s/ct/c14151.htm and http://www.state. gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2003/33771.htm. Wardlaw, G. (1982). Political terrorism: Theory, tactics, and counter-measures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weinzierl, J. (2004). Terrorism: Its origin and history. In Nyatepe-Coo, A.A. & Zeisler-Vralsted, D. (Eds.). Understanding terrorism: Threats in an uncertain world. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. Whitaker, D.J. (2001). The terrorism reader. NY: Routledge. White, J.R. (1991). Terrorism: An introduction. Pacific Grove, CA:Brooks-Cole. (2002). Terrorism: An introduction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. (2006). Terrorism and homeland security (5th Ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Wilkinson, P. (1977). Terrorism and the liberal state. NY: Wiley. (2000). Terrorism versus democracy: The liberal state response. NY: Frank Cass.

chapter four

Balancing Counterterrorism Strategies Lessons from Evolutionary Ecology Bryan Vila and Joanne Savage

INTRODUCTION

Terrorism often is portrayed as fundamentally different from more mundane types of crime. This distinction is understandable, but unwarranted and counterproductive because it encourages overreliance on aggressive measures to combat terrorism. We believe that a true understanding of the causes of terrorism can occur only if we apply the same systematic, scientific approach to the problem that is used to study other forms of behavior, and that an understanding of the root causes of terrorism is necessary for the development of effective counterterrorism policies. In this chapter, we discuss terrorism using the same evolutionaryecological perspective on human behavior that has proved useful for understanding crime and developing novel approaches to crime control and prevention. Unlike more traditional approaches to these social problems, the evolutionary-ecological perspective deals systematically with biological, social, and cognitive factors that influence human development over the life course at both micro and macro levels. It also explains why effective long-term crime control strategies must strike a balance between opportunity reduction, deterrence, and developmental interventions. The following discussion places terrorism within an evolutionary-ecological framework and proposes a suite of theoretically driven counterterrorism policies. Using a gametheoretic model, we demonstrate that terrorism can best be controlled The authors thank Cynthia Morris and Lieutenant Stephen M. James of the Royal Irish Rangers for helping us evolve this essay in rapidly changing times.

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using the same balanced approach that is most effective for countering other types of crime. We argue that over-dramatizing terrorist threats and over-emphasizing punitive and protective counter-strategies without addressing the root causes of terrorism is counterproductive and cannot succeed in the long run. In particular, we argue that defining a contest as a “war” limits one’s counter-strategic options to reducing the vulnerability of potential targets or deterrence. War is a short-term, destructive construct. In war, one fights coherent enemies, protecting important assets from them, denying them access to the resources they need to survive and thrive, and punishing them mercilessly in order to destroy their motivation to attack and, thus, to prompt surrender. Terrorism is a tactic, like amphibious landing or airborne assault or carpet bombing; one does not war against tactics – one counters them. One of the key insights that emerges from our analysis is that choosing to war against terrorism prevents a nation from employing a vital set of counterterror strategies.

THE EVOLUTIONARY-ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The evolutionary-ecological perspective (Cohen and Machalek 1988; Vila 1994; Vila and Cohen 1993) holds that humans, like other species, are behavioral strategists who strive to obtain valued resources. Individuals acquire behavioral strategies through a complex set of interactions between (a) innate characteristics common to all humans (e.g., hunger, thirst, sex drive); (b) innate biological characteristics that vary between humans (e.g., personality, intelligence, body size); and (c) sociocultural factors (e.g., the beliefs and skills learned from family, school, religion, and community). From conception onward, this developmental process affects the skills, values, beliefs, and instrumental strategies that individuals acquire as they interact with physical and social environments. During this learning process, they develop strategic styles – sets of compatible strategic behaviors – that have produced successful outcomes in past efforts to acquire material, hedonistic, economic, or political resources (see Table 4.1). Such resources can be acquired only if a suitably motivated and equipped individual converges with them in a time and space in the absence of effective barriers to acquisition (Cohen and Felson, 1979).

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Table 4.1. Types of crimes Type

Example

Primary resource sought and method used

Expropriative

Theft Fraud Embezzlement

Expressive

Sexual assault Nonexpropriative assault Illicit drug use

Economic

Narcotics trafficking Prostitution Gambling Terrorism Election Fraud

To obtain material resources such as property from another person without his/her knowing and/or willing cooperation To obtain hedonistic resources that increase pleasurable feelings or decrease unpleasant feelings To obtain monetary resources through profitable illegal cooperative activities To obtain political resources by using a wide variety of tactics

Political

Source: Vila, 1994, p. 317

From this perspective, “criminality” can be described as a pattern of behavior where “a person’s strategic style emphasizes the use of force, fraud, or stealth to obtain valued resources” (Vila, 1994, p. 324). Because crime is often risky, even individuals with strong criminal habits tend to require special motivation to act criminally in most situations.1 Figure 4.1 illustrates the way this paradigm applies to criminal behavior and crime control. Motivation at a particular point in a person’s life is a function of interactions between biological, sociocultural, and developmental factors across the life course.

1

It is beyond the scope of this discussion to cover human motivation in detail. We note here that the concept of natural selection is central to the evolutionary perspective on behavior. The genes of individuals who behave in ways that are consistent with survival, mating, and the promotion of offspring are passed on to subsequent generations. Thus, characteristics associated with those behaviors are selected by this process. It is believed that hunger, thirst, and libido evolved this way. But it is also believed by many that the desire for resources, greed, and avidity in learning methods for finding mates, sociability, and so on also evolved this way because of their association with survival, mating, and promotion of offspring. Thus, there may be genes related to delight or pleasure attained in sociable conversation (Savage and Kanazawa, 2004) or annoyance at paying taxes. Such emotions may occasion preferences for doing some things and not others – and motivations for making money, dating, or confronting an antagonist.

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Biology Temptation

+

Social and cultural influences

Development

Motivation

Opportunity

Crime

Protection Deterrence Development

Counter strategy

Figure 4.1. The general paradigm for understanding crime and crime control (Vila, 1994).

Those interactions provide people with the values, preferences, and resources that shape their choices. They also provide the skills, abilities, and resources that constrain the behavioral strategies they can bring to bear when an opportunity emerges for acquiring material, hedonistic, economic, or political resources. Behavioral ecologists refer to these attributes as, respectively, “resource valuation” (RV) and “resource holding potential” (RHP) (Cohen and Machalek, 1988; Maynard Smith, 1982; Parker, 1974). A crime can occur only when a suitably motivated person armed with an effective behavioral strategy converges with an opportunity for crime – a suitable target and the absence of an effective guardian. (Note how the presence of an opportunity can increase motivation via temptation.) In turn, criminal acts provoke responses from victims and from society as a whole. As the feedbacks in Figure 4.1 show, counter-strategies can either attempt to (1) reduce opportunities (e.g., by incapacitating offenders, increasing guardianship, or modifying people’s routine activities); (2) deter rational offenders by increasing their perceptions of the certainty, severity, or swiftness of punishment; or (3) affect development in a way that reduces the likelihood that individuals will develop or rely on criminal behavioral strategies. EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY AND TERRORIST ACTS

From this point of view, terrorist acts can be seen as a type of strategic behavior that might develop in the same way that other strategic behavioral styles do. Unfortunately, there is no widely accepted

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definition of terrorism (e.g., Graham, 2005; Klinger and Heal, this volume; Mullins and Thurman, this volume; Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler, 2004). The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” Some authors debate the importance of including state-sponsored terrorism and genocide, which are explicitly exempted by U.S. government definitions of terrorism (e.g., Barak, 2004; Chomsky, 2003; Graham, 2005; Thackrah, 1989). Although terrorism may be motivated by a desire to obtain political influence, our focus is on the behavioral strategies that terrorists employ. Thus, we see no reason to distinguish between acts of intimidation and coercion committed by individual actors, groups, or by persons acting with the backing of their governments. In this chapter, we discuss what is believed about the risk factors for engaging in terrorist activities, motivation for committing terrorist acts, and opportunities for terrorism. After providing that context, we consider the implications for counterterrorism.

THE INDIVIDUAL: RISK FACTORS FOR TERRORISM

Vila’s (1994) evolutionary-ecological model begins with factors associated with the development of strategic styles at the individual level (see Figure 4.1). Given the intense interest in this topic, there is surprisingly little empirical research on the characteristics of terrorists or the risk factors for terrorism. The U.S. government’s study, Who Becomes a Terrorist AND WHY (Hudson, 1999, p. 35) states that “Relatively little is known about the terrorist as an individual and the psychology of terrorists remains poorly understood.” Our search of the Proquest database, found only twelve scholarly sources related to the search term “causes of terrorism.” We found no prospective longitudinal studies and few studies where data were actually acquired from terrorists. Most of the studies we did locate were small scale and used convenience samples (e.g., captured terrorists). Other authors have also commented on the lack of data regarding this important topic (e.g., Hudson, 1999; Silke and Taylor, 2000; Soibelman, 2004).

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One consistency that emerges from news reports and the scholarly literature is that terrorists do not fit the typical profile for violent offenders developed from American data on violent criminals, such as serious violent offenders in the United States. These offenders tend to share multiple risk factors, such as low socioeconomic status, low IQ, illiteracy, poor social skills, and living in certain very disadvantaged urban areas with families that also have multiple difficulties. Use of drugs and alcohol also are frequently part of the profile. Although some authors emphasize the “dim economic prospects” of young male terrorists (Ehrlich and Liu, 2002), many such individuals come from affluent families and are not described as having troubled childhoods or problems with delinquency. Soibelman (2004) writes that “Terrorists are not usually generalised criminals” (p. 185). Bueno de Mesquita (2005) argues that though lack of economic opportunity in nation-states is positively correlated with terrorism, actual terrorist operatives are not poor or lacking in education because terrorist organizations screen the volunteers for quality. A more likely commonality for terrorists is that they may live in societies or social groups that have experienced economic hardship, though this is a matter of debate in the literature (e.g., Fields, Elbedour, and Hein, 2002). It is clear that some noted terrorist groups live in economically depressed societies such as Palestine, Chechnya, and the Basque region of Spain. There is ample evidence that those committing terrorist acts often believe their groups are economically disadvantaged or oppressed, and that their strategic options are constrained. For example, Mao argued that the Red Terror was absolutely necessary to “free the masses from long years of oppression” (quoted in Garrison 2004, p. 263). The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HRSA) manifesto, “The Philosophy of the Bomb,” argued that terror “is birthed by humiliation and desperation” (quoted in Garrison, p. 270). There are few studies on this topic. Hewitt (1984) did not find correlations between terrorism and rising unemployment or increases in the cost of living. Testas (2004) found an interaction such that low income had a larger positive effect on terrorist activities in countries with civil war. Clearly more information is needed on this issue. With respect to education, there also is mixed opinion in the literature. Some authors have proposed that terrorists’ educational

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attainments are similar to those of economically well-off surrounding populations. Other data suggest that this is not an accurate characterization. Soibelman (2004), for example, found that all five of the (captured) suicide bombers he interviewed had finished their schooling by age fourteen. Smith and Morgan (1994) found that whereas 54 percent of left-wing U.S. terrorists in their sample had a college degree, right-wing terrorists were usually uneducated, unemployed, or impoverished. Schbley’s (2003) data may help explain some of these inconsistencies. She found that, after matching for numerous other factors, Hizbullah’s Istishhadeens (HIS) with a college education had the least affinity for martyrdom, were least susceptible to indoctrination and the charisma of religious leadership, and were least willing to commit terrorist acts. At the aggregate level, Testas found that among thirty-seven Muslim countries, those with higher education had more terrorism, though he explains that more educated people are more likely to be involved in politics, and that in some countries, more education may mean more religious education. One common characteristic that terrorists do usually share is an association with a group or cause. Whereas many of our street criminals do not have deep social or community ties (except sometimes to gangs; Curry, this volume), terrorists over the centuries typically have been involved with a group and share strong ties to that group. We speculate that the typical terrorist, compared to other criminals, lacks ties to society apart from the group in question, and that this social isolation and lack of empathy for outsiders may be key to the cognitive processes that allow otherwise law-abiding persons to ignore moral prohibitions against violence. We find no studies that directly test this hypothesis, but studies by Soibelman (2004), Garrison (2004), Ardila (2002), and others suggest that terrorists may be motivated by religious beliefs, by the need for friendships, and by marginalization. Finally, belief systems – constructs that affect resource valuation, perceptions about opportunities and costs, and willingness to employ particular behavioral strategies – appear to be a key factor in terrorism. Many authors focus on belief systems as an impetus for terrorism, yet most do not provide data about specific beliefs. Salij (2005) writes that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists’ beliefs. Goertzel (2002) believes that terrorists think rationally, but “they think within the

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limits of belief systems that may be irrational” (p. 98). A few authors do test the prevalence of specific beliefs. For example, Smith’s (2004) content analysis shows that terrorism-practicing groups, compared with controls, believed that enemies are more aggressive and dangerous. Fair reports that “grievances” turn Pakistani youths to religious groups, which may in turn increase the base of potential sympathizers of Islamist militant organizations. Unlike the irrational thinking of psychotics, the belief systems of terrorists are shared by large numbers of people. Justification for violence appears to be a very important class of beliefs necessary for terrorism. Garrison argues that terrorists hold at least one of three basic concepts about society – that the truth of their cause justifies any action that supports it. Other authors have also discussed the issues of justification (e.g., Hastings, 2004) and Jihad (e.g., Soibelman, 2004). We see three common elements in the belief system of modern terrorists: • Perceived threat against the group or cause • Learned justifications for extreme violence in defense of – or liberation of – that group • Cultural values that include martyrdom and self-sacrifice as a positive outcome Beliefs can be powerful. Just as it is possible to convince lawabiding individuals to kill innocent strangers in war, under certain circumstances it is possible to teach individuals that heinous terrorist acts are acceptable and will be rewarded. Thus, potential terrorists are many and are not limited to Muslim extremist groups. Would Americans have engaged in a “terrorist insurgency” if another nation invaded the United States, arrested the president, and assumed power? Even a cursory Web search of the term “militia” indicates that many would have. There are also contradictory comments about the mental health and personality characteristics of terrorists. Gallimore, using case studies, argues that many terrorist leaders survived major traumatic experiences from their childhood, and that “the terrorist personality appears to develop from a painful and dysfunctional childhood in which the individual forms personality and identity disorders” (2002,

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p. 152). He characterizes members of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, as individuals who “want, and need, to belong to a group so that they can feel better about themselves and have the sense that they are part of a group that is acting for the greater good of the victimized group” (p. 155). Timothy McVeigh is characterized as someone who suffered trauma during military service in the Persian Gulf, a victim of bullying and humiliation in childhood, with psychological scars from his parents’ numerous separations and eventual divorce (Gallimore, 2002). The prevailing view is that suicide bombers do not have enough in common to rely on a personality profile, though some authors believe that suicide bombers may be characterized by an authoritarian personality (Lester, Yang, and Lindsay, 2004). We speculate that some individuals involved in terrorist acts may have obsessive disorders – which are necessary to focus so intensely on their cause – but there are no empirical studies that test this. Despite these speculations, numerous authors have suggested that terrorists do not share common personality or psychiatric features. Fabick (2002)writes that “there is no terrorist personality per se . . . the type of person drawn to and radicalized into a terrorist subculture is unique to the particular political and social context” (pp. 227–228). Atran (2003) agrees that suicide terrorists have no appreciable psychopathology.

MOTIVATION FOR TERRORISM

Unlike many of the violent crimes that we study in the United States – robbery, homicide, aggravated assault, domestic violence – terrorism sometimes appears to have rather unselfish motivation. Acts of terrorism are ostensibly committed for the benefit of a group (e.g., LaFree and Dugan, 2004), at significant cost to the individuals carrying out the acts. “Selfish” aspects of these acts might include the respect and approbation that the individual receives from comrades, or the martyrdom that is promised if he or she dies. Membership in a successful terrorist organization also can help those who survive its dangers ascend to power (e.g., Hamas members in 2006, the PLO in 1993, Irgun in 1948, or Lenin in 1917). Kfir (2002) argues that the heroism of suicide attacks is an equalizer to “Western superiority” (p. 147).

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Terrorism is not the typical weapon of individuals representing powerful societies. Instead, it tends to be the weapon of groups that are politically weak, economically impoverished, and disadvantaged compared to their adversary. In our terms, terrorist violence is a behavioral strategy that enables members of an organization with little or no conventional political or military might to exercise power and obtain valued resources – whether they be political, economic, expressive, or hedonistic. Ardila argues that terrorism is “The fruit of the resentment and lack of empowerment that lead to acts against the civilian population – men, women, and children” (p. 10). Many authors note the relevance of political or economic disadvantage among terrorist groups. For example, Looney (2004) discusses economic problems in Pakistan as a motivator of terrorism. Ehrlich and Liu (2002) propose that poverty, inequality, and large numbers of young men with dim economic prospects are likely to contribute to terrorism. We suggest that terrorism is most likely to be the weapon of individuals and groups who do not have access to enough mainstream weapons to engage in a “fair fight” with their adversary. This is consistent with Black’s (2004) view of terrorism as “self-help”: “the handling of a grievance with aggression” (Black, p. 10). It also is consistent with more conservative voices who believe that “The circle of revenge and retaliation is one of the most noticeable elements in terrorism. In many cases, the terrorists want to retaliate against real or imaginary enemies who did something bad to their people, to their culture, to their religion, or to their social group” (Ardila, 2002, p. 10). Soibelman’s (2004) interviews with five Palestinian suicide bombers echo this sentiment – all of his interviewees reported negative experiences with the Israeli military, such as the killing of a friend or being beaten. Reasons they cited for committing a suicide bombing included politics, religion, and honor. Based on the study of human nature more generally, we believe that it is unlikely that people would prefer terrorist activity to other methods of redressing grievances or obtaining desired ends because of strong preferences for survival and the resources put at risk by engaging in terrorism. Terrorism evolves through a process involving economic and political disadvantage, strong ties to a group, and perceived threat to that group. Thus, individuals who belong to a “threatened” group feel helpless to address the threat without resorting to extreme

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measures. Certain characteristics of the group may foster the development of justifications for the use of extreme terrorist violence, or the ability to convince members that there will be positive outcomes (beliefs related to martyrdom or Jihad, for example). Examples of this dynamic abound. As a brief example we offer the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, and al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on the United States. Soibelman argues that “The perceived threat from Israel to Palestinian daily life and to Islamic culture more generally has led the most extreme amongst the Islamist movement to claim Jihad as an act of self-defence against the ‘enemies of God’” (2004, p. 179), and provides examples of related sentiments among interviewees. We believe that terrorism could be reduced substantially if extreme economic hardships are avoided or ameliorated; social, religious, and/ or cultural isolationism are reduced; and/or political empowerment made more achievable. Of course, powerful groups and states have also used terror – during the French and Chinese revolutions for example. In both cases, justifications were made for the use of terror, and terror was used against previously powerful persons. Most other cases of state terror also tend to fit this pattern of desperation – or at least desperation was used as an excuse for acting outside international norms for armed conflict (e.g., SAS counterterror operations in Ireland; the U.S.-sponsored Phoenix program in Vietnam; government operations supporting apartheid by the Republic of South Africa; Nazi Germany’s efforts to suppress underground groups by murdering random members of their communities; and Japan’s actions during World War II in northern China). Note, however, that genocide appears to follow a very different dynamic: Those with sufficient power who wish to rid themselves of a group that they perceive to be troublesome or inferior may simply do so. In summary, we believe the three primary motives for terror are (1) perceived threat to the group, (2) disadvantage of the group or inequality between groups, and (3) perceived approbation or rewards for committing terrorist acts such as respect, honor, or martyrdom. The scholarly literature supports this view. LaFree and Dugan (2004) point out that terrorists are more likely than common criminals to

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see themselves as altruists. Garrison (2004) holds that the belief that a cause is just provides fuel for violent acts, and he provides numerous quotes taken from several centuries of writings that are consistent with this observation.

SITUATION, OPPORTUNITY, AND TERRORISM

As numerous authors have documented, terrorism is not new; Aristotle wrote about tyrants who deserved assassination (see Griset and Mahan, 2003), and various “revolutionaries” have been writing about their use of terrorism since at least the eighteenth century (Garrison, 2004). Terrorist acts have been perpetrated repeatedly in the United States since very early in its inception (Simon, 2001). There have been opportunities for terrorism since the advent of human society. Routine Activities Theory specifies that criminal acts cannot be committed without a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. In the case of terrorism, the suitable targets consist of the entire population of the enemy group, their property, and critical infrastructure. If the enemy population is relatively large, there are a virtually infinite number of targets and means to attack them, including chemical weapons, biological weapons, car bombs, hotel bombs, suicide hijackers, sabotage of nuclear power plants, and poisoning food and water supplies. Most people have heard breathless commentators recount the endless possibilities for terror on the evening news. Access to these targets will be easier in societies that afford greater freedom of movement, assembly, and information. Thus nations such as the United States are more vulnerable to terrorism because of their size, complexity, wealth, and freedom. Conversely, the vulnerability of terrorist groups diminishes as they become smaller, more disciplined, have fewer resources to target, and adopt a looser, networked cellular structure.

THE EVOLUTIONARY-ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON COUNTERTERRORISM

According to an evolutionary-ecological perspective, counter-strategies to terrorism must be applied in balance if they are to succeed.

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Neither opportunity reduction, nor deterrence, nor development strategies can succeed without both of the others. In recent years, opportunity reduction has been a major focus of counterterrorism efforts in addition to deterrence. For example, “guardianship” has been increased by tightening airport, train and bus security, and border controls; monitoring biological, chemical, and radiological weapons and know-how; and heightening security at nuclear power plants, embassies, hotels, and other public buildings. Protective strategies alone cannot succeed for several reasons: (1) because of the virtually limitless number of terrorist targets in an industrialized, free society; (2) because arms-race dynamics assure that each counterterror strategy will provoke a counter-counterstrategy so long as motivation for terror persists (Clarke and Newman, 2006, pp. 222–223; Cohen, Vila and Machalek, 1995; Ekblom, 1999; Lynch, this volume); (3) because even capturing or killing terrorists is futile unless the forces that produce new recruits are neutralized; and (4) because costs to maintain armies in the field in order to fight ephemeral terrorists or guerillas – especially on foreign soil – are orders of magnitude greater than the costs of maintaining a scattered resistance. Deterrence is equally impotent alone because of asymmetries between what conventional industrialized societies have at stake compared with terrorists, as well as how they value those stakes. The utility of deterrence declines if terrorists are materially poor, if they place less value on personal freedom (e.g., because of a fatalistic submission to God’s will), or if what they value most is spiritual. Deterrence doesn’t work if punitive consequences fail to evoke dread. Neither does it work very well if they perceive the certainty and swiftness of punishment to be remote, as they often seem for diffuse, disciplined terrorist groups. Developmental counter-strategies also need bolstering by protective and deterrent counter-strategies. An unprotected society that presents too tempting a target invites attack; a society that does not punish attackers invites annihilation (see Cohen and Machalek 1994). However, in concert with a balance of protective and deterrent strategies, development offers a way out of one of the dilemmas plaguing the contemporary terror/counterterror cycle. The crux of this problem is that the more fear people have of terrorism,

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the more attractive they are likely to find protective, deterrent, and retributive counter-strategies (see Forst, this volume). Similarly, as was discussed previously, among the disaffected people who form the “ocean” in which terrorists swim, perceptions of extreme disadvantage, humiliation, and despair are used to justify desperate and horrible acts. Thus, the interplay of terror/counterterror strategies easily leads to vicious cycles that ignore or undervalue developmental strategies. Only developmental strategies that attack the roots of criminal and terrorist motivation can dampen arms races that raise the costs – and limit the effectiveness – of protective strategies while also increasing the stake current terrorists have in conventional society.

MODELING COUNTER-STRATEGIC BALANCE

In contrast with wars-on-terror approaches, adding developmental counter-strategies to those based on opportunity reduction and deterrence leads us to conceptualize terrorist acts as crimes committed by amorphous groups of individuals who may act alone or as members of loosely coupled networks (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001). This enables victims of a terrorist attack to focus on the roots of the problem, as well as to retaliate and armor themselves. Unlike war, crime control requires a balanced, patient, and constructive approach. As former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker summarized in a recent essay, “Americans tend to want to identify a problem, fix it, and then move on. Sometimes this works. Often it does not . . . What’s needed in dealing with [war-torn, hostile, and chaotic regions of the world] is a combination of understanding, persistence, and strategic patience to a degree that Americans, traditionally, have found hard to muster” (Crocker, 2009). War is ineffective as a counter-strategy against opponents whose motivation arises from deeply held religious beliefs that promise immediate spiritual rewards (e.g., Jihad), and those who view themselves as victims who are powerless against conventional military and economic power. Each demonstration of military might emphasizes asymmetries between victim, state, and terrorist. However, those asymmetries cut both ways. Although conventional arms can inflict terrible casualties upon

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irregular forces, even a lone terrorist operating outside the strictures of conventional war and law can inflict mass casualties on his or her conventional opponent. Thus, over-reliance on opportunity reduction and deterrence can tend to accelerate terrorist recruitment and motivation in a way that ultimately may overwhelm the resources of even very wealthy states – especially when they must fight on foreign soil. A balanced approach to countering terrorism, one that produces a net reduction in motivation to employ terrorist behavioral strategies can avoid this trap. The following simple thought experiment demonstrates the logic behind our contention that strategies for reducing terrorism must strike a balance between opportunity reduction, deterrence, and development. We begin with just two propositions: Competition among control strategies: Opportunity reduction, deterrence, and development counterterrorism strategies compete with one another for limited funding resources. Differing time scales: Opportunity reduction and deterrence strategies – as well as terrorist behavioral strategies – tend to produce immediate results (e.g., targets destroyed, enemies killed, barriers built, technology deployed). Conversely, development-oriented counterterrorism strategies tend to produce results that are gradual, subtle, and incremental.

This combination of competition for resources and differing time scales can produce unexpected consequences. Popular assumptions that counterterror strategies necessarily will reduce the magnitude and persistence of terrorist threats sometimes may be wrong. As we’ve seen all too often since 9/11, terrorist acts tend to provoke fear and outrage that, in turn, stimulate counterterror strategies that focus on opportunity reduction and deterrence – what we refer to as “retaliation and protection.” The general assumption behind this control system is that retaliation and protection will tend to increase in response to the fear and outrage provoked by terrorist acts until sufficient pressure is applied to reduce them to an acceptable level. Once that is achieved, social pressure for retaliation will begin to decline. Figure 4.2 illustrates these assumed dynamics, where F, R, and T, respectively, represent the social and political pressure

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Retaliation and protection

+

Fear and outrage

−

+

Terrorist acts

Assumption: if R↑, then T↓

Figure 4.2. Commonly assumed model regarding control of terrorism.

produced by Fear and outrage, Retaliative and protective strategies, and Terrorist acts. However, when one considers the impact of competition between counter-strategies for resources and the differing time scales on which they affect terrorism, it becomes obvious that this model can have perverse consequences. An imbalance between strategies based on retaliation and protection and those with development-oriented goals may lead to a situation in which, after some delay, devoting more resources to retaliation and protection causes rather than constrains terrorism. We predict that expenditures for retaliation and protection strategies can reach a tipping point where they diminish funding for development strategies to the extent that they are no longer effective at reducing terrorist recruitment. The result can be a surge in terrorist recruitment which may overwhelm earlier progress. Once this system of interactions tips from a virtuous cycle to a vicious cycle, it becomes ever more difficult to derail. Thus, the best overall counterterror strategy strikes a balance between retaliation and development. Figure 4.3 illustrates these dynamics where F, R, T, and D represent the social and political pressure produced by Fear and outrage, Retaliative and protective strategies, Terrorist acts, and Development strategies. The tipping point that shifts this system from virtuous to vicious occurs when the direct impact of R on T overwhelms the ameliorative impact of D on T. Ambassador Ryan Crocker addressed this problem when he warned that “The perceived arrogance and ignorance

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nature of the problem Retaliation and protection

+

− −

t+0

Development −/+ t + n

Fear and outrage

+

Terrorist acts

Outcome: if R < RDT, T↓, but if R > RDT, T↑

Figure 4.3. Unexpected consequences arising from competition between different types of counterterror strategies.

of overbearing powers can create new narratives of humiliation that will feed calls for vengeance centuries from now” (2009). The mathematics of this sort of situation are well understood, and have been modeled extensively to capture the dynamics of population ecology (May, 1974), the diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2003), and many similar problems. The model assumes that a population – whether of individuals or strategies – will tend to increase exponentially in an environment until competition begins to suppress its growth rate. On the one hand, the growth in terrorism will be constrained by cultural beliefs that do not favor terrorist strategies, economic well-being, environmental factors, and technological capabilities that limit the amount of terrorist crime a population can support – and will tolerate. On the other, it will be initiated by underlying sources of alienation, and then stimulated as a consequence of retaliation and protection strategies that motivate more individuals to adopt terrorist strategies in the absence of sufficient development-oriented counter-strategies that would improve quality of life, reduce social isolation, and attack moral beliefs that foster terrorism and thereby decrease the attraction of joining terrorist groups. These dynamics have played out in several episodes, including the response of Americans to homegrown terrorism from groups such as the Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, and Black Panthers during the 1960s and 1970s. It is entirely conceivable that terrorist incidents might cause a society to thrash back and forth between over- and under-reliance on retaliation and protection or

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development-oriented counterterror strategies if intelligence failures caused it to be surprised by each uptick in terrorism. Moreover, when terrorist acts – or portrayals of those acts by government, media, or other leaders – inflame public opinion, the result may be a more tightly coupled system of interactions. As coupling increases, complex systems such as this become more difficult to manage or predict, and the outcome often is disaster (Perrow, 1999).2

IMPROVED COUNTERTERRORIST STRATEGIES

Applying the evolutionary-ecological approach to crime control enables us to intervene on a variety of levels of aggregation to reduce terrorism. We can address the individual. As noted earlier, not many individual-level risk factors are known for terrorists. The most likely risks are (1) strong ties to a disadvantaged cultural, political, or religious group, (2) beliefs that the group is threatened, (3) social isolation, and (4) beliefs that violence is justified to redress grievances or reduce threat. These risks must occur in combination for the probability of terrorism to increase. As it happens, this is now the case in many places around the world where cohorts of children are: (a) growing up in societies with serious economic difficulties; (b) experiencing and witnessing food shortages; (c) forming close ties to religious or political groups that teach them that they are under threat, and that certain enemies must be attacked in order for their group to survive; and (d) learning that it is morally appropriate to kill people from societies that threaten their own, and that individuals who die doing so are revered as martyrs, will gain honor for their families, and will be richly rewarded in the afterlife. Such individuals are ripe for terrorist recruitment. To reduce the number of individuals vulnerable to the call of terrorism, we can address economic factors, ties to known terrorist groups, social isolation, and belief systems. Economic factors will be addressed later under “motivation.” For the purposes of reducing the number of developing individuals who will be open to terrorist justifications, ongoing efforts 2

Space considerations preclude a more thorough examination of the mathematical processes driving these dynamics. See Vila (1997, pp. 48–52) for a more complete discussion.

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to eliminate poverty and starvation should help reduce resentments that foster the development of terrorist beliefs. Regarding ties to terrorist groups, our approach suggests strategies that favor cultural evolution – the growth and development of favored behavioral strategies over those that are less favored (e.g., Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Richerson and Boyd, 2005). For example, twopronged public relations campaigns might be used to vilify terrorist groups by emphasizing their heartless, indiscriminate violence, while simultaneously giving support to nonviolent groups that have similar goals but use different means. This contrasts with current tactics such as the arrest of individuals belonging to either of these groups, spying on members, seizing assets, and breaking up international support networks. Only the most canny and hardened terrorists are likely to survive such broad-spectrum tactics, yet theirs are the first behavioral strategies one would prefer to cull. Similarly, perceptions that an external threat is more serious or proximate richen the matrix in which terrorists thrive. Low-key counterterror tactics that rely on diplomacy are likely to reduce perceptions of threat more than displays of implacable military power. So, for that matter, are narrowly targeted, covert special operations. Once again, an evolutionary approach that includes developmental tactics as well as deterrent and protective tactics is more appropriate than the current war on terror, which does not. (See Stanton, 2009, for a vivid example from early U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.) Overblown perceptions of threats associated with social isolation might be reduced, for example, by providing educational aid for sciences and social studies in high-risk societies. Testas (2004) has pointed out that “more education” may simply mean “more religious education” in some countries, hence targeted aid for specific educational programs may be needed. Education used to broaden the perspectives of high-risk children and foster an understanding of other cultures, as well as empathy for persons outside their group, might be one prong in preventing future terrorism. Public relations also may be helpful. Working within high-risk nations and trying to foster positive views of the target group or nation – possibly through economic aid or other types of exposure to the good things the “enemy” group does – also can be effective.

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In particular, long-term “public diplomacy” efforts to inform and engage foreign publics show great promise. Such efforts include: encouraging person-to-person contact with U.S. officials, academic exchanges, and cultural events; supplying news stories, translating books, stocking overseas libraries, and making foreign broadcasts (Johnson 2006, pp. 163–166). Another promising option is military involvement in humanitarian and relief efforts (e.g., Reaves, 2008), which are overseen by DOD’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, Office of Humanitarian Assistance, Disaster Relief, and Mine Action (www.dsca.mil/programs/ha/ha.htm). For example, Indonesian views of the United States improved following high-profile relief efforts by U.S. military forces responding to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that struck South and Southeast Asia and Africa on December 26, 2004 (GAO 2005, p. 12). At the height of relief efforts, roughly “16,000 military personnel were deployed throughout the areas most affected by the tragedy” (Cossa, 2005). Note that reducing perceptions of threat is a two-way street. Educating people in industrialized nations about the everyday cultural, social, religious, and economic life in terrorist host nations could help reduce pressure for immediate deterrent or defensive strategies and increase support for more patient development. Public education also might reduce the frequency of high-profile faux pas (e.g., crusader metaphors and inflammatory cartoons or quotations). Finally, the beliefs that justify violence could be addressed. Diplomacy and working with high-risk countries to reduce visible and public justifications for violence worldwide is one possible step. We are not the first to advise attempting to change beliefs; for example, Nye (2004) urges the use of “soft power” to build goodwill and induce social reform in less developed nations, and Salij (2005) exhorts policy makers to use moral persuasion to fight terrorism. Davis and Jenkins (2002) look at dissuasion, persuasion, positive inducement, and co-option as methods of “influencing” terrorists. Of course, if the target societies rely primarily on violence to achieve their ends, “moral persuasion” against a different type of violence is not likely to be convincing. Another counter-strategic option provided by our approach addresses the issue of motivation. As mentioned earlier, motivation

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for terrorism often appears to be associated with societal disadvantage, individual economics, and perceived threat against a group or cause. Affluent individuals tend to resist change and avoid taking risks. Ehrlich and Liu (2002) hold that “one overriding conclusion” (p. 190) from their work is that the factors clearly within the power of the United States and its allies to alter are the economic ones. For example, Palestinians, who have suffered through dramatic and persistent unemployment and poverty, have been able to recruit a steady stream of terrorist bombers during recent decades; by contrast, the Weather Underground, a terrorist group operating in the United States during the Vietnam War, was not. Even though polls began to show that Americans were very upset about the Vietnam War and the loss of life it caused, we speculate that because American quality of life was very high, few individuals wanted to risk joining the Weather Underground to fight against the war, particularly because other ways to oppose the war were available. Some authors have expressed doubt that economic support alone could eliminate established terrorist groups (e.g., Hewitt, 1984). Although we agree that no single strategy is likely to eliminate such a group, our argument is that any successful strategy must address developmental concerns. Developmental strategies – like deterrent and protective strategies – are necessary, but not sufficient for countering terrorism over the long term. Addressing quality-of-life issues might go a long way to reduce terrorism. For example, helping societies build infrastructure – electricity, plumbing, roads, public transportation – would help establish a quality of life worth defending. We would also recommend efforts to help develop sustainable economies (Hastings, 2004) and economic aid to develop employment skills. Even if some individuals still hated their target society and believed that its people deserved to die, the probability that they would practice terrorism would tend to decline as economic circumstances improved.

DETERRENCE

Until relatively recently, the United States’ approach to preventing terrorism was “all sticks, no carrots.” We relied mostly on deterrence – laws, punishments, and partnerships with other governments – to

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capture, detain, and punish suspects.3 Using deterrence is particularly difficult with terrorists for several reasons. First, capture and punishment of terrorists is uncertain. We do not catch many of them, and the probability for any individual involved in a terrorist group of being apprehended or killed appears to be low. Enforcement attention currently is divided between known, suspected, and “potential” terrorists on huge watch lists. When enforcement efforts are diffuse, they are weakened. Kleiman (1999) describes the importance of tipping points for criminal motivation; when individuals have a low estimation of their chance of being punished for a crime, they are practically invited to commit that crime. Second, although increasing the severity of punishments may have some effect on criminal behavior under normal circumstances, increasing severity does not seem to be as effective for many groups of terrorists, even if the chances of apprehension are good. Davis and Jenkins (2002) argue that terrorism can be difficult to combat when those relying on it are motivated by religion or other ideologies in which martyrdom plays an important role. When offenders are not even averse to death, our usual deterrents are not likely to have the desired level of effectiveness. As LaFree and Dugan (2004) point out, whereas individuals who commit common crimes usually try to avoid detection, those who commit terrorist acts often seek maximum attention and exposure. This has important implications for counterterrorism measures. Finally, it is clear that overuse of severe punishments and repressive measures can backfire. As Bueno de Mesquita (2005) suggests, although government crackdowns may have some effectiveness in decreasing the ability of terrorists to carry out attacks, they also foment ideological opposition to the government and “impose negative economic externalities” that make attacks more attractive. In the particular case of terrorism, strong deterrent threats and harsh punishment may actually increase the motivation to commit terrorist acts, because cultural values, deeply held beliefs, and the influence of 3

Federal statutes most frequently used in the prosecution of American terrorists in the 1980s, for example, were racketeering, automatic weapons, conspiracy, firearms, explosive materials, stolen property, robbery and burglary, treason, mail fraud, etc. (Smith and Orvis, 1993).

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behavior associated with collective phenomena may exhort individuals to attempt heroic deeds. An analogy to drug dealing is in order. Suicide bombers are plentiful, just as there is no dearth of drug dealers. Drug dealers make money from drug dealing and drug users enjoy the product they sell. However, there is no evidence that individuals accused of terrorist acts enjoy committing them, or that there is much of a self-interested “pull” to commit them. There seems only to be the “push” of beliefs that the victims are part of an enemy group, and that the enemy group might be intimidated if more of its members are killed. If we can remove the “push” factors – the training, the poverty and inequality, the low standard of living, and military or economic threats – we might be able to substantially reduce terrorism. However, we will never eliminate the threat of terrorism. Any possible act may be used by a behavioral strategist to achieve his or her goals, but the probability of using terrorist acts, versus other forms of behavior, to achieve desired ends is likely to decline substantially if we can apply a balanced approach and sustain it over a sufficiently long period of time. This skepticism about the elimination of terrorism is consistent with other authors (e.g., Rosenfeld, 2004), although the logic of our arguments is not always the same. In a thriving society, these acts would be seen as reprehensible because the association with terrorism by a country with connections to the global community would put that society at risk. As Garrison (2004) and others have pointed out, the terrorist believes that violence is the only way to achieve the desired goal – and requires significant justification for using violence. This implies that terrorists view the use of violence as a necessary evil. In sum, although many of the suggestions we have made are not original, this paradigm organizes our thinking about the problem in a novel way. The evolutionary-ecological approach focuses attention on the strategic balance of U.S. counterterror policies and predicts that they will fail unless an appropriate balance is struck.

ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIORS

“Terrorism” describes a set of behaviors and motives. As such, the practice of terrorism can never be eradicated completely. There are a

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variety of ways we might reduce terrorism – and these involve addressing individuals, their motivation, and their opportunities. Ultimately, the best approach to reducing terrorism is likely to be the provision of alternative behaviors that will achieve the desired ends. Davis and Jenkins (2002) point out: However much we may wish it were not so, terrorism has been common throughout history; sometimes, it has even succeeded in bringing about change. To imagine that it could be easily stigmatized out of existence would be both ahistorical and naive. This is especially so when dealing with people who are motivated to employ terrorist tactics because they have no better instruments with which to pursue their aims. Historically, rebellions against real or perceived oppression have routinely included the use of terrorism when the rebels did not have the power to succeed otherwise. (pp. 3–4)

Even given a disadvantaged, isolated group that has been developing hatred against an enemy, the likelihood of terrorism is reduced if that group has a viable alternative method of expressing its views and attaining desired ends. If, when deterrence is applied, individuals believe that they lack alternative means for redressing their grievances or achieving their ends, they will not be able to substitute other behaviors such as peaceful protest or political or economic action. Openness to diplomacy, fostering democracy, and other political methods may be useful to this end. Testas (2004) discusses a “developmental democracy” approach, whereby fostering higher living standards and maintaining them would be accompanied by education, favoring more compromise-oriented politics, higher income, adaptability, tolerance, and moderation. In some political environments, one or more of the suggestions drawn from our theoretical approach could be deemed “appeasement,” and would be rejected for more repressive measures. The contrast between appeasement and repression has been politicized, but it actually is an empirical question. Although we see the potential for diplomacy and economic development and advocate their use to reduce motivation for terrorism, there have been few studies that examine the effects of various antiterrorism measures. In the absence of hard data on this question, we think that the model described earlier makes a strong game-theoretic case for a balanced approach to controlling terrorism. Consistent with our model, Testas (2004) found that repression

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at lower levels decreases terrorism, but at high levels causes it to increase. Hewitt examined a variety of deterrence measures and concluded that they are minimally effective for reducing terrorism. His analyses suggest a positive correlation between the killing of terrorists and terrorist violence in some places. He adds: although military dictatorships can suppress terrorism using extreme measures, there is no evidence that, short of this point, repression is an effective strategy. Whether we measure repression in terms of the deprivation of civil liberties, the size of the security forces, the amount of military activity or the number of people killed by the security forces, the more repressive regimes are no more successful in reducing terrorism than the more liberal regimes. Increasing repression did not lower the level of terrorist violence in Cyprus, Spain, Northern Ireland or Italy. (pp. 93–94)

Hewitt also reports that there was no discernible decline in terrorism when emergency legislation, depriving the population of various civil liberties, was imposed. Similarly, patrolling and indiscriminate mass searches – of homes in particular – do not seem to reduce terrorism in subsequent months. Because of dismal results using repression, the time seems right to try some alternative approaches to terrorism. As a summary to this discussion, we report a gratifying source of support for our thesis (although we had no input into its development). The U.S. Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, which was released in December 2006 – more than a year after this essay was first drafted – sets the doctrine that will guide the conduct of all U.S. counterinsurgency operations involving infantry. The manual’s fundamental principles are fully consistent with those we recommend here for countering terrorism. This consistency is exemplified by the second chapter, “Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities,” which begins with the following paragraph: Military efforts are necessary and important to counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts, but they are only effective when integrated into a comprehensive strategy employing all instruments of national power. A successful COIN operation meets the contested population’s needs to the extent needed to win popular support while protecting the population from the insurgents. Effective COIN operations ultimately eliminate insurgents or render them irrelevant. Success requires military forces engaged in COIN operations to –

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• Know the roles and capabilities of U.S., intergovernmental, and host-nation (HN) partners. • Include other participants, including HN partners, in planning at every level. • Support civilian efforts, including those of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). • As necessary, conduct or participate in political, social, informational, and economic programs. (U.S. Army and Marine Corps, 2006, p. 2–1)

CONCLUSION

Ecological research suggests that over-dramatizing terrorist threats and over-emphasizing punitive and protective counter-strategies without addressing root causes will be counterproductive over the long term. Here we have discussed both a model that predicts this, as well as the scholarly literature on terrorism, most of which tends to support our view. Unfortunately, we have been forced to rely on little empirical data. It is clear that prospective, longitudinal studies of individuals in highrisk nations might help us understand what makes some individuals more vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. Specific details about the actual circumstances and grievances of terrorist organizations and the extent to which these are associated with the rise of terrorism would be helpful. Comparisons of individuals within societies who became terrorists and those who did not – and societies with similar economic problems in which terrorist groups emerged, compared to those where the prevalence of terrorism was much lower – would be very useful for understanding this problem. It also would be helpful to examine past responses to terrorism, and the extent to which those responses were followed by increases or decreases in terrorist incidents. In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary, we contend that terrorism can best be controlled using measured responses that balance the use of protective, deterrent, and developmental counter-strategies. Just as with other types of crime, this approach addresses the ultimate and proximate sources of a terrorist’s motivation, how the costs and consequences of employing terrorist strategies are assessed compared to other available strategies, and the

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dynamics that create opportunities for committing terrorist acts. Over-dramatizing terrorist threats and over-emphasizing punitive and protective counter-strategies without addressing the root causes of terrorism is counterproductive, and ultimately cannot succeed. Wars on terror, like wars on crime, must fail because the metaphor is cruelly deficient. RE F E RE N CE S Ardila, R. (2002). The psychology of the terrorist: Behavioral perspectives. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism. Volume 1. A public understanding (pp. 9–15). Westport, CT: Praeger. Arquilla, J. and Ronfeldt, D. (2001). Networks and Netwars. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Atran, S. (2003). Genesis of suicide terrorism. Science, 299, 1534–1539. Barak, G. (2004). A reciprocal approach to terrorism and terroristlike behavior. In M. Deflem (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Volume 5. Sociology of crime, law and deviance (pp. 33–39). Boston, MA: Elsevier. Black, D. (2004). Terrorism as social control. In. M. Deflem (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Volume 5. Sociology of crime, law and deviance (pp. 9–18). Boston, MA: Elsevier. Boyd, R. and Richerson, P.J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bueno de Mesquita, E. (2005). The quality of terror. American Journal of Political Science, 49(3), 515–530. Chomsky, N. (2003). Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews (J. Junkerman and T. Masakazu, Eds.). New York: Seven Stories press. Clarke, R.V. and Newman, G.R. (2006). Outsmarting the terrorists. Westport, CT:Greenwood. Cohen, L.E. and Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 588–608. Cohen, L.E. and Machalek, R. (1988). A general theory of expropriative crime: An evolutionary ecological approach. American Journal of Sociology, 94, 465–501. (1994). The normalcy of crime: From Durkheim to evolutionary ecology. Rationality and Society, 6, 286–308. Cohen, L.E., Vila, B.J. and Machalek, R. (1995). Expropriative crime and crime policy: An evolutionary ecological analysis. Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention, 2:197–219. Cossa, R.A. (2004). “South Asian Tsunami: U.S. Military Provides ‘Logistical Backbone’ for Relief Operation.” eJournal USA: Foreign Policy Agenda,

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November 2004 (Update Report March 2005, downloaded April 6, 2007 from http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/1104/ijpe/cossa.htm) Crocker, R. (2009). Eight Years On: A diplomat’s perspective on the post9/11 world. Newsweek, Sept. 5, downloaded 09 Sept. 2009 from www. newsweek.com/id/214988/output/print. Davis, P.K. and Jenkins, B.M. (2002). Deterrence and Influence in Counterterrorism: A Component in the War on al Qaeda. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation. Ehrlich, P.R. and Liu, J. (2002). Some roots of terrorism. Population and Environment, 24(2), 183–192. Ekblom, P. (1999). “Can we make crime prevention adaptive by learning from other evolutionary struggles? Studies on Crime and Crime Prevention, 8:27–51. Fabick, S.D. (2002). Us and them: Reducing the risk of terrorism. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The Psychology of Terrorism. Volume 1. A Public Understanding (pp. 225–241). Westport, CT: Praeger. Fair, C.C. (2004). Militant recruitment in Pakistan: Implications for Al Qaeda and other organizations. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 27, 489–504. Fields, R.M., Elbedour, S. and Hein, F.A. (2002). The Palestinian suicide bomber. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism. Volume 1. A public understanding (pp. 193–223). Westport, CT: Praeger. Fox, J. (2004). Is ethnoreligious conflict a contagious disease? Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 27, 89–106. Gallimore, T. (2002). Unresolved trauma: Fuel for the cycle of violence and terrorism. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism. Volume 1. A public understanding (pp. 143–164). Westport, CT: Praeger. Garrison, A.H. (2004). Defining terrorism: Philosophy of the bomb, propaganda by deed and change through fear and violence. Criminal Justice Studies, 17(3), 259–279. Goertzel, T.G. (2002). Terrorist beliefs and terrorist lives. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism. Volume 1. A public understanding (pp. 97–111). Westport, CT: Praeger. Graham, K. (2005). The Security Council and counterterrorism: Global and regional approaches to an elusive public good. Terrorism and Political Violence, 17(1/ 2), 37–65. Griset, P.L. and Mahan, S. (2003). Terrorism in Perspective. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Haddad, S. (2003). Islam and attitudes toward U.S. policy in the Middle East: Evidence from survey research in Lebanon. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26, 135–154. Hastings, T.H. (2004). Nonviolent Response to Terrorism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company.

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Hewitt, C. (1984). The Effectiveness of Anti-Terrorism Policies. New York: University Press of America. Hudson, R.A. (1999). Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why: The 1999 Government Report on Profiling Terrorists. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press. Johnson, S. (2007). Public Diplomacy, Issues 2006: The Candidate’s Briefing Book (downloaded April, 6 2007 from www.heritage.org/research/ features/issues/issuearea/ Diplomacy.cfm). Kfir, N. (2002). Understanding suicidal terror through humanistic and existential psychology. In C.E. Stout (Ed.), The psychology of terrorism. Volume 1. A public understanding (pp. 143–157). Westport, CT: Praeger. Kleiman, M.A.R. (1999). Getting deterrence right: Applying tipping models and behavioral economics to the problems of crime control. Perspectives on Crime and Justice: 1998–1999 Lecture Series, 3, 1–21. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. LaFree, G. and Dugan, L. (2004). How does studying terrorism compare to studying crime? In M. Deflem (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Vol. 5. Sociology of crime, law and deviance (pp. 53–74). Boston, MA: Elsevier. Lester, D., Yang, B. and Lindsay, M. (2004). Suicide bombers: Are psychological profiles possible? Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 27, 283–295. Looney, R. (2004). Failed economic take-offs and terrorism in Pakistan: Conceptualizing a proper role for U.S. assistance. Asian Survey, 44(6), 771–793. May, R.M. (1974). Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nye, J.S. (2004). Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Parker, G.A. (1974). Assessment strategy and the evolution of fighting behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 47, 223–243. Perrow, C. (1999). Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reaves, E.J., Schor, K.W. and Burkle, F.M., Jr. (2008). Implementation of Evidence-based Humanitarian Programs in Military-led Missions: Part II. The Impact Assessment Model Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness, 2(4): 237–244. Richerson, P.J. and Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. New York, N.Y: Free Press.

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Rosenfeld, R. (2004). Terrorism and criminology. In M. Deflem (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Vol. 5. Sociology of crime, law and deviance (pp. 19–32). Boston, MA: Elsevier. Salij, J. (2005). The significance of “ineffective” methods of fighting terrorism. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(6), 700–709. Savage, J. and Kanazawa, S. (2004). Social capital and the human psyche: Why is social life ‘capital’? Sociological Theory, 22(3), 504–524. Schbley, A. (2003). Defining religious terrorism: A causal and anthological profile. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 26, 105–134. Silke, A. and Taylor, M. (2000). War without end: Comparing IRA and loyalist vigilantism in Northern Ireland. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 39(3), 249–266. Simon, J.D. (2001). The endless nature of terrorism. Excerpted in P.L. Griset and S. Mahan (Eds.), Terrorism in perspective (pp. 38–44). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (Reprinted from The terrorist trap: America’s experience with terrorism, by J.D. Simon, 1994, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.) Smith, A.G. (2004). From words to action: Exploring the relationship between a group’s value references and its likelihood of engaging in terrorism. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 27, 409–437. Smith, B.L. and Morgan, K.D. (1994). Terrorists right and left: Empirical issues in profiling American terrorists. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 17, 39–57. Smith, B.L. and Orvis, G.P. (1993). America’s response to terrorism: An empirical analysis of federal intervention strategies during the 1980s. Justice Quarterly, 10(4), 661–681. Soibelman, M. (2004). Palestinian suicide bombers. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 1(3), 175–190. Stanton, D. (2009). Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan. New York: Scribner. Testas, A. (2004). Determinants of terrorism in the Muslim world: An empirical cross-sectional analysis. Terrorism and Political Violence, 16(2), 253–273. Thackrah, R. (1989). Terrorism: A definitional problem. In P. Wilkinson and A.M. Stewart (Eds.), Contemporary research on terrorism (pp. 24–44). Aberdeen, Scotland: Aberdeen University Press. U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps. (2006). Counterinsurgency, Field Manual 3–24 & Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3–33.5. Washington, DC:U.S. Department of Defense, 15 December. U.S. General Accountability Office. (2005). U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: Interagency Coordination Efforts Hampered by the Lack of a National Communication Strategy. GAO-05–323. Washington, DC: GAO, April.

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Vila, B.J. and L.E. Cohen. (1993). Crime as strategy: Testing an evolutionary ecological theory of expropriative crime. American Journal of Sociology, 98(4), 873–912. Vila, B. (1994). A general paradigm for understanding criminal behavior: Extending evolutionary ecological theory. Criminology, 32(3), 501–549. (1997). Human nature and crime control: Improving the feasibility of nurturant strategies. Politics and the Life Sciences, 16(1), 3–21. (1997). Motivating and Marketing Nurturant Crime Control Strategies. Politics and the Life Sciences, 16(1), 48–55. Weinberg, L., Pedahzur, A. and Hirsch-Hoefler, S. (2004). The challenges of conceptualizing terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence, 16(4), 777–794.

chapter five

Gangs, Crime, and Terrorism G. David Curry

Are terrorists like gang members? Terrorists commit crimes, primarily murder and assault. Gang members also commit crimes, including murder and assault. Gang members are more likely to commit a wider variety of crimes (Klein, 1971, 1995; Spergel, 1995). As Rosenfeld (2002, p. 1) notes, many criminologists bear only a “grudging acceptance of terrorism” as a subject of study by criminology. Gang researchers, including this author, have balked at any connection between terrorism and gang crime, because the prospect flies in the face of what we already know about gangs. In particular, there is a belief among many of us that what is most important about gangs was already said by Frederic Thrasher (1927). Research on gangs has a long academic tradition. To propose a relationship between gangs and terrorism is considered by some as an encroachment on that tradition. It turns out, however, that comparing street gangs to terrorist organizations is more promising than I had thought originally. I use the term “street gangs” as defined by Klein (1995) to refer to gangs that include both young adults and juveniles. Leaving either adults or juveniles out of the gang process distorts perceptions of gang crime.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

In “Why Criminologists Should Study Terrorism,” Rosenfeld (2002, p. 2) suggests, “It is our (criminologists’) fault, our poverty of intellectual imagination prevents us from studying terrorism.” Rosenfeld argues that criminologists “blame terrorism when our theories don’t 97

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fit terrorism.” He suggests that criminologists should instead blame our theories. Since Rosenfeld’s admonishment, criminologists have increased their efforts to deal with terrorism from the standpoint of criminological theory (Deflem, 2004; Forst, 2009). LaFree and Dugan (2004, pp. 55–56) identify conceptual similarities and differences between terrorism and crime. As with the study of crime, the study of terrorism is strongly enhanced when interdisciplinary perspectives are considered. Like crime, terrorism is a social construction. Formal and practical definitions of both terror and crime may differ), depending on the observer. Sustained levels of terror, like sustained levels of crime, undermine the social trust necessary for stable social life. Structurally, gang crime falls somewhere between most crime and terrorism. A number of the differences between terror and crime noted by Lafree and Dugan (pp. 57–61) do not hold when terror is compared to gang crime. Whereas common crimes are usually defined as specific acts such as murder or assaults, a number of laws declare certain terror and gang-related activities to be crimes themselves, or they officially enhance the sanctions available based on their terrorist or gang-related contexts. Whereas most criminals seek to avoid detection, terrorists and gang members often attempt to make their acts of violence publicly visible as statements of their group intentions. Some of the similarities and differences are associated with reactions to terrorism and crime. Increases in either tend to attract the involvement of agencies charged with extra-local control (such as state or federal). Lafree and Dugan (pp. 60–61) specifically exclude gang crime from other types of crime when they note that terror and gang crime may involve organized structure as well as sustained campaigns of violence. Lafree and Dugan note further that both crime and terror are committed disproportionately by young males. Gang homicides differ from nongang criminal homicides by involving younger perpetrators and a greater proportion of males (Maxson et al., 1985, Miller and Decker, 2001). Both terrorism and gang violence are essentially social in nature. Rosenfeld (2002, p. 3) explicitly compares terrorism to gang crime: “Terrorism is intended to punish, deter, or reform evil-doers. In that sense, it is no more or less justice-oriented than … gang

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delinquency” (p. 3). Terrorist organizations emerge and grow in what Thrasher (1927) called the interstitial spaces in social organizations. As is the case with gangs, terrorists are guided by and depend on the collective and moral support of their comrades. Neither a terrorist organization nor a street gang can be mistaken for an individual-level enterprise. Though a single offender may commit a designated criminal act, the act is always a reflection of an organizational context. As Geis (2001) observes, “Delinquent gang members need to share companionship and responsibility. Much of what they do in violation of the law would never take place if the perpetrators did not gain from it a sense of moral fellowship with others whom they know and value.” Acts of terrorism share this collective affinity. The terrorist act requires the existence of the attacking and attacked collective identity. Both terrorist organizations and gangs can be described in theoretical terms as social control. Black offers a model of terrorism as a form of social control, which he defines as the means by which a collective responds to “conduct that is regarded as undesirable from a normative standpoint” (Black, 1989; cited by Bursik and Grasmick, 1993, p. 14). As a form of social control, Black (2004, p. 10) labels terrorism as “self-help,” in that it is action that “handles a grievance with aggression.” In its role in social control, terrorism is “a form of justice pursued by organized civilians who covertly inflict mass violence on other civilians.” It is the targeting of civilians that distinguishes terrorism from guerrilla warfare, which primarily targets military personnel. As a method of social control that is criminal in nature, it is similar to murders and assaults committed for vengeance. For Black (2004, pp. 12–13), the relationship between the two groups of civilians – terrorists and their victims – fit a particular social geometry. The perpetrators and victims share a cultural distance. Enemies may be “physically close but socially distant.” Social connections between the two groups are likely based on a chronic grievance. Though single incidents may be involved in the construction of the grievance, the grievance must have a more long-term content, such as disputed territory and a history of violent conflict. “Strong ties among the aggrieved and a lack of ties to their adversaries make a highly moralistic, explosive, and lethal combination” (Black, 2002, p. 13). Although alternative, theoretically feasible interpretations

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of terror have been offered (Forst, 2009, and other chapters in this volume), Black’s theoretical model has much currency. As noted, Rosenfeld (2002, p. 3) and LaFree and Dugan (2004, p. 60) make passing but specific recognition of gang violence as sharing a number of the features of terrorism. Gang members attacking members of rival gangs often speak of their motivations as attaining justice (self-help). The long-standing grievances between gangs, particularly in locales where gangs are well organized, provide the substance of social distance. Conflicts among gangs are frequently intensified to the degree in which gangs are proximal in space. Hence, Black’s geometry of terrorism may also represent a viable explanation of gang violence. Black’s (1989) definition of social control is a response to violations of norms. Janowitz (1976, pp. 9–10) defines social control as “the ability of a social group to engage in self-regulation.” Bursik’s (1993) particular focus is the processes by which neighborhoods control crime. From a model of social control suggested by Hunter (1985) for the social control of neighborhood schools, Bursik developed a systemic model of social control. Convenient for my intention here is Bursik’s selection of the genesis and endurance of gangs in inner city neighborhoods to demonstrate his model. Prior to Bursik’s enhancement of social disorganization theory, a problem for gang theorists had been the failure of structural models to explain why well-organized gangs have endured and prospered in communities where the personal ties within the neighborhood were strong (Kornhauser, 1978). Strong neighborhoods are less likely to be plagued by crime and delinquency including gangs. Bursik and Grasmick (1993, pp. 31–38) observed that traditional social disorganization theory (Shaw and McKay, 1942) focused on neighborhood linkages at the personal level of social control – bilateral or multilateral ties between individuals and families. Bursik and Grasmick (1993, p. 17) note that neighborhoods that control crime within their boundaries have linkages that transcend the personal level of social control. Building on Hunter’s (1985) model of the level of social control of schools, Bursik identified two additional levels of social control that affect a neighborhood’s ability to control crime. The first of these two additional levels of social

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control is the parochial level. Parochial institutions include schools, businesses, churches, and voluntary organizations. Bursik notes that whereas the ties between neighbors and their families are “affective” in nature, social control at the parochial level is driven by nonsentimental intentions. Linkages at the parochial level of social control are motivated by collective concerns such as property values and quality of education, and include control of crime. Some resources needed to control crime and quality-of-life conditions of neighborhoods exist outside the level of parochial control. This led Bursik to follow Hunter in identifying the public level of social control. For the neighborhood, public resources include police and fire protection, street maintenance, zoning, taxes, allocations for education, and public investments in jobs. A community that has strong personal networks may lack the connections to control and influence institutions at the parochial and public levels. Often the strongest institutions (or quasi-institutions) in neighborhoods devoid of parochial and public control are the gangs themselves (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993, p. 178). Gangs that provide alternative supports for youth, when families and schools cannot, may become strong components of neighborhood organization (Venkatesh, 2008). Not to be diminished in this context is the limited source of illegal income that gangs can provide in the absence of legitimate opportunities. In areas where terrorist organizations develop, the personal level of social control may be the only resource to which inhabitants have access. Persons may have no social control or linkages to the parochial or public levels of social control in their social world. Rosenfeld (2004, p. 25), in his “institutional balance” explanation of terrorist violence, describes such a condition in societies where there is “a dominance of family and religion”: Individuals develop a strong sense of interpersonal obligation, but one that is restricted to persons with whom they share particular social statuses and identities, often based on kin, ethnic, and religious affiliation. In the absence of strong social support for universalistic rules of conduct, a sense of identity with or obligations to others who are outside of the relevant social groups is virtually nonexistent. (p. 25)

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Whether one considers terrorist organizations and gangs as emerging from differential access to levels of social control, conditioned on a geometry of social control, or imbalances in institutional spheres, there exist conceptual similarities between gangs and terrorist organizations. Another question is the degree to which these theoretical similarities are complemented by social linkages between the two kinds of organizations.

THE ALLIANCE MODEL OF TERRORIST AND GANGS RELATIONS

Law enforcement agencies share a common fear that international terrorist organizations may develop alliances with U.S. street gangs. This fear is supported by documented relationships between terrorist organizations and organized crime. A United Nations report (Eleventh United Nations Congress, 2005) describes what it is about international organized crime that makes these groups an attractive ally for terrorist organizations. In addition to growing global interconnectivity, organized crime has the resources to “move money, share information, exploit and manipulate modern technology, and provide endless quantities of black market commodities” (pp. 2–3). The report goes on to note that “the emergence of transnational organized crime during the 1990s provided an example and role model for terrorist groups to follow” (p. 9). Conditions that reduce the appeal of cooperation with terrorist organizations as allies for organized crime include the substantial differences in goals of the two kinds of organizations. Organized crime groups are typically pragmatic and profit-driven, more concerned about profit than principle or politics (United Nations, 2005, p. 5). Terrorist organizations have ideological, political, and religious goals. On one hand are opportunistic “businessmen,” on the other are committed zealots. A disincentive for organized crime groups to ally with terrorist organizations is that close association with terrorist organizations can make organized crime a much higher priority for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. A disincentive for terrorists to ally with organized crime is that association with the opportunistic nonprincipled organized crime figures could make the

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terrorist groups vulnerable to betrayal or even infiltration through such connections (United Nations, 2005, p. 3). Still, terrorist groups and organized crime share “similar needs in terms of false documentation, weapons and the like,” and also share a “common interest in countering the law enforcement efforts of governments.” At the same time, to some degree, the kinds of resources and expertise each possesses complement and supplement those of the other (United Nations, 2005, p. 3). For these reasons, the United Nations report concludes, “Cooperation between terrorist groups and organized criminal groups can and do occur when their interests overlap in such enterprises as human smuggling or arms and munitions” (United Nations, 2005, p. 13). If street gangs have the same level of organizational resources as those attributed to international organized crime groups, there is indeed a possibility that alarm about street gang and terrorist alliances may be justified. Fortunately, gangs are not as well organized as some law enforcement administrators and governmental officials portray them. In an online issue of The Economist (2005), a list of conditions was offered that would make street gangs viable allies for international terrorist organizations. Not surprisingly, the list includes the characteristics noted in the U.N. report as making organized crime groups appealing allies for terrorist organizations. To be capable of carrying out military-like operations or complex crimes of violence, gangs would require leadership, functional roles, and discipline. International crime organizations have access to stable crime-generated resources. Gangs have been alleged to possess those kinds of resources through control of drug traffic (Venkatesh, 2008). Federal law enforcement officials have claimed to have found such connections for gang criminal organizations across national boundaries. Gang Organization A few gang researchers have argued that gangs are better organized than most other researchers have found them to be (SanchezJankowski, 1991; Taylor, 1990). More generally, gangs have been depicted as loosely organized confederations, subject to almost continual changes in structure, composition, and purpose (Decker and Van Winkle, 1996; Hagedorn, 1998; Klein, 1995; Short and Strodtbeck,

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1965; Spergel, 1995). Since Thrasher (1927), gang researchers have suggested that conventional gangs could eventually become more like organized crime groups. One study in particular reveals the limited nature of gang organization. Decker et al. (2002) studied the level of organization of four gangs identified as well organized by local law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies in Chicago and San Diego were asked to identify the most organized gangs in their jurisdictions. The Chicago police selected the Black Gangster Disciple Nation (BGDN) and Latin Kings. San Diego police identified Logan Heights Calle Treinte and the Lincoln Park Syndo Mob. Gang members were enlisted from two sources – probation offices and prisons. The researchers chose these institutional sources because gang members on probation or in prison had a greater likelihood of having committed serious offenses and of being members of their gangs for longer periods of time. In their interviews, the researchers sought information on structural complexity, involvement in community, and relationships with other gangs. Among measures of organizational complexity were levels of membership, leadership structure, regularity of meetings, written rules, membership dues, and consequences for leaving the gang. Engaging in political activity and legitimate businesses is comparable to similar activity by organized crime. Decker and his coauthors considered instrumental relationships with other gangs to be similar to relationships among organized crime groups. A primary finding on the level of organization in the San Diego gangs emerged very early in the research. Between planning and implementing the research project, the two San Diego gangs “had been dismantled through aging out, splintering, and vigorous law enforcement, prosecution, and incarceration.” One year before data collection, the two San Diego gangs had been identified as the gangs in city that were most organized and most likely to grow into organized crime groups. One year later, those gangs no longer existed. The two Chicago gangs were much more highly organized than either of the San Diego gangs. It was the BGDN that the researchers determined to be most organized, but by no means were the members unanimous in attributing the organizational structure measures to their gang. There was 100 percent agreement only on that the BGDN

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had leaders. Decker and his coauthors concluded that only the BGDN showed emergent structures that might be associated with organized crime, but had not developed at that time enough to be considered organized an crime group. In other words, what may be the bestorganized gang in the nation may have only the “potential” of becoming an organized crime group. Gang Access to Resources from Drug Sales Research on gangs and drug trafficking has consistently shown the limited control that gangs have over drug trafficking. Studies by Reiner (1992) and by Decker and Van Winkle (1996) concluded that street gangs lack the organization and discipline to engage in effective drug trafficking. From their studies of Chicago homicides, Block and Block (1993) found that gang homicides were more likely to be turf-related than drug-related. By analysis of crime records from four Los Angeles police districts, Klein et al. (1991) determined that street gangs were “minor players” in crack sales in Southern California. From the only empirical data on a gang’s drug-selling operation, Venkatesh (1999) estimated the hourly wage of “soldiers” in his drug gang as approximately seven dollars per hour. Others have found similar results for the profits of street-level drug distribution (MacCoun and Reuter, 1992; Padilla, 1992). Global Interconnectivity of Gangs Gangs with the same names as American gangs are reported in other countries, particularly in Europe (Klein et al., 2001). Though a few European gangs use names that are taken from U.S. gangs, these gangs have no structural connections to their U.S. counterparts (Decker and Weerman, 2005). In fact, this copying of gang names has been found in U.S. cities. Hagedorn (1998) noted the use of Chicago gang names and alliances in Milwaukee, and Decker and Van Winkle (1996) found the same for Los Angeles gang names and alliances in St. Louis. The spread of gang names has led some law enforcement professionals and researchers to mistake the spread of gang culture for a conscious expansion strategy by the Los Angeles Crips and Bloods (Leet et al., 2000). Based on a survey of law enforcement (Maxson, 1998), gang culture spreads rather than the gangs themselves. An additional piece

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of evidence in this conclusion is that gangs in emerging cities mix symbols and colors differently from the big-city gangs from which they have borrowed their names (Starbuc et al., 2004).

THE EL RUKN STREET GANG–LIBYA ALLIANCE

A rare alleged incidence of a terrorist alliance between an American street gang and a foreign entity did not turn out well for the gang. The alliance was to be between the El Rukn street gang and the government of Libya. The El Rukn street gang had earlier incarnations as the Blackstone Rangers and the Black P. Stone Nation. The gang’s founders included an African American teenager named Jeff Fort. Spergel (1995) describes Fort as having “an organizational talent, if not genius.” Fort originally served time for defrauding the federal government through a training grant with Chicago’s Woodlawn Organization. After his release from prison, Fort founded the Moorish Science Temple of America and built what Spergel characterized as an extremely well-organized criminal enterprise. Jeff Fort was serving time again in 1985 when he was indicted for the El Rukn terrorist alliance with Libya. The planned alliance included the bombing of police stations and government buildings. There was even a proposal to down an airliner. The plan developed beyond a meeting in Panama between Libyan officials and El Rukn lieutenants. Fort supposedly masterminded the alliance from a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas by telephone. Telephones in federal prisons are each marked with warnings that calls are monitored. The El Rukns were alleged to have been offered $2.5 million, and, after their reign of terror, asylum in Libya. The alliance unraveled as federal authorities arrested Fort’s lieutenants and charged the imprisoned Fort with a list of new federal crimes. Eventually five El Rukn leaders, including Fort (New York Times, 1987), were convicted and sixteen more pled guilty (Spergel, 1995, p. 137). Almost all of the El Rukn leaders pleading guilty gave testimony against Fort. From being the best-organized gang in Chicago or even the United States, the El Rukns became a nonplayer among Chicago gangs. In a report by former Los Angeles prosecutor Ira Reiner on gangs and violence, Reiner (1992) suggested that

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gang members are among the most visible offenders. It was naïve of the El Rukn leadership to assume that their planning activities would go unnoticed. Gangs not only lack the structure and resources that make them appealing alliances for terrorist groups, but, maybe more so than organized crime groups, gangs also draw unwelcome attention from authorities to terrorist activities.

A RECRUITMENT MODEL

An alternative model of terrorist-organization connection to U.S. street gangs is a recruitment model. In this scenario, gang members may serve as recruitment pools for members or pawns of terrorist groups. Cases of American-born citizens being recruited into Islamic terrorist organizations are on record. Perhaps the best known was Clement Rodney Hampton-el, an African American converted to Islam and indicted for his participation in a plot to blow up a number of New York structures, including tunnels and bridges. Still the only prosecution involving the recruitment of a gang member as a terrorist is the case of Jose Padilla. On May 8, 2002, Jose Padilla, a member of the Latin Disciples street gang was taken into custody as he stepped off of a plane at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. In a nationally televised statement, Attorney General Ashcroft announced that Padilla was being charged with conspiring to set off a non-nuclear, radioactive (“dirty”) bomb (Whitney, 2005). Deputy Attorney General James Comey labeled Padilla “a soldier of our enemy, a trained, funded, and equipped terrorist. … a highly trained Al Qaida soldier who had accepted an assignment to kill hundreds of innocent men, women and children.” Though Padilla’s charges have been modified to plotting to rent adjacent apartments in high rises, turn on the gas, and set off explosions to destroy the buildings, Padilla’s story has always emphasized his membership in the Latin Disciples. On May 8, Padilla was alleged to be returning from a meeting with high-ranking al Qaeda Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Padilla, who was held without charges for over three years as an “enemy combatant,” was transferred to the control of civilian authorities in 2005. In January 2008, Padilla was sentenced to seventeen years and four months in federal prison (Semple, 2008). As

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in the case of the El Rukn alliance, Padilla’s status as a gang member may have led in part to his being a target of law enforcement. Gang researchers have recognized that the age of gang members is increasing, as older gang members have limited alternatives in the legitimate labor market. Venkatesh (1999) has suggested that some of these older gang members are as frustrated with their gangs as with the rest of society. George Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center (Sadovi, 2002), does not discount the possibility of terrorist recruitment of gang members. In Knox’s words, “All American gangs … have this combative, hate-the-system, tear-it-up attitude. What drives gangs is conflict … they want to wreak havoc.” Joining terrorist groups for gang members is “like they made it big time.” Looking at the El Rukn and Padilla examples, it may be more likely that gang members will reach out to terrorist organizations than the other way around. As compared to the “alliance” model, the recruitment model is more likely, but it is possible that from the perspective of terrorist organizations, recruits other than gang members may be more attractive selections.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM RESPONSE

Given the similar genesis of terrorist groups and gangs, why is it that gangs appear so much weaker and less successful than terrorist groups? One possible explanation is the grounding of Islamic terrorist groups in a broader cultural belief structure. Individuals and even nations often contribute or support terrorist groups. Gangs, on the other hand, have no allegiance to a broader normative system. A search for individual profits is not attractive to a wide range of supporters. Another possible answer to the difference between terrorist groups and gangs is in the decades-long reaction of U.S. law enforcement to gangs. Beginning in the 1980s, law enforcement organizations have concentrated on gangs. Greene and Decker (2007) point out that the two major institutional reactions to gangs have been multiagency task forces and gang-intelligence units. Despite the dearth of evaluations of these kinds of gang suppression programs, Greene and Decker (2007, p. 28) go on to suggest that “the fundamental reasons that such interventions have not led to the outcomes that were expected

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is that the nature of the problem was ‘misdiagnosed’.” It is generally accepted among gang researchers that these suppression strategies assumed that gangs were more organized than they actually were. By focusing on gang members, the criminal justice system may have inadvertently increased the gang problem by throwing the book at gang members. These strong reactions to gangs may have led to the incarceration of marginally involved youths, while giving gangs the opportunity to become more organized in custodial settings. Though gangs may thus have been strengthened or enlarged by suppression strategies, the process left gangs isolated from their communities and decreased the opportunities of street gangs to sustain profitable criminal enterprises. It might be more effective to use task forces and intelligence units against terrorist groups. Terrorist organizations are already well organized. Terrorist groups have cross-national connections and resources comparable to those of international crime organizations. As Greene and Decker (2007) note, gang-suppression programs have usually not been evaluated. Much more can be done. In order to see if gangsuppression strategies work against terror organizations, criminal justice responses to terrorist organization should be subjected to rigorous evaluation.

REFERENCES Black, Donald, “Social Control as a Dependent Variable,” in Toward a General Theory of Social Control, Volume 1, Donald Black, editor (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1989). “Terrorism as Social Control,” in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives, Mathieu Deflem, editor (Amsterdam: Elsevier/JAI Press, 2004), pp. 9–18. Block, Carolyn R. and Richard Block, Street Gang Crime in Chicago, National Institute of Justice (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 1993). Bursik, Robert J., Jr. and Harold G. Grasmick, Neighborhoods and Crime (New York: Lexington, 1993). Decker, Scott H., Tim Bynum, and Deborah Weisel, “A Tale of Two Cities: Gangs as Organized Crime Groups,” Justice Quarterly, Volume 15 (2002), pp. 395–425. Decker, Scott H. and Barrick Van Winkle, Life in the Gang: Family, Friends, and Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Decker, Scott H. and Frank Weerman (editors), European Street Gangs and Troublesome Youth Groups (San Francisco, CA: Alta Mira, 2005). Deflem, Mathieu, Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives (Amsterdam: Elsevier/JAI Press, 2004). Eleventh United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, International Cooperation against Terrorism and Other Criminal Activities in the Context of the Work of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Bangkok: United Nations, April 2005), pp. 18–25. Forst, Brian, Terrorism, Crime, and Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Geis, Gilbert, “Forward,” in The Modern Gang Reader, 2nd Edition, Jody Miller, Cheryl L. Maxson, and Malcolm W. Klein, editors (Los Angeles: Roxbury Press, 2001). Greene, Jack and Scott H. Decker, “Transforming Law Enforcement: From Political to Administrative to Terrorism,” in Homeland Security, P. Stockton, editor (New York: Oxford, 2007). Hagedorn, John M., People and Folks: Gangs, Crimes, and the Underclass in a Rust Belt City (Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1998). Hunter, Albert J., “Private, Parochial, and Public School Orders: The Problem of Crime and Incivility in Urban Communities,” in The Challenge of Social Control: Citizenship and Institution Building in Modern Society, Gerald D. Suttles and Mayer N. Zald, editors (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1985). Janowitz, Morris, Social Control and the Welfare State (New York: Elsevier, 1976). Klein, Malcolm W., Street Gangs and Street Workers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971). The American Street Gang (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Klein, Malcolm W., Cheryl L. Maxson, and Lea C. Cunningham, “‘Crack’, Street Gangs and Violence,” Criminology Volume 29, Number 4 (1991), pp. 623–650. Klein, Malcolm W., Hans-Jürgen Kerner, Cheryl Maxson, and Elmar G.M. Weitekamp (Eds.), The Eurogang Paradox: Gangs and Youth Groups in the U.S. and Europe. (The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). Kornhauser, Ruth R., Social Sources of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). LaFree, Gary and Laura Dugan, “How Does Studying Terrorism Compare to Studying Crime,” in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives, Mathieu Deflem, editor (Amsterdam: Elsevier/JAI Press, 2004), pp. 53–90. Leet, Duane, Anthony E. Smith, and James M. Rush, Gangs, Graffiti, And Violence: A Realistic Guide the Scope and Nature of Gangs in America (Florence, KY: Cengage Publishing, 2000).

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Maxson, Cheryl, Margaret A. Gordon, and Malcolm W. Klein, “Differences Between Gang and Non-gang Homicides,” Criminology, Volume 23, Number 2 (1985), pp. 209–222. MacCoun, Robert and Peter Reuter, “Are the Wages of Sin $30 an Hour? Economic Aspects of Street-Level Drug Dealing,” Crime and Delinquency, Volume 38, Number 4 (1992), pp. 477–491. Maxson, Cheryl, Gang Members on the Move, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Bulletin, Department of Justice (Washington, DC: Office of Justice Programs, 1998). Miller, Jody A. and Scott H. Decker, “Young Women and Gang Violence: An Examination of Gender, Street Offending and Violent Victimization in Gangs,” Justice Quarterly, Volume 18, Number 1 (2001), pp. 115–140. New York Times (1987) Five Draw Long Sentences for Terrorism Scheme, Section A, p. 15. Thursday, December 31. Reiner, Ira, “Gangs, Crimes and Violence in Los Angeles,” (Los Angeles: Office of District Attorney, County of Los Angeles, 1992). Rosenfeld, Richard, “Terrorism and Criminology,” in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives, Mathieu Deflem, editor (Amsterdam: Elsevier/JAI Press, 2004), pp. 19–32. “Why Criminologists Should Study Terrorism?” The Criminologist, Volume 1, November/December (2002), pp. 1–4. Sadovi, Carlos, “El Rukns Had Early Terror Ties: It’s Not the First Time Gangs Have Been Linked to Terrorism” (Chicago: Chicago Sun Times, June 11, 2002). Sanchez-Jankowski, Martin, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Semple, Kirk, “Padilla Sentenced to 17 Years in Prison,” New York Times (September 22, 2008). Shaw, Clifford B. and Henry D. McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942). Short, James F., Jr. and Fred L. Strodtbeck, Group Process and Gang Delinquency, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). Spergel, Irving A., The Youth Gang Problem: A Community Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Starbuck, David, James C. Howell, and Donna J. Lindquist, “Hybrid And Other Modern Gangs,” in American Youth Gangs at the Millennium, Finn-Aage Esbense, Stephen G. Tibbetts, and Larry Gaines, editors (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004). Taylor, Carl, Dangerous Society (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1990) The Economist http://www.economist.com Thrasher, Frederic M., The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927).

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Venkatesh, Sudhir, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). “The Financial Activity of a Modern American Street Gang,” in Looking at Crime from the Street Level, Volume 1 (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 1999), pp. 1–11. Whitney, Mike. “Free Jose Padilla,” ZNet (May 23, 2005), http://www. zmag.org/znet

chapter six

Women Terrorists Rita J. Simon and Adrienne Tranel

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines evidence from women involved in terrorist organizations that are currently active. We examine the roles women play in existing terrorist groups and the common demographic characteristics of the women who join these groups. We also examine the motives women have for joining terrorist organizations and whether those motives differ by type of terrorist group. The evidence demonstrates that women join terrorist groups for myriad reasons, including marginalization by society, individual choice, avengement of another’s death, recruitment by the organizations, and serving as pawns in a man’s game. Charles Townshend, writing in Terrorism, reports: Something like a quarter of the Russian terrorists of the 19th century were women; a proportion possibly exceeded among the German and American terrorists of the 1970s. A full third of the Communist Organized for the Liberation of the Proletariat (COLP) in Italy were women, and 31 percent of that nation’s Bridate Rossi (Red Brigades). (Townshend 2002)

In an earlier paper published in 1980 that examined the historical role of women in terrorist organizations, we found that women’s involvement in such organizations was not a side effect of the women’s liberation movement. Rather, the evidence suggested that one of the unintended consequences of women’s involvement in these organizations is that their involvement weakened traditional customs and sex roles (Benson, Evans, and Simon 1980).

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Like the 1980 piece, this chapter is limited largely to anecdotal evidence about female terrorists, which creates only a thin foundation for sociological generalization. In addition, if the female terrorists are successful – and they largely are – the women die without ever relaying their reasons for joining the organization. Therefore, projections about why those women chose to join terrorist organizations, without direct evidence about their choices, are speculative at best. For example, do they join for ideological reasons or because the opportunity is open to them and they have personal motives such as revenge? Several common themes do exist among the various women’s stories as to the roles they have played within their organizations, the kind of women who join terrorist groups, and the reasons they cite for becoming involved in terrorist organizations. Citing an incident in July 2007 in which a woman approached seven Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint in Ramadi and blew herself up, killing everybody in the vicinity, Peter Berger and Paul Cruickshank warned that female participation in suicide attacks “have grown alarmingly in recent years. And unless we come to terms with the phenomenon female extremist militants might be an important part of our future.” The thrust of this chapter supports that warning, and not only among Islamist militants (Berger and Cruickshank 2007). A Brief History of the Role of Women in Terrorism Women’s participation in revolutionary movements was historically both commonplace and active. Over time, women in revolutionary groups have not limited their roles to the stereotypical female role, but instead have taken on prominent leadership roles, as seen in the cases of Russia, Latin America, and East Asia. As of 1980, the women who were joining revolutionary movements came from the middle and upper classes and were generally of an age between adolescence and their late thirties. At the time of the 1980 piece, it did not appear that women’s involvement in revolutionary groups and terrorist organizations was a side effect of the women’s liberation movement. Rather, the research showed that as women broke down traditional roles within the organizations, in turn, the traditional female roles in society at large dissolved. In examining the roles women played in various

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revolutionary movements, the demographic characteristics of the women who joined the groups, and the division of labor within the groups, we found that women were not participating in terrorism because of the women’s liberation movement. Characterizing women currently involved in terrorism, Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill, writes: “When men conduct suicide missions they are motivated by religious and nationalist fanaticism, whereas women appear more often motivated by very personal reasons” (Bloom 2005, p. 145). As examples, Bloom describes the “Black Widows,” the female operatives in Chechnya as persons who have lost a loved one and are motivated by their personal tragedy. She notes that Palestinian women are also motivated by the desire to recover their family honor. Importance of Women in Terrorism Today Terrorist organizations have changed dramatically in the last twenty-five years, and have taken on an entirely different dynamic in the world. A brief description of the organizations discussed in this paper is necessary for the reader to understand the variety of groups in existence today and the purported purposes of the terrorist organizations. Jessica Stern, in Terror In the Name of God, reports that “women have been responsible for over a third of the suicide bombings carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam in Sri Lanka and over two thirds of those perpetrated by the Kurdish Workers Party PKK” (Stern 2003, p. 53). Al Qaeda is a terrorist group, founded largely in Afghanistan, with a global network whereby its members fight against Western ideals. Mostly founded on Islamic ideals, al Qaeda seeks to liberate Muslims from what it perceives as Western domination. Al Qaeda is the organization held responsible for the attacks against the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Other organizations considered in this chapter are related to a particular country and that organization’s pursuit of liberty from the dominating nation. In Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are Hindus who wish to be liberated from the majority Buddhist nation. LTTE has fought a civil war for nearly fifteen years against the Sinhalese Buddhist majority of Sri Lanka. Likewise, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) seeks to drive the

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British from Ireland; the Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain seek an independent Basque country separate from Spain; the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) has fought with Israel for years over the boundaries between the two territories; and Chechnya seeks independence from Russia. Although nationalist revolutionary groups remain active throughout many different countries, terrorism is now more globalized and farreaching in this age of technology. With the events of September 11, 2001, and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, the world has assumed a new perspective regarding terrorism. Terrorism is no longer confined to a country’s borders and the nationalistic movement within those borders. Rather, terrorism is now of international concern and drives new policies and legislation. Modern politics are primarily concerned with preventing terrorist groups from launching large-scale attacks on other countries. Thus, the landscape in which we consider this chapter on women terrorists has changed drastically, but ironically, women’s reasons for participating in terrorist groups remain largely the same.

CASE STUDIES: THE WOMEN WHO JOIN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

The data provide information on the roles that women assume when they participate in terrorist groups and on the demographic characteristics of the women who join these groups. With this research, some conclusions can be drawn about the reasons why women join terrorist groups, although limitations exist as to how far the generalizations may reach, based on the limited number of stories available and the anecdotal nature of those stories. The Roles Women Assume in Terrorist Organizations Women have maintained a high level of participation and activism in the terrorist organizations they join. Although women play supportive roles in some groups, women do not play only supportive roles. Rather, female members of these organizations can also be found at high-level leadership and in front-line positions in which the members participate directly in the attacks. But the roles that women fulfill

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within the organizations are directly related to the kinds of organizations in which they participate. We previously divided contemporary terrorist groups into two categories, a categorization that still holds true today. The idealist groups are “inspired by vague notions of world liberation and emphasize the dramaturgy of violence” and “are the most eccentric and bizarre of all terrorist groups.” On the other hand, the nationalistic groups “stress the political rights and liberation of the people of a specific geographic area.” But the groups that comprised the list of idealists in 1980 have now gone defunct, mostly due to the capture of their leaders. Today, the primary idealist group engaging in terrorism is al Qaeda. At the top of the list of those people wanted for their alleged involvement in al Qaeda is Aafia Siddiqui, the only female on the “deadly seven” list created by former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Siddiqui is wanted for her involvement as a “fixer” in al Qaeda, someone who has knowledge about the United States and can help accomplish objectives for other operatives. The allegations against her consist of suspicious money transfers and purchases of military equipment on the Internet, assisting the plot of the 9/11 attacks, a plot to blow up underground gas tanks in Baltimore, and overseeing a $19 million diamond deal to secure money for al Qaeda. Siddiqui did not carry out any of the al Qaeda attacks against the United States herself, but she did play a substantial role as an agent and planner of the attacks. Her role was one of support and assistance; she used her knowledge of the United States to assist in financial deals, and her knowledge of science and technology to plan the attacks themselves. It is not clear that Siddiqui’s role was limited to one of support and assistance because she is a woman, but it is possible that Islamic ideals underpinning al Qaeda objectives were the reasons for her having a more secretive, behind-the-scenes role. In 2005, al Qaeda sent three women on suicide missions, two in Iraq and one in Jordan. One of the women, Muriel Degauque, was a thirty-eight-year-old Belgian married to a Belgian of Moroccan descent. Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi was one of the two suicide bombers involved in the bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. It turns out that Sajida failed to detonate her bomb. According to an account in Newsweek (December 12, 2005) the woman had lost three

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brothers in the fight against the Americans, and had married her fellow bomber less than a week before she went on the suicide mission. The nationalist groups the PLO and the IRA remain active, although Spain, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya now represent additional countries with active revolutionary movements. In the nationalist groups, there is remarkably little division of labor, and women are becoming increasingly active in direct terrorist attacks. In particular, women are especially active in suicide bombings (as opposed to car bombings, planted bombs, etc.). Yet in organizations where women make up the same percentage of members as men, it is more likely that women in those groups obtain positions of leadership. The Palestinian example illustrates female activism in terrorist groups and women’s ability to participate in any level of the organizations. As in other countries where nationalist terrorist groups are prevalent, Palestinian women play a large role in the physical attacks, and particularly in suicide bombings. Women have been used to assist in planning the attacks as well as in carrying the bombings out. In March 1985, Sumayah Sa’ad drove a car loaded with dynamite into an Israeli military position in southern Lebanon. The attack killed twelve Israeli soldiers and wounded fourteen others. Two weeks later, another young Palestinian woman drove a TNT-laden car into an Israeli Defense Force convoy that killed two soldiers and wounded two more (Stern 2003, p. 311). In January 2002, Wafa Idris carried out a suicide bombing that killed one Israeli and wounded one hundred others. Since January 2002, roughly seventy Palestinian women have followed in her footsteps, though only eight succeeded in blowing themselves up. In September 2005, female recruits were being trained by Hamas in the Gaza Strip to carry out attacks on Israel. The women were being trained to plant roadside bombs, fire rockets and mortars, and infiltrate Jewish settlements. Some of the women said they were married and had children. Their husbands knew of their activities, as did the fathers and brothers of the unmarried women. The husbands and brothers of most of the women were also members of the armed wing of Hamas. Religion and culture play an important role among Palestinians as to what status women may have among the terrorist groups. There is no ban in Islam on women participating in jihad, and women can

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participate in jihad in both supportive roles and in active roles. The groups justify bending traditional female roles as necessary to the realization of jihad. For example, whereas normally women who venture outside of the home would have to be accompanied by a male chaperon, if a woman goes out to fight and if she is not gone for longer than a day and a night, then she may venture out without a male chaperon. In addition, women are not required to wear the veil if doing so assists in misleading the enemy. The traditional prohibition against Muslims taking their own lives is also a rule that has flexed in the face of what the Palestinian terrorists deem “necessity.” Though the Koran condemns suicide by men and women alike, both gender groups often ignore that rule to achieve political goals such as liberation. Women are necessary to the Palestinian revolutionary movement, because as suicide bombings become more common, the group needs more people to commit the bombings. As women have become more and more involved in terrorist organizations, they have achieved similar roles to those that men hold. Conversely, however, Palestinian women often take advantage of traditional notions of their role in society in order to carry out a suicide bombing more effectively. For example, many women will take on the role of carrying weapons, because in Islamic cultures, men are not supposed to touch women they do not know, thus making it easier for women to conceal explosives and other weapons. We see a remarkable growth in the number of women terrorists in Chechnya. Women are directly involved in terrorist attacks and, in particular, suicide bombings. In the past several years, almost every suicide bombing has involved women, and some of the attacks have been carried out exclusively by women. Authorities say that female suicide bombers have taken part in at least fifteen attacks since the war erupted again in 1999. This growth in numbers has also been noted among Irish women participating in the IRA. As women become more directly involved in the physical, direct attacks, they have expanded ideological notions about themselves, and use their participation in these groups to see themselves as equals to men. Women are involved in the terrorist acts committed by the Basque separatists, ETA, who fight for the liberation of the Basque country from the rest of Spain. Though the women in the organization are

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outnumbered by men, they perceive themselves as ideological equals to men. Once women become committed to ETA, they believe themselves to be determined fighters who follow through on their commitment. They also see themselves as stronger than the men in ETA because they have to endure more pain in their everyday lives. Where women make up a larger percentage of the organization, they are more likely to hold positions beyond those of suicide bombers. In Sri Lanka, for example, women make up half of the population of the LTTE, who seek liberation for the minority Hindu population. Women began to join LTTE in the mid-1980s. Of the LTTE’s Central Committee members, the highest decision-making body in the organization, three out of ten members are women. In addition, women often occupy positions more central than, or at least equivalent to, their male counterparts. One leader of the group, “Dhanu,” is known for killing the former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. Notably, prior to joining the LTTE, and two years before the bombing in which Prime Minister Gandhi died, Dhanu was gang-raped and the Indian peacekeeping forces killed her brothers. In LTTE, women take part directly in the fighting and are given the same training and experience as men. In fact, women were needed during the 1980s because LTTE was experiencing a shortage of numbers and needed more fighters. By 1985, women had developed their own army division of the LTTE. Women have proven themselves to be strong fighters, and are cited as being just as harsh as their male counterparts and just as willing to take their own lives in order to accomplish a mission. With the onset of women’s active participation in LTTE, other traditional female roles began to dwindle. Girls no longer need to travel with a male chaperone because their solitude allowed them to carry out suicide missions. In addition, a young male is prone to more danger from threats to his mission than is a young female. Because women are less suspicious, they are able to carry out their missions with a higher degree of success. Demographic Characteristics of Women in Terrorist Organizations Terrorist organizations are attracting more and more women over time, which suggests that these organizations are increasingly more

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appealing to women. It is therefore important to examine what classes of women are joining terrorist groups. In some instances, terrorist organizations appear to be attracting young, educated, single women. Most of the women are in their twenties, although the range of ages spans from as young as eleven years old up to the early thirties (Al Qaeda). However, Bloom notes that “women suicide bombers in Sri Lanka and Turkey have few if any career options. Many of them are unsophisticated and poorly educated and simply follow their leaders blindly” (Bloom 2005, p. 165). Female terrorists are usually not mothers. This fact is sometimes attributable to an inability to have children or to the fact that they are too young to have contemplated motherhood. Of the Spanish women in ETA, very few of them are mothers and even fewer mothers assume leadership positions. It is also rare that Irish mothers become involved in the IRA. Idris, the first Palestinian suicide bomber, was divorced after nine years of marriage, apparently because she and her husband were unable to have children. It appears, then, that childless women may choose to join terrorist organizations precisely because they do not have children. Often, the women in terrorist organizations come from the margins of society, as we see in the cases of Chechnya, Sri Lanka, and Palestine. In Chechen society, if a woman is raped, that rape dishonors her entire family. Therefore, a common characteristic among female terrorists in Chechnya is that they are socially stigmatized in some way – for example, they have been raped or they cannot have children. In Palestine, a woman can be stigmatized for not being able to have children. In Sri Lanka, some of the women who join LTTE are women who have been raped. According to Hindu faith, a woman who has been raped cannot then marry or have children. Therefore, one way women can redeem themselves is through fighting for Tamil freedom. In fact, family members of a rape victim will often encourage the woman to join LTTE. Moreover, usually the women who join LTTE are low-caste Tamil women who join the group between the ages of eleven and thirteen. These women are particularly recruited for suicide bombings because they are not viewed as socially valuable. The women who join terrorist groups are not seeking liberation for women. In fact, sometimes the women who join these groups are more conservative than their peers. For example, Aafia Siddiqui

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is a divorced mother of three children who holds a degree from Brandeis University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been described as a pious Muslim who comes from a family of pious Muslims. Her mother was a strong activist woman, and Ms. Siddiqui followed in her mother’s footsteps. Ms. Siddiqui held traditional Muslim beliefs, wore traditional dress, and read the Quran regularly. She is also described as having positive feelings about the United States, and even believed that she could turn the United States into an Islamic nation. Ms. Siddiqui was politically active and was determined to reconcile her Islamic faith with Western science and technology. Another common characteristic of women who join terrorist organizations is that they seek to avenge some wrong that has been done to them. This proposition is true in Palestine and Ireland, although the most prominent story comes from Chechnya. Zarema Muzhakhoyeva attempted to set off a bomb in a café in Moscow in July 2003. Her attempt failed, however, and she was apprehended by the Russian police. Zarema was twenty-two years old at the time she attempted the suicide bombing, and had been married and pregnant at the age of fifteen. Her husband died fighting for Chechen independence, and so, according to Chechen tradition, Zarema and her daughter then belonged to her husband’s family. That family, however, did not treat Zarema well and she escaped, leaving her daughter behind. Finding herself without any money, Zarema took out a loan from a group of men who told her that the only way she could pay them back was with her life. She said she wanted to complete the suicide bombing to avenge her husband’s death, but at least in part, she was forced to complete it by being drugged.

CONCLUSIONS: THE REASONS WHY WOMEN JOIN TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS

Though the evidence is anecdotal and difficult to piece together given the dearth of information about many of the subjects and the speculation surrounding their circumstances, certain themes are consistent despite the variety of motives suggested in the women’s stories. Women are joining terrorist organizations with increasing frequency

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and are becoming more personally active as suicide bombers. They are motivated by clear objectives that seem unique to women. First, as noted, a common characteristic of women in terrorist organizations is that they have been marginalized by society in some way. Women may therefore join terrorist groups as a way to avenge themselves of their own plight, relieve their families of any dishonor they have imparted (i.e., because of rape or an inability to have children), or simply escape the society that has marginalized them. Some societies, like the Tamils in Sri Lanka, encourage raped women to redeem themselves by fighting for Tamil freedom. Therefore, marginalized women may see participation in terrorism as a way to achieve redemption, or they may simply feel pressured into joining the organization in order to reduce any embarrassment on the part of the family. Terrorism may also provide these women with a concrete avenue by which they can achieve eternal beauty and glory. Though socially marginalized women cannot be beautiful or glorified during their lifetimes, they can achieve these goals through martyrdom. Second, strong personal reasons underlie much of a woman’s decision to join a terrorist group. For example, in a manner closely related to the idea of martyrdom, some women engage in terrorism as a way to avenge the death of someone close to them. This tendency is particularly true among Chechen, Irish, and Palestinian women who have witnessed grave atrocities being committed to their loved ones. These women thus feel compelled to avenge the death of a loved one by killing those they deem responsible. Other personal reasons among female terrorists include the desire to fulfill their own political goals and motivations. Many women will choose to become members of terrorist groups if they believe that the choice will further their political hopes. In Spain and Ireland, the female members of ETA and the IRA have made independent decisions to join those organizations. The possibility always exists that women join terrorist groups out of their own volition, and wish to challenge political movements through terrorism. Some writers suggest that women join terrorist organizations out of religious motivation. This conclusion seems possible in the case of al Qaeda, whose religious leanings have motivated the goals of the group. But such a conclusion limits the discussion too narrowly.

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Inherent in certain strains of the Islamic religion is a strong effect of various Muslim beliefs on cultural norms. Al Qaeda is a complicated organization with radical idealistic beliefs that reach beyond the standard of mere religiousness. Among Palestinians, women are able to surmount traditional cultural notions while concurrently capitalizing on those norms in order to carry out terrorist attacks. Thus, women both obliterate and take advantage of cultural traditions as they participate in terrorism. This correlation cannot be attributed to a religious motivation for joining revolutionary movements. Another less common reason that women join terrorist organizations is that they are merely pawns of the male game. In Chechnya, this reason is particularly common; accounts are available to demonstrate that some women have been coerced into joining terrorist organizations. However, evidence in other countries does not suggest that women are forced into participation in terrorist groups; therefore these phenomena may be unique to Chechnya. Some female suicide bombers may have chosen to act as they did because of the rewards they expect to receive in heaven. A male suicide bomber may expect to be rewarded with seventy-two virgins, but what about women? Women, according to some modern clerics may expect to become chief of seventy-two virgins, that is, the fairest of the fair (Tsai 2007). Finally, it is entirely possible that women join terrorist groups because they are recruited into the organizations out of the organizations’ need for more participants. As terrorism becomes a more common way for terrorists to make their beliefs known, especially in the international arena, women’s participation becomes increasingly more common. The groups need effective ways of deceiving the enemy, and they need more members in order to carry out more attacks. Therefore, the terrorist groups are learning that they can tap into another source of power and numbers – women. In examining the roles that women play in modern terrorist organizations and the demographic characteristics of the women who join these organizations, we see that women participate in terrorism for a number of reasons, including personal motivations, the need to redeem themselves and overcome dishonor, sheer desire to be politically active through terrorism, potential coercion into joining

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the groups, and the need on the part of the organizations to have more active members. Despite changes to the stage on which terrorism takes place today, women’s reasons for participating in terrorism remain largely the same as they were thirty years ago. In the main, they do not represent future leaders for gender equality or women’s liberation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ann, Adele, “Women Fighters of Liberation Tigers: Women and the Struggle for Tamil Eelam,” EelamWeb (1990), available from http:// www/eelamweb.com/women/. Benson, Mike, Mariah Evans and Rita Simon, “Women as Political Terrorists,” Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control, Volume 4 (1980), pp. 121–130. Berger, Peter and Paul Cruickshank, “Meet the New Face of Terror,” The Washington Post (August 12, 2007), p. B4. Bloom, Mia, Dying to Kill (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). “Chechen ‘Black Widow’ Bomber Jailed,” BBC News, August 4, 2004. Available at http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/ europe/3610327.stm. Cunningham, Karla J., “Cross-Regional Trends in Female Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 26 (2003), pp. 171–195. Cutter, Ana, “Tamil Tigresses, Hindu Martyrs.” Available at http://www. columbia.edu/cu/sipa/PUBS/SLANT/SPRING98/article5.html. “Failed Chechen Suicide Bomber Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison,” Mosnews.com, August 4, 2004. Available at http://www.mosnews.com. “French Newsmagazine Details Tiger Atrocities.” Available at http:// www.priu.gov/lk/news _update/Current_Affairs/ca200004/ 20000419LTTE_atrocities… (April 19, 2000). Gavin, Deborah, “The Female Terrorist: A Socio-Psychological Perspective,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law, Volume 1 (1983), pp. 19–32. Groskop, Viv, “Chechnya’s Deadly ‘Black Widows’,” New Statesman, Volume 133, Issue 4704 (September 6, 2004). Hasan, Khalid, “Aafia Siddiqui Bought Diamonds for Qaeda,” Daily Times (September 8, 2004). Available at http://www.dailytimes.com. Isikoff, Michael and Mark Hosenball, “Tangled Ties,” Newsweek (April 7, 2003). Available at http://www.msnbc.com/msn/com/id/4687305. Israeli, Raphael, “Palestinian Women: The Quest for a Voice in the Public Square Through ‘Islamikaze Martyrdom’,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 16, Number 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 66–96.

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MacDonald, Eileen, Shoot the Women First (New York: Random House, 1991). Manoharan, N., “Tigresses of Lanka: From Girls to Guerillas,” Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, available at http://www.ipcs.org (March 31, 2003). MEMRI, Inquiry and Analysis Series No. 83 (Feb. 12, 2002). Myers, Steven Lee, “Chechen Women’s Role in New Attacks a Disturbing Sign of What War Has Done,” The New York Times, September 12, 2004. Neuberger, Luisela de Catado and Tiziana Valentine, Women and Terrorism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966). Ozment, Katherine, “Who’s Afraid of Aafia Siddiqui?” Boston Magazine (October 2004). Available at http://www.bostonmagazine.com, Archives. “Spain Hails ‘ETA Leaders’ Arrest” October 4, 2004. Available at http:// www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/Europe/10/04/france.spain.eta. Stahl, Julia, “Palestinians Using More Children, Women for Terrorism,” January 6, 2005. Available at http://www.cnsnews.com. Stern, Jessica, Terror in the Name of God (New York: ECCO Harper Collins, 2003). Stroggins, Deborah, “The Most Wanted Woman in the World,” Vogue (March 2005). “Terror Alert Spurs Worldwide Hunt” CBS News. May 27, 2004. Available at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/27/terror. Townshend, Charles, Terrorism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 18. Tsai, Michelle, “How God Rewards a Female Suicide Bomber,” Slate (March 1, 2007). “Women of Al Qaeda.” Newsweek ( December 12, 2005).

Part two

STRATEGIES FOR INTERVENTION

chapter seven

Is Crime Prevention Relevant to Counterterrorism? Cynthia Lum and Christopher S. Koper

INTRODUCTION

Is the practice of crime prevention – as well as its scholarship, discourse, tools, institutions, and perspectives – relevant to countering terrorism? Substantive concerns have been expressed about differences between terrorism and crime, both in definition and nature, and accordingly between applying crime prevention strategies and tactics to counterterrorism (for a review of some of these arguments, see Deflem, 2004; LaFree and Dugan, 2004; Mythen and Walklate, 2005; Rosenfeld, 2004). On the one hand, terrorism – commonly defined as violence motivated by political and/or religious ideology, with intentions of creating mass casualties and/or public fear – is a unique type of violence, with extralegal, political, and social elements that diverge from the characteristics of everyday forms of crime. The applications of crime prevention strategies, which mostly include schemes that block very common forms of deviant behavior, could be too weak to be applied to terrorism, or so general and far reaching that their use might lead to costs of freedom and livelihood that greatly outweigh benefits. Further, the most promising counterterrorism approaches may lie outside the criminologist’s purview and expertise, involving international diplomacy, economic or political sanctions, technological or military solutions, or the transformation of religious institutions. In Northern Ireland, for example, a number of policing strategies used against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were seen as exacerbating rather than alleviating IRA terrorism (McGarry and O’Leary, 1999;

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Tonge, 2002). Some have argued that, in the end, political powersharing structures established by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 as well as the IRA’s own de-legitimization were the most effective mechanisms in reducing IRA terrorism (Reynolds, 1999). These were political rather than criminal justice remedies. The extreme rarity of terrorism may mean that many crime prevention techniques are either irrelevant or even dangerous to counterterrorism efforts due to unacceptable levels of false positives and the risks of civil and human rights violations. At the same time, parallels between crime and terrorism suggest that crime-prevention theory and practices can be relevant to countering terrorism (see LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw, 2009; Kennedy, 2009; and Lum, 2009a). Terrorists engage in illegal activities – including murder, assault, property damage, theft, money laundering, and conspiracy – all of which have been studied by crime prevention scholars. As with other types of crime and violence, routines, opportunities, and criminogenic commodities that facilitate terrorism could be successfully blocked (Clarke and Newman, 2006). Criminal justice agencies are responsible for dealing with the perpetrators and victims of terrorism, arguably making the justice arena the most appropriate place for prevention strategies to be developed. Furthermore, many crime prevention researchers study individual, social, psychological, and economic backgrounds and life-course patterns of individuals to predict their later criminality. The same approach could be used to study, for instance, why some juveniles are recruited into terrorist activities or what motivates an individual toward terroristic violence. The multi-disciplinary tradition of criminology matches well with the study of terrorism; a few criminologists with the knowledge and skill sets to study terrorism have already done so from varying perspectives. Ultimately, the question of whether crime prevention techniques, perspectives, theories, and institutions are relevant to counterterrorism requires exploring the parallels between crime and terrorism, the potential for applying crime prevention strategies to addressing terrorism, the legal and constitutional concerns about applying preventive techniques to counterterrorism, and the costs and benefits of such an effort. Further, the application of crime prevention

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interventions (or any intervention) to terrorism must be scientifically evaluated to determine the effectiveness of such approaches (see Lum et al. 2006). In this chapter, we suggest that to begin to answer this question, one useful approach might be to create an organizing framework for crime prevention interventions, and then see if such a framework could be applied to counterterrorism interventions, and what the consequences of doing so would be. A framework we suggest is the Crime Prevention Matrix, a three-dimensional visualization that we have developed extensively for police interventions and research (Lum, 2009b; Lum, Koper, and Telep, 2009) to categorize the wide array of programs that could fall under the umbrella of crime prevention. We explore whether, where, and when counterterrorism efforts might fit into this matrix and, most important, what guidelines should be used to determine the appropriateness of this fit. We close by discussing the implications: why and how those studying crime prevention can contribute to counterterrorism studies.

A FRAMEWORK FOR CRIME PREVENTION

Broadly, crime prevention has been conceptualized as encompassing actions, strategies, plans, perspectives, theories, and approaches that attempt to reduce crime, criminality, and other social problems that contribute to crime (Clarke, 1996; Cornish and Clarke, 1986; Eck and Weisburd, 1995; Homel, 1996; Hughes, 1998; Newman et al., 1997; Newman, 1973; Sherman et al., 1997; Tilley, 2005; Tonry and Farrington, 1995). Prevention activities can range from the reactive to the proactive; focus on individuals, groups, places, situations, times, or physical objects; span different periods of the life of a person, place or group; and involve both criminal justice and noncriminal justice entities and institutions. Indeed, crime prevention encompasses a dizzying array of interventions. Because the conceptualization of crime prevention and its associated tactics and strategies can be so wide-ranging, it may be easy to assert that the umbrella of crime prevention could also encompass counterterrorism. As already mentioned, counterterrorism strategies involve agencies, mechanisms, processes, theories, and conceptualizations that deal with violence, property damage, coercion, and fear.

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But such a sweeping assumption does not pinpoint what type of crime prevention perspectives and strategies apply to counterterrorism or the scientific justifications for such applications. A better approach may be to conceptualize crime prevention through an organizing framework, then determine if counterterrorism fits such a framework and what principles would justify such a fit. To do this, we present one such framework in Figure 7.1, a threedimensional matrix of crime-prevention-program characteristics. Initially inspired by Rosenberg and Knox’s (2005) Child Well-Being Matrix, we developed this more broadly for crime prevention programs and have used it for policing evaluations.1 Each axis represents varying degrees of a common categorizing trait of many crime prevention programs – the scope or type of target, the specificity of the prevention mechanism, and the level of proactivity of the intervention.2 The dimension on the X-axis represents the scale or scope of an intervention’s target, and ranges from individuals at one end to larger social aggregations of individuals and the spaces they occupy, up to the national (or even international) level, at the other end. 1 2

The Matrix is available online at http://gemini.gmu.edu/cebcp/matrix.html One could hypothesize other dimensions that could characterize crime prevention programs, such as type of institution responsible, level of effectiveness, legitimacy and legal challenges, and so on.

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For example, some crime prevention strategies focus on reducing the recidivism of individuals through rehabilitation schemes or by addressing criminogenic groups like gangs. Place-based approaches in contrast (Weisburd, 2002) focus on larger social aggregations, such as blocks, communities, or neighborhoods. The divisions between these categories are not determinate or discrete; ultimately, groups, places, communities, nations, and the international arena are fluid and overlapping concepts based on different aggregations of individuals. The Y-axis represents a second common dimension by which crime prevention strategies are often classified – the level of specificity of an intervention and its goals, from focused to general. More focused crime prevention interventions might be tailored to target specific types of individuals or places. General tactics, on the other hand, may have broader, more philosophical goals such as deterring all potential lawbreakers (e.g., implementing three-strikes laws or increasing police patrol). Like varying targets of crime prevention strategies represented by the X-axis, characterizing crime prevention tactics on degree of specificity is common and has been discussed by a number of scholars (e.g., Erickson and Gibbs, 1975; Sherman and Berk, 1984; Stafford and Warr, 1993). The Z-axis represents the level of proactivity in an intervention, from reactive to proactive to highly proactive. Reactive interventions either reinforce or strengthen the reaction of criminal justice responses (e.g., rapid response to 911 calls or reactive arrests by police). More proactive programs reflect those interventions that tend to use analysis and patterns of previous incidents to reduce the possibility of future crimes. Moderately proactive strategies may intend to reduce a recent crime flare-up or to deter an event likely to happen tomorrow. Highly proactive interventions are geared toward more long-term effects by dealing with underlying causes of problems or addressing early risk factors. The intersection of the three dimensions then presents a way to describe and organize crime prevention programs. For example, the area of the matrix where general, slightly proactive, and communitylevel dimensions intersect could point to interventions such as neighborhood watch or after-school recreational programs. Federal enhancements for local gun crimes and other sentencing laws, to

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provide another illustration, may be placed at the intersection of more national, general, and slightly proactive strategies.

THE RELEVANCE OF THE MATRIX TO COUNTERTERRORISM INTERVENTIONS

What would be the relevance of such an organizing framework to our question of whether crime prevention approaches might be applied to counterterrorism? First, the Matrix creates generalizations about the characteristics of crime prevention interventions that can be described by the three dimensions. Take for instance situational crime prevention strategies such as placing a light next to an outdoor cash machine to prevent robberies. Such a strategy could be categorized as a proactive, place-based, and focused strategy, and there is some evidence that indicates this type of prevention approach is useful in reducing crime (Eck, 2002). On its face, this strategy seems to have little relevance to the prevention of terrorism. More generally, however, it represents an effort to increase guardianship and reduce vulnerability at a place that presents special opportunities for criminal activity. In a similar manner, focused and proactive manipulations of the environment may have relevance to the prevention of terrorist acts at vulnerable places. An example would be the installation of metal detectors and other screening devices in airports or train stations to prevent hijackings and bombings. Thus, it is the intersection of the Matrix dimensions and the associated crime prevention mechanisms at that intersection (in this case, protecting a vulnerable area) that gives us a context in which to think about how research in crime prevention helps to fill out a similar prevention matrix for terrorism. Which prevention measures, then, could be applied to terrorism given such a matrix? It could make more sense to place counterterrorism efforts within the reactive realm of the matrix because terrorism may be difficult to predict and therefore prevent proactively. Reactive approaches to terrorism might range from the pursuit of known terrorist offenders by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to military strikes against terrorist camps in foreign nations.

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To consider another hypothesis, should we use strategies like directed police patrol to reduce the likelihood of shootings or bombings at potentially high-risk places like temples or mosques (a strategy that is focused in terms of place but that emphasizes general deterrence), or should we focus very specifically on the detection and surveillance of known terrorist cells (a more reactive approach focused on individuals or groups)? Some counterterrorism should be placed in the top, right-hand portion of the matrix, where strategies are more international, abstract, and general. This realm could encompass legislation that enhances the punishment of offenders or international investigations against money laundering. One can now see that though the placement of interventions into such an organizing framework can be useful, we also are concerned about whether such placement would yield beneficial results. Thus, we could further apply what we know from the crime prevention evaluation literature about interventions and characteristics of those interventions in terms of prevention effectiveness. If crime and terrorism are similar enough in nature to suggest that similar prevention approaches might be applied to both, then perhaps devising counterterrorism measures with intersecting dimensions similar to those of effective crime prevention interventions may be a useful way of applying crime prevention perspectives to counterterrorism. For example, Lum et al. (2009) did this for the entire range of policing interventions that had been evaluated using at least moderately strong methods. Mapping these studied interventions according to the characteristics discussed earlier, yielded “realms of effectiveness,” or clusters of evaluated interventions that have been shown to have positive effects on crime reduction. Using this knowledge about policing interventions (or any other category of interventions) could provide guidance about what combination(s) of characteristics of counterterrorism efforts may have a greater chance of being effective. Similarly, if no evaluation exists regarding an existing counterterrorism strategy, that strategy might be mapped into the matrix to see if it falls within areas that are more likely to have effective crime prevention strategies (as determined by scientific evaluation).

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GUIDANCE IN USING CRIME PREVENTION CONCEPTS FOR COUNTERTERRORISM INTERVENTIONS

The presentation of the matrix is not meant to suggest that crime prevention is so broadly defined that counterterrorism interventions can fit unequivocally within its framework and vocabulary. Rather, the question of whether criminologists might apply a crime prevention framework when thinking about countering terrorism is an inquiry about the theoretical logic of such placements, as well as the justifications and guiding principles for such decisions. Specifically, placing a counterterrorism program into this matrix suggests that the preventive mechanisms associated with intersecting dimensions of the area of placement (e.g., proactive, general, place-based strategies) not only are effective, but can also be applied to counterterrorism. We argue that the placement of counterterrorism interventions into this matrix must be guided by reasonable, empirically based principles and justifications, not conjectures, academic turf-claiming, or politics. If counterterrorism programs are to be placed within any crime prevention framework, three guiding principles must be considered: 1. Use (and/or develop) knowledge about the nature of terrorism to hypothesize about the areas of the Matrix (and thus the types of strategies) that are most applicable to counterterrorism; 2. Use (and/or develop) evidence from rigorous outcome evaluations to determine which crime prevention and counterterrorism strategies are effective; and 3. Weigh the costs and benefits of applying certain areas of the Matrix to counterterrorism. Guiding Principle (1): Use (and/or develop) knowledge about the nature of terrorism to hypothesize about the areas of the Matrix (and thus the types of strategies) that are most applicable to counterterrorism. Arguably, we should begin by considering what is known about the nature, etiology, and sociology of terrorism from existing research (some of which is probably unknown to many criminologists). For starters, we might consider research that addresses questions such as: * What do we know about the types of people who engage in terrorism? Do they fit a certain profile, based on their background

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characteristics and their life trajectories? Do terrorists have similarities to people who commit other acts of mass murder and mayhem (e.g., school shooters and abortion-clinic bombers) or even more everyday crimes? Are there precursor behaviors (e.g., money laundering) or involvement in other activities and groups (e.g., hate crimes/groups) that predict involvement in terrorism? How do social conditions such as poverty, unemployment, religious ideology, and ethnic conflict contribute to terrorism? What do we know about the organization and operations of terrorist groups and cells? To what extent do they use other criminal activities, such as drug dealing and money laundering, to further their operations? How much do they rely on the assistance of persons not directly involved in the attacks (e.g., financial backers)? Do they operate in ways similar to those of other organized criminal enterprises? At what specific places and times are terrorist acts most likely to occur? What are terrorists’ preferred targets, tools, and methods for inflicting mass casualties and/or terror? How do varieties of terrorism differ (e.g., domestic versus international, political versus religious)?

Although this list of research questions is by no means exhaustive, these sorts of inquiries can suggest hypotheses about the best ways to characterize terrorism, terrorists, and ultimately counterterrorism using our prevention dimensions. Such inquiries can better highlight the parallels between terrorism and other forms of crime (LaFree and Dugan, 2004); where such parallels exist, we can consider whether the former might be reduced using interventions that successfully prevent the latter. For example, if Muslim youths in isolated and impoverished communities join groups at high risk for terrorism for some of the same reasons that inner-city youths join criminal gangs, then perhaps successful strategies for reducing gang membership could be used to steer at-risk Muslim youths away from potential terrorist groups (see Curry, this volume). Similarly, knowledge about the response of terrorists to prevention mechanisms could be used to theorize about whether a preventive framework applies. For example, are terrorists deterred by death or

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apprehension? The scant research available suggests not (Landes, 1978), so preventive mechanisms that emphasize general deterrence may not be useful. However, if there are social-psychological forces that allow for members of terrorist or other hate groups to be reintegrated into society through shaming or mediation, then methods akin to restorative justice may be appropriate. These strategies have been shown to be effective in reducing recidivism among violent offenders (Braithwaite and Strang, 2000; Sherman et al., 2000), and some scholars have offered that they can also be applied to terrorism (McEvoy and Newburn, 2003; Umbreit, 2001). Others have used a social-psychological approach to think about why individuals commit acts of terror; they focus on interventions that make use of those aspects of terrorism (Post, 2006; Victoroff, 2005). To provide another illustration, we can consider the nature of terrorists’ methods. To inflict mass casualties, terrorists must have access to firearms, explosives, chemical agents, weapons of mass destruction, or other equipment or machinery (such as an airplane) that can be used to such ends. They also need targets where many people congregate and that are relatively unguarded (e.g., transportation hubs, shopping centers). These considerations suggest that opportunities, routines, situations, and other mechanisms near in space and time to the actual event, rather than early risk factors, may be important to prevention. In this vein, Clarke and Newman (2006) have emphasized the application of routine activities theory and situational crime prevention to blocking opportunities for terrorism, rather than just trying to locate and arrest terrorists. In addition, Roach et al. (2005), using Ekblom’s (2001) concept of conjunction of criminal opportunities, lend insight into how opportunities and processes that lead to a terrorist event could provide potential targets for prevention. Hypothetically, weapons and materials used to make weapons might be detected and seized before they are used. Metal detectors at airports, which are successful at least in reducing airplane hijackings, are an example of how tangible opportunities can be blocked (Cauley and Im, 1988; Enders and Sandler, 1993, 2000; Enders et al., 1990; Landes, 1978). Such empirical knowledge about which terrorism methods are the most salient can also help in placing a counterterrorism strategy within a prevention matrix.

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It should be emphasized, however, that deriving such parallels between crime and terrorism is itself in need of empirical testing; criminologists cannot simply assume the two are sufficiently similar by logical deduction. Furthermore, using theory and research about the nature of terrorism to draw parallels with crime should be approached cautiously, as similarities between crime and terrorism do not suggest that the outcomes of prevention efforts for crime and terrorism will be the same. The similarities establish only links as to where in the matrix counterterrorism strategies might be placed. More important, we must have evidence that such strategies actually can be effective, a point that leads to our second guiding principle. Guiding Principle (2): Use (and/or develop) evidence from rigorous outcome evaluations to determine which crime prevention and counterterrorism strategies are effective. Knowledge about the nature of terrorism can be helpful in hypothesizing about where counterterrorism might fit in the matrix. However, that knowledge still (a) needs to be empirically tested and supported and (b) will not tell us if a counterterrorism program will work in the same way as a crime prevention program might in the same area of the matrix. As research on terrorism illuminates potential points of intervention, we must then have rigorous evaluation evidence to judge the effectiveness of intervention strategies appropriate for those intervention points. Thus, as with crime prevention, rigorous evaluation research is needed to provide an evidence-based rationale for justifying the placement of intervention strategies into different areas of our crime and terrorism prevention matrix. Of course, the most relevant evidence to aid in this endeavor would be that regarding strategies intended to counter terrorism. Unfortunately, such evidence is virtually nonexistent, as Lum et al. discovered in a systematic search and review of evidence on the outcomes of counterterrorism programs. Others in this volume have also emphasized that the rarity of terrorism events makes it difficult to truly rely on a scientific evidence-base for devising interventions. Given this dearth of knowledge, perhaps one alternative is using existing evaluations of crime prevention programs and how they cluster within the Matrix to help illuminate what might work or guide future evaluation research. In other words, hypotheses about the effectiveness of some

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counterterrorism strategies might be guided by whether similar strategies are effective in reducing crime more generally. Indeed, there is a substantial body of evidence on the effectiveness of crime prevention techniques (Martinson, 1974; National Research Council, 2004; Sherman et al., 1997; Sherman et al., 2002) that might have relevance to counterterrorism. For example, one of the few counterterrorism policies supported by rigorous evaluation evidence is the enhancement of airport security, which has reduced hijackings of airplanes (Cauley and Im, 1988; Enders and Sandler, 1993; Enders et al., 1990). Clear parallels exist between airport-security measures and other situational, place-based target-hardening techniques that have shown promise as general crime prevention methods for microplaces (Eck, 2002; Welsh and Farrington, 2003). Another example is that, with certain exceptions, proactive strategies in policing, such as problem-oriented approaches or hot-spot policing, tend to be more effective in reducing crime than reactive strategies (Sherman and Eck, 2002; Weisburd and Eck, 2004; Lum et al., forthcoming). This may suggest that proactive policing strategies have potential for success against terrorism as well. Such strategies might include enhanced patrols at buildings and other places considered to be at high-risk for attack, or attempts to establish better community relations and information sources in places where terrorist cells are believed to exist. Still other examples might be found in efforts to rehabilitate offenders or to alleviate early risk factors for delinquency and crime. As already described, there is some evidence that restorative justice could be useful for violent offenders and for resolving group conflict. Cognitive-behavioral training, a strategy that seems promising in offender rehabilitation and delinquency prevention (Gottfredson et al., 2002; MacKenzie, 2002) or other conflict-alleviating interventions (Victoroff, 2006) might also be effective in steering high-risk recruits away from normalizing ideological notions that increase their risk of being recruited into terrorist groups. We should be mindful, however, that evaluation research on crime prevention programs can help guide us only to the more effective areas of the matrix. Counterterrorism interventions that use similar prevention mechanisms still have to be tested as to their effectiveness.

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Thus, evaluation research on counterterrorism is needed to get us closer to choosing effective strategies. As will be emphasized in the conclusion, this is an area that is drastically underdeveloped and one to which crime prevention researchers could contribute. Guiding Principle (3): Weigh the costs and benefits of applying certain areas of the Matrix to counterterrorism. Differences in the cost-benefit calculations associated with counterterrorism and other crime prevention interventions may be so vast as to render implications of a crime prevention program irrelevant to counterterrorism policy. Deriving counterterrorism strategies from a crime prevention matrix may make logical sense and may even be supported by evaluations. Yet such derivation may not be justified if astronomical costs are associated with creating counterterrorism measures that mimic crime prevention efforts. This principle is especially important in counterterrorism, where some potential terrorist acts could be so catastrophic or generate so much fear that the public is willing to incur substantial prevention costs, despite the irrationality of associated policies. The astronomical expenditures on counterterrorism interventions since September 11 point clearly to this belief. How terrorism distorts the cost-benefit calculus for prevention mechanisms can be explicated both from the side of terrorists and from that of those trying to prevent their attacks. The supply of and demand for terrorism (Enders and Sandler, 2006, pp. 10–13; Telhami, 2002) differ substantially from the corresponding curves for other forms of crime, thus changing the cost-benefit calculus for a particular area of the matrix. Terrorism has political and historical elements to it that are not present in the nature of ordinary crimes (Roach et al., 2005; Rosenfeld, 2004). Terrorism is often motivated by emotions and causes that are stronger than those that motivate everyday crime, making its supply less responsive to policies that aim to increase its costs. Those who supply suicide bombings, for example, are not deterred by the extreme cost of the act – the loss of one’s own life. Additionally, there is little evidence that increasing the risk of apprehension or the severity of punishment works in deterring terrorists (Landes, 1978). Telhami (2002) has suggested also that there is a demand for terrorism that is reflected in support by nonoffenders – financial, rhetorical, or philosophical – for the

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political and ideological agendas of groups and individuals who commit acts of terrorism. The demand for everyday crime is much less strong or common, except perhaps in the case of vice. The inelastic supply and political demand for terrorism are problems that uniquely affect our ability to rationalize about costs and benefits associated with counterterrorism efforts. The public fear and moral panic that terrorism incites serve to distort further the calculation of costs and benefits. As we have noted, terrorism is much rarer than common forms of crime, even using the broadest definition of terrorism. Accordingly, counterterrorism measures may have to cast wider and deeper nets than their corresponding crime prevention counterparts when attempting to prevent future events. Although this can generate a high false-positive rate, citizens might be more inclined to put up with a higher false-positive rate because of their fear, which can translate into restrictions and violations of their constitutional, legal, and human rights. Additionally, such false positives may fall disproportionately on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Those who are more tolerant of false positives, by contrast, may have low risks of being the victims of such errors. Other costly unintended consequences of interventions can undermine the initial goals of those interventions. Take, for instance, the suggestion of using community-oriented policing to fight terrorism. Such policies could have vastly different benefit-to-cost ratios, depending on how the policies are interpreted. One interpretation seems beneficial: community-oriented schemes that aim to increase the legitimacy of the police within minority communities by improving contact, establishing relationships, and providing better service (Lum, Haberfeld, Fachner, and Lieberman, 2009). Such endeavors can reduce marginalization, a potential cause of recruitment into dissident groups, and also help police develop information sources within communities where terrorists might be hiding (see Greene, this volume). A countervailing application of community policing might be to encourage citizens to report any and all suspicious behavior to law enforcement. Such a sweeping policy might lead to substantially higher costs than benefits. In heterogeneous communities, members of one group may use the police to gain leverage, direct blame, or cause

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moral panic against other groups. Everyday behaviors of minority ethnic or religious groups could be perceived as threatening by outsiders and result in calls to the police about “suspicious” behavior. Strategies could also erode already fragile relationships between the police and communities that are viewed as suspicious or problematic. Recent crackdowns on illegal immigration to fight terrorism could undermine the relationships that police have built within immigrant communities to address everyday problems. Just because an intervention has logical appeal doesn’t mean that it is supported by evidence or is legitimate for either crime prevention or counterterrorism. More generally, wider nets and acceptance of the high costs of preventing terrorism may be viewed as a necessary tradeoff between security and democracy. However, this tradeoff could have serious and substantial long-term costs. Democratic values can deteriorate if the threshold of this balance is pushed too far, especially in countries where democratic culture and institutions are weak, fragile, or developing. Long-term net widening can lead to gradual changes in the tolerance for certain violations of political freedoms that may go unnoticed across generations. Furthermore, how terrorism is defined, and therefore who bears the burden of the negative externalities of prevention efforts, is subject to a number of influences. The government of the day may choose to be opportunistic in their net-widening capacity, targeting specific opposition groups and further exacerbating ethnic conflicts. When applying prevention techniques to counterterrorism, we have to be especially sensitive to this guiding principle. In sum, the application of a preventive framework like the Matrix to counterterrorism depends on what is empirically known about the nature of terrorism, the evidence base of counterterrorism and crime prevention interventions, and how cost-benefit calculations are likely to change when applying crime prevention strategies to terrorism. We conclude by considering how crime prevention scholars can contribute to these inquiries.

HOW CAN CRIMINOLOGISTS CONTRIBUTE?

This discussion emphasizes the need for a preventive framework that uses empirical evidence, not conjecture, opinion, disciplinary

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biases, or politics. We have described a number of counterterrorism research topics to which criminologists might contribute: adding to existing empirical evidence on the nature of terrorism and its parallels to other forms of crime; building evidence on the effectiveness of prevention measures potentially applicable to counterterrorism; evaluating counterterrorism interventions themselves; conducting cost-benefit estimates of crime prevention and counterterrorism programs; exploring knowledge about the collateral effects of counterterrorism; and understanding the institutional, social, and political environments in which counterterrorism is played out. In particular, criminologists may be particularly well-suited to contribute to program evaluation and the development of evidencebased policy in the area of counterterrorism. These two areas are emphasized in criminological research but undeveloped in terrorism studies. A comprehensive review of research on counterterrorism by Lum et al. (2009) revealed that fewer than 1 percent of all studies were based on empirical, systematic research (also Damphousse and Smith, 2004). Under the Campbell Review process,3 Lum et al. (2009) found only seven of over twenty thousand studies reported in articles, books, government reports, dissertations, and other researchpublication venues involved moderately rigorous evaluations of counterterrorism strategies. Those few studies revealed that tested strategies failed to reduce terrorism; or worse, they led to increases in terrorism. For example, though metal detectors in airports are effective in preventing airplane hijackings, there is evidence that there may be substitution and displacement effects, leading to increases in other types of nonhijacking terrorist events. Military responses to terrorist events can increase terrorism in the short run and may have few or no long-term effects. Little is known about the effectiveness of imposing harsher punishments on terrorists or increasing their risk of apprehension. Finally, protecting diplomats, securing embassies, and adopting United Nations resolutions against terrorism seem to 3

The Campbell reviews are designed to search systematically for rigorous evaluations of social interventions (e.g., in the fields of education, psychology, and criminal justice) and then combine similar findings to allow generalizations about what is known about effectiveness of the programs evaluated, often using meta-analytic techniques.

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have little, if any, statistically significant effects on terrorism against intended (or unintended) targets. Thus, although there is a strong research tradition on the etiology, economics, and political aspects of terrorism, we know very little about what types of preventive strategies may be useful to counter acts of terrorism – this despite the proliferation of counterterrorism strategies and the exponential increase in spending on counterterrorism programs that has taken place during the last few years (Congressional Budget Office, 2006). In other words, there is a dire need for research on how to prevent terrorism. This is an area to which crime prevention scholars can make valuable contributions. The evaluation of crime prevention programs has been a major tradition in the field of criminology and criminal justice studies, and it has arguably been the most effective way in which our field has influenced public policy. Criminologists have much experience with empirical outcome evaluations of programs intended to reduce crime and its social harms, experience which is not mirrored in political science or terrorism studies. For criminologists, the interest in evidence-based assessments of counterterrorism programs is also underscored by closely related underlying agendas: contributing to the reduction of social problems, carving an important niche in terrorism research, and addressing the moral panic that can accompany counterterrorism measures. Often, scientific evidence can have a moderating effect on rash, knee-jerk responses that may do more harm than good. In the case of counterterrorism, sound evaluation research can provide a counterweight to policies that could erode democratic and other social and political values (Mythen and Walklate, 2005). Prevention researchers will need to think carefully and creatively about the best ways to evaluate counterterrorism measures. Improving the evidence base of counterterrorism policy in this way will require more than the obligatory “more evaluations.” It will require the creation of an infrastructure to support such an endeavor (Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley 2006). Crime prevention scholars have had some experience building such infrastructures for the evaluation of policing and corrections policies, and such experiences might be useful to counterterrorism studies. This means investing in efforts to

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produce more rigorous outcome evaluations, exploring alternative methods for the study of rare events, building evaluation requirements into public policies, improving access to information for evaluation, and establishing more open dialog between and among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. These efforts can help support calls for more evaluation research. Criminologists have a clear role in counterterrorism research, and our discussion of ways to apply our Crime Prevention Matrix to counterterrorism emphasizes this point. Such applications require exploration of the empirical parallels between terrorism and crime, evaluations of crime prevention and counterterrorism programs, and serious discussion of the costs and benefits of both. These are all research areas where criminologists have experience and that have yet to be adequately filled.

RE F E RE N CE S Braithwaite, J. & Strang, H. (2000). Restorative justice: Philosophy to practice. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Cauley, J. & Im, E. (1988). Intervention policy analysis of skyjackings and other terrorist incidents. The American Economic Review 78(2), 27–31. Clarke, R. (Ed.). (1996). Preventing mass transit crime. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press. Clarke, R. & Newman, G. (2006). Outsmarting the terrorists. Westport, CT: Praeger. Congressional Budget Office. (2006). Estimated appropriations provided for Iraq and the war on terrorism. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Cornish, D. & Clarke, R.V. (Eds.). (1986). The reasoning criminal: Rational choice perspectives of offending. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Damphousse, K. & Smith, B. (2004). Terrorism and empirical testing: Using indictment data to assess changes in terrorist conduct. In Deflem, M. (Ed.), Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Sociology of crime, law and deviance, Volume 5. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. Deflem, M. (Ed.). (2004). Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Sociology of crime, law and deviance, Volume 5. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier.

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Eck, J. (2002). Preventing crime at places. In Sherman, L., Farrington, D., Welsh, B. and MacKenzie, D. (Eds.), Evidence-based crime prevention. New York, NY: Routledge. Eck, J. & Weisburd, D. (Eds.). (1995). Crime and place. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press/Willow Tree Press. Ekblom, P. (2001). The conjunction of criminal opportunity: A framework for crime reduction toolkits. At www.crimereduction.gov.uk/learningzone/ cco.htm. Enders, W. & Sandler, T. (1993). The effectiveness of antiterrorism policies: A vector-autoregression-intervention analysis. The American Political Science Review, 87(4), 829–844. (2000). Is transnational terrorism becoming more threatening? Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44, 307–332. (2006). The Political Economy of Terrorism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Enders, W., Sandler, T. & Cauley, J. (1990). UN conventions, terrorism, and retaliation in the fight against terrorism: An econometric evaluation. Terrorism and Political Violence, 2(1), 83–105. Erickson, M. & Gibbs, J. (1975). Specific versus general properties of legal punishments and deterrence. Social Science Quarterly, 56: 390–397. Gottfredson, D., Wilson, D. & Najaka, S. (2002). School-based crime prevention. In Sherman, L.W., Farrington, D.P., Welsh, B.C. and MacKenzie, D.L. (Eds.), Evidence based crime prevention. London: Routledge. Homel, R. (Ed.). (1996). Politics and practice of situational crime prevention. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press/Willow Tree Press. Hughes, G. (1998). Understanding crime prevention: Social control, risk and late modernity. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Kennedy, L. (2009). Applying crime theory to terrorism research. In Frost, N.A., Freilich, J.D. and Clear, T.R. (Eds.), Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy: Policy proposals from the American society of criminology conference. Belmont, CA: Cengage/Wadsworth. LaFree, G. & Dugan, L. (2004). How does studying terrorism compare to studying crime? In Deflem, M. (Ed.), Terrorism and counterterrorism: Criminological perspectives. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. LaFree, G., Yang, S. & Crenshaw, M. (2009). International cooperation, not unilateral policies may be the best counterterrorist strategy. In Frost, N.A., Freilich, J.D. and Clear, T.R. (Eds.), Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy: Policy proposals from the American society of criminology conference. Belmont, CA: Cengage/Wadsworth. Landes, W. (1978). An economic study of U.S. aircraft hijackings, 1961– 1976. Journal of Law and Economics, 21: 1–31.

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Lum, C. (2009a). Theoretical and Methodological Innovations in Terrorism Research: A Response to LaFree, Yang and Crenshaw. In Frost, N.A., Freilich, J.D. and Clear, T.R. (Eds.), Contemporary issues in criminal justice policy: Policy proposals from the American society of criminology conference. Belmont, CA: Cengage/Wadsworth. (2009b). Translating police research into practice. Ideas in American Policing Lecture Series, Police Foundation, Washington, DC. Lum, C., Haberfield, M., Fachner, G. and Lieberman, C. (2009). “Police activities to counter terrorism: What we know and what we need to know.” In Weisburd, D. Feucht, T., Hakimi, I., Mock, L. and Perry, S. (Eds.), Top protect and to serve: Police and policing in an age of terrorism – and beyond. New York: Springer. Lum, C., Kennedy, L. & Sherley, A. (2006). Are counter-terrorism strategies effective? The results of the Campbell systematic review on counterterrorism evaluation research. Journal of Experimental Criminology. The full review is also available online at: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/doc-pdf/Lum_Terrorism_Review.pdf. Lum, C., Koper, C. & Telep, C. (2009). The Evidence-Based Policing Matrix: An Online Tool. http://gemini.gmu.edu/cebcp/matrix. html. Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, George Mason University. (forthcoming). The Evidence-Based Policing Matrix. Journal of Experimental Criminology. MacKenzie, D. (2002). Reducing the criminal activities of known offenders and delinquents: Crime prevention in the courts and corrections. In Sherman, L.W., Farrington, D.P., Welsh, B.C. and MacKenzie, D.L. (Eds.), Evidence based crime prevention. London: Routledge. Martinson, R. (1974). What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform. Public Interest, 35: 22–54. McEvoy, K. & Newburn, T. (2003). Criminology, Conflict Resolution and Restorative Justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. McGarry, J. & O’Leary, B. (1999). Policing Northern Ireland: Proposals for a new start. Belfast, Northern Ireland: The Blackstaff Press. Mythen, G. & Walklate, S. (2005). Criminology and terrorism: Which thesis? Risk society or governmentality? British Journal of Criminology, 46(3), 379–398. National Research Council (NRC). (2004). Fairness and effectiveness in policing: The evidence. Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices, Eds. Wesley Skogan and Kathleen Frydl. Committee on Law and Justice, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Newman, G., Clarke, R. & Giora Shoham, S. (Eds.). (1997). Rational choice and situational crime prevention: Theoretical foundations. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Newman, O. (1973). Architectural design for crime prevention. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Post, J. (2006). The mind of the terrorist. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, A. (1999). A constitutional pied piper: The Northern Irish Good Friday Agreement. Political Science Quarterly, 114(4): 613–637. Roach, J., Ekblom, P. & Flynn, R. (2005). The conjunction of terrorist opportunity: A framework for diagnosing and preventing acts of terrorism. Security Journal, 18(3), 7–25. Rosenberg, M. & Knox, L. (2005). The Matrix Comes to Youth Violence Prevention: A Strengths-Based, Ecologic, and Developmental Framework. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 29: 185 – 190. Rosenfeld, R. (2004). Terrorism and Criminology. In Deflem, M. (Ed.). Terrorism and counter-terrorism: Criminological perspectives. Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 5. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. Sherman, L.W. & Berk, R. (1984). The specific deterrent effects of arrest for domestic assault. American Sociological Review, 49(2): 261–272. Sherman, L.W. & Eck, J. (2002). Policing for crime prevention. In Sherman, L.W., Farrington, D.P., Welsh, B.C. and MacKenzie, D.L. (Eds.), Evidence based crime prevention. London: Routledge. Sherman, L.W., Farrington, D.P., Welsh, B.C. & MacKenzie, D.L. (Eds.). (2002). Evidence based crime prevention. London: Routledge. Sherman, L.W., Gottfredson, D., MacKenzie, D.L., Eck, J., Reuter, P. & Bushway, S. (1997). Preventing crime: What works, what doesn’t, what’s promising: A report to the United States Congress. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. Sherman, L.W., Strang, H. & Woods, D. (2000). Recidivism Patterns in Canberra Reintegrative Shaming Experiment (RISE). Center for Restorative Justice, Research School of Social Science. Australian National University. Stafford, M. & Warr, M. (1993). A reconceptualization of general and specific deterrence. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 30(2): 123–135. Telhami, S. (2002). The stakes – America and the Middle East: The consequences of power and the choice for peace. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tilley, N. (Ed.). (2005). Handbook of crime prevention and community safety. Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing. Tonge, J. (2002). Northern Ireland: Conflict and change. 2nd Edition. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, Prentice Hall.

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Tonry, M. & Farrington, D. (Eds.). (1995). Building a safer society: Strategic approaches to crime prevention. In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, v. 19. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Umbreit, M.S. (2001). Response to terrorism. Saint Paul, MN: University of Minnesota, School of Social Work, Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking. Victoroff, J. (2005). The mind of the terrorist. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49(1): 3–42. (2006). Fighting terrorism by fighting terrible intergroup relations. Presentation for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism. National Press Club, Washington DC. December, 2006. Welsh, B. & Farrington, D. (2003). Effect of closed-circuit television on crime. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 587(1): 110–135. Weisburd, D. (2002). From criminals to criminal contexts: Reorienting crime prevention research and policy. In Waring, E. and Weisburd, D. (Eds.), Crime and Social Organization: Advances in Criminological Theory, Volume 10. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Weisburd, D. & Eck, J.E. (2004). What can police do to reduce crime, disorder and fear? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 593: 42–65.

chapter eight

Implications of Opportunity Theory for Combating Terrorism James P. Lynch

INTRODUCTION

Opportunity theory (OT) was an innovative approach to understanding why crime occurs, as well as how crime is distributed across people, places, time, and activities (Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garafalo, 1978; Cohen, Felson, and Land, 1980).1 Prior to the appearance of OT, the typical approach to understanding crime was to determine why certain people were motivated to commit crime and others were not. The resulting criminological theories focused on the person, and specifically the criminal, as the unit of analysis, and sociological and psychological processes as the principal explanations for criminal motivation. OT in contrast, emphasized the occurrence of crime rather than criminal motivation as the phenomenon to be explained. The place or the situation is the unit of analysis, and characteristics of those places or situations explain when crime will occur and when it will not (Clarke, 1997). OT was embraced immediately by applied criminologists and practitioners, because it seemed much simpler and easier to translate into policy than traditional criminological theory (Clarke, 1980; 1

The term “opportunity theory” is used to refer to a group of theories that address the occurrence of crime rather than the motivation to commit crime. It includes routine activity theory, lifestyle theory, defensible space theory, situational crime prevention, and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). These various theories differ in many respects, including the relative emphasis given physical as opposed to social aspects of environments, to intentional as opposed to naturally occurring variation in opportunity, and to macrosocial as opposed to situational sources of opportunity.

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Felson and Clarke, 1998). Under the latter paradigm, crime could be affected only through the psychological and sociological processes that affected motivation. This was a long-term process that was imprecise in its outcome, and largely out of the control of criminal justice agencies that are often held accountable for crime and its distribution. OT gave these groups a way to understand the occurrence of crime that could be immediately translated into action. Practitioners were quick to use this theory to formulate policies, and applied criminologists, in turn, studied these policies (and other instances of opportunity reduction) to test the basic tenets of OT. These efforts have produced a body of empirical literature that demonstrates the effectiveness of opportunity reduction for controlling common law crime (Clarke, 1995; Guerette, 2009). This essay addresses the issue of whether OT can be as usefully applied to terrorism, as it has been to ordinary street crime. The first of the following sections describes OT, and the second considers its applicability to the problem of terrorism. In the third section, we assess the extent to which OT can be used to understand where and when acts of terrorism will occur. This is done by comparing the nature of terrorist acts to the assumptions underlying OT, as well as to the assumptions required to employ the methodologies used to test opportunity theories of street crimes. The matter of applicability revolves largely around the question of whether OT can be useful for understanding and preventing terrorism. We find that although OT provides a very useful framework for thinking about preventing terrorist acts, it cannot yet offer an empirically based understanding of where and when terrorist acts will occur, and of how these acts can be prevented on a consistent basis. Existing knowledge about the relationship between opportunity reduction and fear of street crime, as well as the study of opportunity reduction and its effect on fear of terrorism, may be, as Forst suggests in Chapter 12, of more use in managing the fear engendered by terrorism.

OPPORTUNITY THEORY

OT is designed to explain where and when crime will occur. Various frameworks have been developed to identify attributes of places,

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activities, and times that are conducive to crime (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). Interventions have been designed to change these attributes and thereby influence the prevalence and incidence of crime across times, places, and activities (Clarke, 1997) The validity of OT has been assessed by examining the effects of these manipulations of opportunity as well as the naturally occurring variance in opportunity on the occurrence of ordinary street crime.2 Defining Opportunity OT subsumes a number of more specific attempts to define attributes of situations that can affect the opportunity to commit crime. Lifestyle theory, routine activity theory (RAT), and situational crime prevention all attempt to identify the opportunity to commit crime. These specific formulations of OT are similar in the concepts that they have used to define opportunity, but differ with regard to the empirically observable attributes of situations that they use to identify the subdimensions of opportunity. Cohen et al. (1980) argue that opportunity for crime exists when attractive targets are exposed in the absence of guardianship. Targets of crime are attractive if they have monetary or symbolic value to an offender. So on average, a Bugatti will be more attractive than a Dodge, because the former costs more than the latter and it is also more prestigious to own. Exposure refers to whether the target of crime is visible and accessible to the offender. If your Bugatti is kept in a garage in a remote location, then potential offenders will not select it as a target because they do not know it is there. Accessibility means that the offender can physically get to the target either directly or through a proxy. These two dimensions of exposure are additive and independent. A target that is visible is more exposed than a target that is not, and a target that is both visible and accessible has even greater exposure. Guardianship refers to the presence of guardians who can intervene to prevent or interrupt the crime. Security guards, 2

“Ordinary street crime” refers to serious crimes of assault and/or theft such as those captured in the Uniform Crime Reports index crime classification as opposed to vice crimes such as gambling, prostitution, and drug use; more minor crime such as loitering, simple assault, status offenses, and trespassing; or crime perpetrated by deception rather than force, such as fraud or identity theft.

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for example, would clearly affect guardianship in the situation. Guard dogs would be similarly unambiguous as an example of guardianship. Locks, in contrast, would affect exposure because they are passive. They restrict access, but they do not act or cannot act to prevent or interrupt a crime. The most prominent early work on OT took the routine activity approach to identifying criminal opportunity. It focused largely on the naturally occurring, social aspects of environment produced by macrosocial forces. At that time, Felson and his colleagues examined the effects of the miniaturization of goods and the increasing laborforce participation of women as social, structural, and technological changes that, by altering routine activities, offered opportunity for crime (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Cohen et al. 1980). Later, researchers used the newly emerging victimization surveys to associate more direct measures of routine activities with opportunity, and thereby, with criminal victimization (Maxfield, 1987; Lynch, 1987; Cantor and Lynch, 1993). Gradually, the routine activity approach to identifying criminal opportunity gave way to situational crime prevention. In contrast, situational crime prevention emphasized both the physical and social aspects of environments, engineered as opposed to naturally occurring opportunity, and the situation rather than one’s position in the social structure. The dominance of the situational crime prevention approach was due in part to abundance of good data that could be used to test and elaborate the theory. Some of the early natural experiments conducted by Clarke and his colleagues at the Home Office captured the imagination of academics and practitioners, and demonstrated that the manipulation of opportunity could reduce crime in a given situation (Clarke and Mayhew, 1988; Mayhew, Clarke, and Elliot, 1989). This gave rise to a large number of evaluations of crime reduction programs based upon opportunity reduction, all of which became potential data for testing and building OT (Guerette, 2009). In contrast, the data available for testing routine activity theories was less abundant and the results less dramatic, so the interest in this approach to building OT waned. The transition in Marcus Felson’s work illustrates this shift in emphasis most clearly. In the 1970s, he did some of the pioneering work in routine activity theory with victimization surveys to make

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the point that opportunity was important as a factor in understanding crime (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Cohen et al. 1980). This work stalled in the 1980s in part because of the inability of victim surveys to provide the data necessary to build and test middle-level theories. By 2002, he had abandoned the RAT approach and wholeheartedly embraced the situational crime prevention (Felson, 2002). Using the situational crime prevention approach, subsequent definitions of OT became increasingly complex as a result of adding dimensions to the theory and by elaborating the definition of those initial dimensions. For example, the dimension of proximity to motivated offenders was added to the opportunity framework to acknowledge that the presence of motivated offenders in proximity to crime targets can affect the risk of crime, and that pools of motivated offenders were distributed in space and time. Whereas the initial work on OT categorized and examined the natural variation of criminal opportunity across places, situations, and activities (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Langan, Cox, and Collins, 1987; Lynch, 1987; Maxfield, 1987), the development of the theory has been driven more by the evaluations of programs and policies (Clarke and Mayhew, 1988; Clarke, 1997). This makes for a slightly different nomenclature. Those who study naturally occurring variation in opportunity tend to identify and group attributes of targets, whereas those evaluating policies tend to specify opportunity concepts by identifying actions that can be taken to reduce opportunity. The two vocabularies can usually be easily mapped one onto the other. The evolution in OT can be seen very clearly in Ronald Clarke’s work. In 1985, Clarke had taken the four concepts in routine activity theory – accessibility, guardianship, attractiveness, and proximity – and transformed them into three major intervention strategies, each with four subdimensions. Opportunity could be reduced by (1) increasing the effort required, (2) increasing the risk of apprehension, and (3) reducing the rewards for committing the offense (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). Increasing the effort could be done by hardening the target, controlling access, deflecting offenders, and controlling facilitators. Hardening targets included steps like steering wheel locks that made it more difficult to accomplish the crime. Access control included policies like entry phones or ID badges that

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Table 8.1. Opportunity reduction strategies and techniques under each Strategies Increase perceived Increase Reduce anticipated Remove effort perceived risk reward excuses Techniques Target hardening

Entry/exit screening Merchandise tags

Target removal Removal of car radio

Fenced yards

Formal surveillance Security guards

Identifying property Property marking

Stimulating conscience Roadside speedometers

Deflecting offenders Street closures

Surveillance by employee Park attendants

Reducing temptation Off-street parking

Controlling distributors Drinking age laws

Control facilitators

Natural surveillance

Denying benefits

Facilitating compliance

Steering locks Access control

Rule setting Customs declarations

denied access to persons with no right to be near targets. Deflecting offenders could be accomplished by closing streets or moving attractions that brought offenders near targets. Controlling facilitators refers to restricting access to tools needed to accomplish the crime, such as guns or computers. The full range of specific concepts included under each opportunity reduction strategy is presented in Table 8.1. By 2003, Clarke’s opportunity reduction framework had increased to five strategies with five specific activities in each. To the original three strategies, he added reducing provocations and reducing excuses. Reducing provocations refers to reducing the precursors of crime events – the things that encourage or free potential offenders to take advantage of the opportunity to commit crime. So the chance of violence can be reduced by reducing frustrations in situations stemming from crowding or long lines, so that persons are less likely to respond violently to provocations. It can also be reduced through avoiding disputes by clearly marking areas for different activities or separating rival sports fans. Reducing excuses for violence removes

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aspects of the situation that “neutralize” the moral binds of laws and mores, and that allow people to “drift” into crime (Becker, 1963; Matza, 1964). Making rules clear reduces “neutralization” by making appropriate behavior unambiguous, and reinforcing this message by featuring these rules prominently. Excuses for ignoring rules such as inefficient service or drugs should also be removed to make “neutralization” more difficult. In his earlier formulations, Clarke conveyed the idea that potential criminals are rational actors who will look at crime in a costbenefit framework. By reducing the benefits and increasing the costs in a particular situation, one can reduce crime. In his more recent formulation, Clarke acknowledges that many potential offenders are also irrational. They are influenced by affective states that can be aggravated or ameliorated by the situation. This evolution also marks an attempt to broaden the applicability of OT beyond the explanation of property crimes to the understanding of violence. Although OT has increased in complexity, it still has not reached the level of specificity necessary to serve as an unambiguous guide to the opportunity for common law crime in a given situation. What will constitute target hardening, for example, in one situation may not in another. This increased specificity will come as more work is done on OT but the theory is not there yet. Moreover, some of the concepts in the frameworks offered by Clarke and his colleagues are not easily distinguished from others. Under “increase the risk,” for example, Clarke lists “taxi driver IDs,” and under “reduce the rewards,” he lists “licensed street venders.” The mechanism seems similar in that both reduce the anonymity of potential offenders or facilitators, and thereby increase the chance of apprehension. There may be a distinction between these specific instances of opportunity reduction strategies, but the concepts are not defined clearly and extensively enough to know what this distinction might be. Some of this ambiguity comes from the very applied nature of most of the more recent work in opportunity reduction. Applying OT in a specific instance requires adaptation of general concepts, and this adaptation is so great and so unique to a specific situation that there is no sense torturing a concept to make it clearer. Once a general strategy has been chosen, the clinicians in the situation can give the

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concept specific content.3 This is a good strategy if your primary interest is reducing crime in a particular instance. It is less useful if you are interested in building a generalizable and parsimonious theory of opportunity. Here, fine distinctions in the implementation of strategies become the means for refining the theory, but this task has not been given the attention it should receive. Opportunity theories of common law crime have increased in scope and complexity over the last twenty years. They have begun to provide a framework for understanding how situations can contribute to the occurrence of crime. The application of opportunity reduction strategies in specific situations has provided the data necessary to construct an integrated and complete theory of criminal opportunity (Felson, 2002). The synthesis of these data, however, has not yet reached fruition. So we can use the opportunity framework to suggest a range of opportunity reduction strategies that could reduce street crime in a particular situation, but the theory has not reached the level of specificity where it would indicate unambiguously which opportunity reduction strategy would be most effective in that instance.

TESTING OPPORTUNITY THEORY

In addition to defining what constitutes opportunity for crime in a given situation, proponents of OT needed to establish empirically (1) that reductions in opportunity were correlated with reductions in crime, and (2) that reductions in opportunity would not simply displace crime to other targets or result in the substitution of alternative technologies for those removed. Over the years, reasonably good evidence has been amassed indicating that reductions in opportunity reduce crime, and do not frequently result in displacement or adaptation (Barr and Pease, 1990; Hesseling, 1994). Some of that evidence is reviewed in the following section. Testing the effects of opportunity on crime requires variation in opportunity as well as in crime across situations. This variation has 3

The opportunity framework offers a well-developed process of crime analysis to be applied to a particular situation – isolate the problem, review the literature, analyze the problem, list potential interventions, implement the intervention, and evaluate the outcome.

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been observed in several ways. First, specific programs designed to reduce opportunity were implemented in a specific set of situations, and the covariation of crime and opportunity was assessed in that situation. Sometimes this manipulation of opportunity was done within the context of an experiment – with random assignment and manipulation of opportunity to experimental and control groups – but not in others. Second, the natural variation in opportunity across situations was correlated with the variation in crime across situations. Evaluations of Interventions The initial tests of OT took advantage of incidental and even accidental manipulations of opportunity. The detoxification of natural gas in England, for example, removed the instrument of choice for suicide. The result was that the rate of suicides with natural gas decreased substantially whereas the rate of suicides by other means did not change (Clarke and Mayhew, 1988). This supported the general idea that reducing opportunity can reduce crime. Another instance of incidental variation in opportunity was the motorcycle helmet law in Germany (Mayhew et al., 1989). Here, a law was passed requiring the use of helmets when riding a motorcycle. Since most motorcycle thefts were not premeditated, potential offenders were not likely to come equipped with a helmet. As a result, they were much more likely to be stopped by the police when they were riding the stolen motorcycle, thereby increasing the guardianship on motorcycle thefts. After the law was passed, the theft of motorcycles decreased dramatically with no increase in the theft of other vehicles. As opportunity reduction became more popular as a crime control strategy, the evaluation of self-conscious opportunity reduction programs became a good source of data for testing OT. Evaluations of the effect of the installation of wheel locks on motor-vehicle theft, for example, showed that vehicle theft was reduced as a result (Webb, 1997). A burglary intervention program in Huddersfield, England was implemented and evaluated, demonstrating that increased surveillance of repeat victims of burglary substantially decreased burglary rates in the area (Anderson and Pease, 1997). Similar evaluations of street lighting (Painter and Farrington, 1997), closed-circuit television (Brown, 1997), and tagging of merchandize

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(DiLeonardo, 1997) all found negative effects of these opportunity reduction strategies on crime rates. Very sophisticated evaluations of area-based police interventions also showed that opportunity reduction reduces crime (Weisburd et al., 2006). The results of these and other evaluations (Guerette, 2009) led to the conclusion that in a large number of situations (but not all), opportunity reduction resulted in decreases in crime. Although these vehicles for research helped establish the general utility of OT they were less useful for elaborating the breadth and depth of opportunity concepts. These evaluations of purposeful attempts to reduce opportunity were dependent on the actions of the police and others to initiate opportunity reduction programs. The range of opportunity reduction strategies, and therefore the range of opportunity concepts, that can be tested will be limited as a result. The police may, for example, restrict their programs to various forms of “target hardening” such as “clubs” for automobiles, but avoid major design changes in motor vehicles, as these are seen as the responsibility of motor-vehicle manufacturers. There was also the tendency among advocates of opportunity reduction as a policy to feature successful programs and not to report those that were not successful (Clarke, 1997). Though this kind of selective evidence encouraged the use of opportunity reduction as a crime control strategy, it limited the usefulness of this evidence in building the theory. Naturally and Routinely Occurring Variation in Opportunity Victimization surveys offered another venue for assessing the co-variation of opportunity and crime. These surveys included victims and nonvictims as well as information on places and situations that could provide opportunity for common law crime. Victim surveys have a number of benefits and liabilities as a source of data on OT. The benefits include a representative sample of persons and, to the extent that appropriate questions are asked of respondents, a representative sample of opportunity. This avoids some of the selectivity that occurs in the program evaluation data. Though this potential has been exploited to some extent, difficult issues of survey design have inhibited the use of this vehicle for elaborating and testing

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OT. Some of the limitations of victim surveys as vehicles include the fact that they are limited to the natural variation in opportunity that exists in the population, and cannot introduce varieties of opportunity reduction. This inability to manipulate opportunity and the fact that most of these surveys are cross-sectional also limits the use of experimental and quasi-experimental designs in testing OT (Guerette, 2009). Nonetheless, the analysis of victim-survey data has been a major source of evidence for establishing empirical support for the opportunity perspective. The initial studies based on victim-survey data used surveys that were not specifically designed to test OT. Using the National Crime Survey (NCS), Cohen and Felson (1979) found that households with more people in the labor force had higher rates of burglary victimization, due presumably to the lower levels of guardianship in those households. Other studies found consistent relationships between social-structural characteristics of persons or their lifestyle that were proxies for opportunity concepts (Hindelang et al., 1978; Cohen et al., 1980; Cohen and Cantor, 1981). A person’s laborforce status was used to indicate the degree of exposure both for the person and for the household that remained empty while the person was at work. Persons in the work force had higher rates of personal victimization and higher rates of burglary. Gradually, more questions designed to measure opportunity concepts were added to victim surveys, such as time out of the household and the presence or absence of self-protective devices (Cantor and Lynch, 1992; Miethe and Meier, 1994; Rountree and Land, 1996; Tseloni, 2000). The results again showed a negative relationship between opportunity reduction and victimization risk. Still more focused surveys explored the effects of opportunity in specific activity domains such as work or school (Cox, Collins and Langan, 1987; Lynch, 1987; Addington, 2003). These domain-specific surveys were better able to measure forms of opportunity reduction because they focused on a smaller range of behavior. This simplified the survey-design problems that have inhibited the use of victim surveys to test OT. In almost every case, victimization surveys have supported the basic relationship between opportunity reduction and victimization by street crime.

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Addressing Displacement and Substitution In addition to demonstrating that opportunity reduction has a negative effect on crime, it was important to demonstrate that this crime was not simply displaced to other places, other targets, or other crimes. This is a bit more complicated than testing the negative correlation between opportunity reduction and a specific crime of interest, because one must identify the range of places, targets, and technologies that could be chosen when the opportunity to commit one type of crime in a given situation is reduced. When the range of alternative targets or alternative technologies is identified, one must monitor these targets to ensure that displacement does not occur. In some cases, the range of alternatives is clear, whereas in others, it might not be. For example, in a study that is evaluating the effects of opportunity reduction for car theft, should they assess the influence of this program on motorcycles as a target of displacement or on bicycles? What about trucks? It is conceivable that efforts to reduce burglary could encourage burglars to join the drug trade or move to street robbery. This type of displacement is not often assessed. Geographic displacement is also complicated. Although studies have often examined the effects on adjacent areas, more distant areas could be substituted, because they have targets and access or egress similar to the area in which opportunity was reduced. It may be the social similarity of areas that make them attractive as alternative targets, and not their geographical proximity. Most of the evidence from studies that have made reasonable assumptions about where and to what displacement might occur seems to support the idea that opportunity reduction does not simply result in displacement. There is a true reduction in crime as a result of opportunity reduction. Mayhew and Clarke’s (1988) study of the effects of detoxification of natural gas on suicide included the monitoring of suicides by other means, and they found no increase in suicide by other means. Similarly, the evaluation of the helmet laws in Germany monitored other vehicle thefts to see if thwarted motorcycle thieves would move on to these other targets (Mayhew, Clarke, and Elliot, 1989). They did not. More sophisticated assessments of geographical displacement have shown that there is none, and that there is evidence of adjacent areas benefiting from opportunity reduction in targeted communities (Weisburd et al., 2006).

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Summary Opportunity theories of common law crime have developed substantially since their inception in the late 1970s. The basic proposition that crime can be reduced (and not just displaced) by reducing opportunity in specific situations has been firmly establish with empirical testing. Theories of what constitutes opportunity for crime in a particular situation have become increasingly more complex over time, and it is a worthwhile approach to understanding and controlling street crime. This theory has not reached the level of specificity whereby it can provide detailed guidance to efforts to control crime.

CAN OPPORTUNITY THEORY BE USED TO UNDERSTAND AND COMBAT TERRORISM?

As the foregoing discussion suggests, the utility of an opportunity reduction approach for controlling ordinary street crime is well established, and OT is a useful way to accumulate and organize knowledge about effective crime reduction. The purpose of this essay is to determine whether OT will be useful for understanding and combating terrorism. There is no doubt that opportunity reduction is being practiced in response to terrorism. One need only go to an airport, government building, or monument to see that this is the case. We are much less certain that this strategy is effective in reducing the number or rate of terrorist acts, or that the approach to building OT for common law crimes can be applied to terrorism. Addressing these issues must begin with a definition of terrorism and a comparison of terrorism to common law crime. If terrorism is like common law crime in all important respects, then we can reasonably assume from the success of OT in understanding common law crime that OT will be useful in understanding and combating terrorism. Terrorism and Ordinary Street Crime Ordinary street crime includes acts of theft or violence in which offenders take or damage the property or the person of a victim. These acts are prohibited by statute or custom. The motive behind these acts can be instrumental or expressive. When they are instrumental, they are seen as a means to financial gain or power. When they are expressive,

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they are motivated by emotions such as anger or fear. These crimes require that the damage be done and that it be done intentionally. Terrorism is like ordinary street crimes in some respects but not others. Terrorist acts, like ordinary common law crimes, involve damage to property or persons without the consent of the victims. This damage is inflicted intentionally. As Forst (Chapter 12, this volume) points out, the motives or purposes of terrorist acts are different from those of ordinary crimes in that the former are intended to further political goals through the generation of fear. The latter are designed to further personal goals of accumulating property or exerting control over other persons. Consistent with these goals, perpetrators of ordinary common law crime prefer that their acts remain largely invisible, except in specific incidents in which offenders want their victims to know for the purpose of intimidation. Even when their acts are visible, offenders in ordinary crimes take great pains not to be identified, injured, or caught. In contrast, terrorists want to make their crimes as visible as possible in order to maximize the amount of fear generated. They also are not as concerned with being identified, injured, or caught. The goals of terrorism, then, are collective and political, whereas the goals of ordinary common law crime are overwhelmingly individualistic and economic.4 People commit burglary because they want the property that this activity generates. Terrorists commit acts of terror to advance the collective political goals of their group. From these differences in goals come differences in objectives. The individualistic orientation of ordinary crime and its largely economic intent means that offenders will want to limit the visibility of these acts and keep secret the identity of the perpetrators. In contrast, terrorists want their acts to be both visible and attributable to them. These differences in the goals and objectives of terrorists, as compared to persons committing street crimes, are consequential for the application of OT to the understanding of terrorism.

4

This is not to say that personal motivations do not affect terrorists, but that in the case of terrorists, there is a corporate entity with interests that will constrain the personal motivations of individual terrorists. Simon and Tranel (in this volume) provide evidence of both the individual and organizational forces operating on individual terrorists. This corporate entity is usually not a factor in the case of street crime.

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Opportunity theory assumes that criminals are rational actors, and that we can know what their rational calculus is in choosing a target and a time for committing a crime (Clarke and Cornish, 1985). Knowing how an offender reasons allows us to assess the attractiveness of targets and evaluate the costs imposed by guardianship. An offender seeking to maximize monetary return will choose a target that is the most valuable, fungible, and accessible, and that involves the lowest risk of being caught. The definition of value, fungibility, and accessibility would be reasonably similar across persons. This is consistent with the greater emphasis given property crime in both interventions based on OT and in tests of OT (Clarke, 1997). The utility function for theft is more uniform and more easily understood than for more expressive crimes such as assault.5 I would argue that the utility function for terrorists is more complex and varied than for perpetrators of ordinary street crime, therefore our ability to accurately identify attractive targets is more limited.6 The generation of profit through theft is relatively simple when compared to the generation of fear through terrorist acts. Profit from theft is some function of the value of the goods stolen, the transaction costs involved in stealing the goods, and transforming the goods into money. The generation of fear is much more complicated. Acts that will scare one person will not put fear in another, whereas the valuation of property is much more uniform across the population. The complexity of the link between criminal or terrorist acts and fear is so great that people often say that fear of crime is “irrational.” This charge usually means that there is not a simple relationship between fear and objective risk such that groups with low levels of objective risk of criminal victimization have high levels of fear of criminal victimization (Warr, 1984). 5

6

This is not to say that violent crimes are irrational. Tedeschi and Felson (1994) make a good argument that violence often has a purpose such as (1) getting others to comply, (2) restoring justice, or (3) protecting one’s self image. My contention is that valuations of what constitutes insult or injustice in the population will be more variable than what constitutes a desirable car or computer. Clarke and Newman (2006) make a creative and serious attempt at identifying the utility function of terrorists in target selection with their EVILDONE framework. However creative this framework may be, it is, and probably will remain, speculation.

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The complexity of the crime-fear link can also be seen in the variety of terrorist strategies that can be successful in generating fear. The attack on highly visible symbols such as the World Trade Towers generates fear, but so too does suicide bombings in neighborhood shopping centers or random shots by snipers in major metropolitan areas. The complexity of the crime-fear link makes it difficult to understand the utility function of terrorists. Understanding the terrorist utility function is crucial to identifying the opportunity for the occurrence of terrorist acts in a specific situation or place. Opportunity theory and opportunity reduction strategies are most useful in the case of “crimes of opportunity.” This term, “crimes of opportunity,” generally means that the offender did not approach the crime with forethought or intense motivation. If the offender is highly motivated, then he or she is more likely to adapt to limitations of opportunity, or to search for an alternative target or technology. This is the case, even within ordinary street crime, where professional burglars are more likely to respond to limitations on opportunity with new technologies than casual burglars. To the extent that terrorists are more motivated than criminals who commit ordinary street crimes, opportunity reduction strategies will be less effective, because their effects will be short-lived as terrorists employ new technologies or select new targets. Opportunity theory and opportunity reduction are less applicable to organized criminal activity, because the utility function of a corporate entity can be different from that of an individual offender. OTs of ordinary street crime are based on the rational calculus of the individual offender. In such a framework, concerns about the safety of the offender loom large in the selection of targets. Corporate entities are willing to pursue activity that is not in the best interest of the employees doing the work, but is in the long-range interest of the organization. Suicide bombers are a perfect instance of the preeminence of corporate rationality over individual rationality. This is not to say that the utility function of corporate crime entities cannot be understood, but that it is different from that of individual offenders who have been the main focus of OT based on common law crime. Moreover, the utility function of the corporation may be different from that of the individual, and both must be taken

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into account. This is an added layer of complexity that has not been explored much in studying opportunity reduction strategies in common law crime.7 Most terrorist acts involve organizations; the corporate pursuit of innovation is more likely to develop successful adaptations to reductions in opportunity or to find new targets. The cost of searching for alternative targets or technologies in response to opportunity reduction can be borne by a group more easily than by an individual. Moreover, the group can reinforce the motivation to search for alternative targets and technologies because of the commitment to group goals or to colleagues in the group. Search behavior that would have been abandoned by the individual will be pursued for the group. This increases the likelihood that terrorists would engage in displacement and substitution. Terrorism is different from ordinary common law crime in ways that make it unlikely that OTs or opportunity reduction strategies developed for common law crimes will be directly applied to terrorism. Although it is intuitively appealing that limiting access or increasing guardianship for a particular target will reduce the chance of terrorist attacks on that target, OT helps us very little in identifying likely targets that a terrorist will choose, and the chances of displacement and substitution are very high. Conceptual frameworks based on OT such as those developed by Clarke and Newman (2006) are useful for thinking about opportunity reduction, but there is little direct empirical evidence indicating that one strategy will be more effective in preventing terrorism than another in a specific situation. Building a Theory of Opportunity for Terrorism Although OTs developed for ordinary street crime may not be easily or directly applicable to terrorism, it may still be possible to develop empirically based theories of opportunity for terrorism using the same methodologies that have been employed in developing OTs for 7

It is interesting that none of the many case studies of natural and engineered variation in criminal opportunity have distinguished between organized and nonorganized crime. This is consistent with minimizing the role of offenders in OT but it would be a useful distinction in determining when OT can most fruitfully be applied and when it cannot.

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street crime. By evaluating opportunity reduction programs or taking advantage of natural variations in the opportunity for terrorism, it may be possible to better understand the link between opportunity and terrorism. I believe that, unfortunately, here too, unique features of terrorism make it unlikely that this type of empirical work will tell us much. There is no shortage of interventions designed to reduce the opportunity for terrorism. One need only go to the airport, a government building, or the New York subway to see that increases in surveillance of guardianship abound. The increased surveillance in airports is particularly salient to me because I am on some form of “no fly” list, as a result of which, I must see an airline representative each and every time I fly in the United States. After twenty or thirty minutes of checking, I am issued a boarding pass. We could learn a great deal about the effectiveness of these increases in surveillance if we assessed their effectiveness in a manner similar to what Ron Clarke and his colleagues (1997) have done for surveillance designed to reduce common law crime – monitoring the prevalence of the crime prior to the reduction in surveillance, and assessing it again afterward. Unfortunately, this approach is complicated by the rare-event nature of terrorism. Places that are the object of opportunity reduction programs can go for years and years without a terrorist event, so reductions in terrorist incidents could be just happenstance. It is very difficult to detect change in terrorism with these evaluations. It may be possible in these evaluations of opportunity reduction programs to assess the frequency of the occurrence terrorism after the intervention using some sort of counterfactual. Rather than comparing the post-period to the pre-period, we would compare the post-period to what we would expect the frequency to be in that postperiod. This expectation is based on theory or other empirical evidence. This approach is more feasible when the theories on which it is based are well established, and that is not the case with OTs of terrorism. If the evaluation of specific opportunity reduction programs is not a fruitful empirical strategy, then perhaps examining the “natural” variation in opportunity may be of some use. Here, the rare-event

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problem can be addressed by accumulating terrorism events over time and place to get enough sample cases to permit analysis. Thus, incidents of terrorism can be aggregated in a sample of nations over time to obtain several dozen incidents or more for each nation, or they can be aggregated in nations over time to form a time series. One of the problems in these approaches is finding a denominator of the terrorist incident rate. What is the population at risk? Very often, the population for a particular ecological unit – in this case, nation – is used as the denominator. These national rates are compared, and attributes of these nations are correlated with these rates to identify the correlates of terrorism incidents. The same is often the case with the time-series data, where changes in counts of terrorist events are used rather than some rate based on the at-risk population (Enders and Sandler, 2002). These highly aggregated types of analysis are very blunt instruments indeed. Not taking account of the at-risk population leaves open the possibility that changes in the volume of this population, and not some policy change, have produced the observed changes in terrorist acts. Moreover, aggregating the information to the nation level obscures a great deal of the within-nation variation in both the dependent and the independent variables. Terrorist attacks may be concentrated in a specific region that may have very different characteristics from those of the nation as a whole. The intervention behavior that is the principal independent variable is often a national change in policy, such as the use of metal detectors that will be differentially implemented at specific locations within the nation or over time. This too will add within-nation variation and limit one’s ability to determine if the intervention has had an effect. Opportunity reduction strategies or natural variation in opportunity will need to be very large to observe any differences across these highly aggregated units. These nation-level analyses are more likely to find effects of large differences in the social structure of nations, such as levels of inequality or ethnic heterogeneity. Detecting the effects of differences at the situational level, as OT requires, demands incident-level data, with a record for each situation or place-time unit. Another complexity with aggregating terrorist events to solve the rare-event problem is the resulting increase in the heterogeneity of the terrorist events

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included. The temptation is to include as terrorism any event that minimally satisfies the definition. This will result in treating events that are quite different in their intent, consequences, and context as the same. Having this type of heterogeneity in the dependent variable will reduce the explanatory power of any statistical model (Lynch, 1987). There have been a small number of very clever incident-level analyses of existing databases of terrorism events (Lum and Koper, 2006), but these, too, suffer from the rare-event problem and the ensuing problems of aggregation that occur when researchers try to compensate for the rarity of terrorist events. Dugan, LaFree, and Piquero (2005), for example, studied airline hijackings, some of which were terrorist acts. To get their sample of 828 hijackings they included every known event over a fifty-two-year period. They measured policy changes using the year in which the policies were adopted without any direct measure of implementation across time and place. In some cases, they distinguished countries that implemented policies, but there was no measure of variation below the nation. Even with all of this aggregation, they could identify only 124 terrorist events, and only 5 in the United States. This is much too blunt an instrument to tell us much about the effects of opportunity reduction in specific situations. The sample of terrorist events is small, the measures of opportunity reduction are not very precise, and many other factors can be at play across these wide expanses of time and space. Lum and Koper (in this volume) are more sanguine about criminologists’ ability to build knowledge through program evaluations, but it is not clear to me how this will be done in light of the rare-event problem and the other problems that flow from it. It may be possible to build incident-level databases that will be more sensitive to opportunity differences in the situation. Analysts could employ a case-control design wherein matched time-place units could be found for every terrorist incident. So, for every monument that was a target of a terrorist attack, one would find a similar monument that was not the object of attack during some time period; and for every shopping center that was attacked, a matching shopping center would be found, and so on. The difficulty with a case-control design, however, is the selection of the control cases, that is, those place-times

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without terrorism incidents. Ideally, controls should be selected from an exhaustive or at least representative list of all units, in this case, time-place units. If this condition is not satisfied, any differences (or failures to find differences) between the case and control groups could be due to selection bias. Obtaining a sampling frame or list of time-place units for such analysis is not simple. First, one would need a typology of places at risk of terrorist attack, such as airports, planes, and mass-transit systems. Then the time-places in which a terrorist attack occurred would be selected as the case group, and a random sample or a matched sample of the remaining time-place units would be selected as a control group. Thus, an airport that was the scene of a terrorist attack at a given time would be compared to an airport at that same time that was not the scene of the attack on various dimensions of opportunity. It is not clear whether this type of database has been constructed to study the effects of opportunity on terrorist acts, but this seems to be a way of getting the situation-specific information necessary to test OT and of dealing with the rare-event problem. By using all known terrorist events in the analysis, we lessen the impact of the problem of terrorism as a rare event. The ability to match cases and controls on a variety of characteristics may also help preserve precious degrees of freedom. Moreover, by introducing variation at the situation level, we can provide a real test of situational crime prevention, also known as OT. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this approach will be getting the attributes of situations without terrorist incident that are relevant to opportunity. In systematically collecting data, we seldom pay attention to the dog that did not bark. Though it is possible to build an empirically based OT of terrorist incidents, it will not be easy. The rare-event nature of terrorism makes it difficult to assess the effects of specific interventions designed to prevent acts of terrorism. It also requires aggregating terrorist incidents over a large number of places and times to get the number of cases necessary for stable estimates. This aggregation lessens the chance of finding the effects of situation-level differences in opportunity on the incidence of terrorism. Case-control approaches may be of some use in solving these problems, but it has not been done to date.

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Summary Opportunity theory developed from the study of ordinary common law crime cannot be readily applied to terrorism. The “utility function” of common law criminals, especially those engaged in property crime, is reasonably well understood. As a result, criminologists are able to identify targets that would be more or less attractive to potential criminals. The same is not the case with terrorism. The utility functions of terrorists are not as well understood. It is also reasonable to assume that the problem of displacement and substitution will occur much more often in terrorism than it does in common law crime, in large part because terrorism is more likely to be an “organized” crime. The organized nature of terrorism also complicates understanding the utility function of terrorists, because the rationality of the individual terrorist can be quite different from that of the organization. Both theoretical and empirical treatments of OT have not addressed the relative applicability of the theory to organized and nonorganized crime. Finally, building an OT of terrorism empirically cannot be done as easily as it has been for ordinary common law crime because terrorism is so much rarer.

OPPORTUNITY REDUCTION TO REDUCE FEAR, NOT TERRORISM

The unique features of terrorism relative to ordinary street crime make it very difficult to borrow from OTs of common law crime to inform theory and practice with regard to terrorism. There are, however, unique features of terrorism that may make OT and interventions based upon opportunity useful for controlling terrorism. The uniqueness to which I am referring is the goal of generating fear that is part and parcel of terrorism, but is usually a by-product and often an unwelcome (to the offender) by-product of ordinary street crime. Whereas opportunity reduction may not affect the occurrence of terrorism (and it is difficult for us to know if it has), reducing opportunity may (or may not) affect public fear as a result of terrorism or the threat of terrorism. I argue here that what we know about the effects of opportunity reduction and fear of street crime may be more applicable to terrorism than the effects of opportunity

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on the occurrence of street crime. Moreover, studying the relationship between opportunity reduction and fear of terrorism is more feasible than studying the effects of opportunity reduction on the incidence of terrorism. Why Study the Opportunity-Fear Relationship? In the foregoing section, I have argued that the theory and methods of OT developed for ordinary street crime do not hold much promise for the reduction of terrorism. So in some sense, we study the opportunity-fear relationship because studying the opportunity-terrorism relationship is not possible with some of the traditional tools used by criminologists. A more important reason to study the effects of opportunity reduction on fear is, as Brian Forst notes, that managing fear is essential in controlling terrorism. If the goal of terrorism is to generate fear, then reducing fear reduces the damage of terrorism, and reduces the incentives for terrorists to commit additional terrorist acts. We cannot and will not stop engaging in opportunity reduction programs even if we know that they are unlikely to have much impact on the occurrence of terrorist acts or the durable damage resulting from them. The political consequences of not visibly reducing opportunity are, I believe, simply too great. I argue that the goal of opportunity reduction strategies regarding terrorism is fear reduction, not terrorism reduction; as such, this should be the object of study. Some of the opportunity reduction efforts may be ineffective or even counterproductive in reducing fear, and if that is the case, we should find out. Finally, we should study the opportunity reductionfear relationship because we can. The literature on fear of ordinary street crime has lessons for fear of terrorism. The association between objective risk and fear is not straightforward. Moreover, fear is not a rare event and can be studied empirically with the traditional tools that criminologists have used. Opportunity Reduction and Fear of Ordinary Street Crime The literature on opportunity reduction and street crime includes relatively little information on the effects of this policy on fear of ordinary street crime. Virtually all the work examines the effect of opportunity reduction on the occurrence of crime (Clarke, 1997). The literature

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on communities and crime, including studies on the effects of community policing, have more to say about specific forms of opportunity reduction and fear of ordinary street crime, although this is not their principal purpose. The lessons that can be drawn from this literature are limited, however, by the narrow range of opportunity reduction measures that have been studied, and by the substantial differences between policing street crime and responding to terrorism. Studies of the fear of street crime have shown how complicated the study of fear of crime can be. Warr (1984) distinguishes between fear that is immediate and specific and anxiety that is concern over what has been or what you suspect will be. He also distinguishes between personal fear that pertains to yourself and altruistic fear that has as its focus other people that you care about. Warr argues that in assessing fear of crime, one must be clear about exactly which of these dimensions you are interested in. This literature has also identified common sources of fear of crime. Warr and Stafford (1983) maintain that fear is a function of the perceived risk of you being a victim of crime, and the severity of that crime in terms of psychic and durable harms. This is a multiplicative function such that very serious crimes that are not very prevalent (like murder) will not generate the maximum amount of fear, but crimes of moderate severity that are quite prevalent (like burglary) will engender higher levels of fear. The perception of the risk of being a victim of an ordinary street crime is affected by objective risk, but it is not determined by the risk of being victimized. Much of the work on the relationship between risk of street crime and fear has been driven by the fact that the groups with the lowest risk of victimization tend to have the highest levels of fear (Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). Explaining that paradox has sent criminologists in a variety of directions, looking for factors other than objective risk of victimization that could account for the high levels of fear among women and the elderly. Media and other sources of information have been shown to influence our perception that we will be a victim of street crime (Heath and Gilbert, 1996; Chiricos et al., 1997). Cues in our environment that are not themselves victimization, but that are believed to be associated with victimization can also be a source the perception of risk (Hope and Hough, 1988; Skogan,

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1990). Relatively little work has been done on the effect of opportunity reduction on fear of crime per se. Communities and Crime. The communities and crime literature has taken some lessons from the fear of crime literature in terms of measuring fear in residential communities, but it has been much more focused on the effects of community organization and police policies on crime and fear. Some of the attention to fear was occasioned by the belief that fear of crime in residential communities reduces the interaction among residents, and reduces the social organization that these communities need to protect themselves (Skogan, 1990; Taylor, 1999). So fear of crime can breed crime, and crime can generate perceptions of risk and thereby fear. A second reason for the emphasis on fear, especially in policy evaluations, was the rare-event nature of crime. It was difficult to detect the effects of police and other programs on crime, because even in bad places crime was relatively rare and required large samples to detect. Fear was more prevalent because everyone can be afraid, and it was much easier to measure change in fear in these communities. These community studies can be divided into those that assessed the natural variation in crime, fear, and community organization and those that measured the effects of specific interventions on fear and crime. The first group of studies showed a persistent relationship between community organization and crime and fear. Highly organized communities had low levels of crime and low levels of fear (Maxfield and Skogan, 1981; Greenberg et al., 1982; Taylor, 1990). These studies are of little use in understanding how opportunity reduction might affect fear, because the nature of crime and the nature of residential communities are so different from that of terrorism. Ordinary street crime and specifically interpersonal violence in residential communities is often highly individualistic, and occurs among intimates for personal motives. Terrorism occurs among strangers for political motives, and it is often a collective enterprise. Much of community crime reduction and fear reduction relies on persistent patterns of interaction that can be used to promote attachments to the community, as well as ways to negotiate a consensual

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social order in the area (Taylor, 1999). Terrorism is much too episodic to be affected by the same forces that influence common law crime in residential communities. Negotiating an acceptable social order will reduce routine street crime in a residential community, but not more episodic events perpetrated by persons from outside of the community. Moreover, a large proportion of terrorist acts occur in nonresidential communities, where there are no residents whose persistent patterns of interaction can be changed. Evaluations of community intervention programs may have more relevance for understanding the effects of opportunity reduction on crime, because the interventions were policies of police agencies that could presumably be applied in many different types of places. Increased police surveillance, for example, can be implemented in residential communities, but also at airports, train stations, monuments, and other public, nonresidential places. The results of these evaluations are mixed both in terms of the relevance of opportunity reduction strategies to nonresidential communities and the effects of these interventions on the fear of crime. Skogan found that community-policing initiatives reduced fear of crime in six communities where he studied the effects of the policy. The effects of these programs on street crime itself were less evident and consistent. Skogan (1990) and his colleagues found that reductions in fear were not uniform across community-policing programs. In those places where the police retained traditional patrol practices but increased their intensity, there was no affect on fear. Where the police employed less traditional modes of interacting with the public, such as conducting door-to-door canvasses of communities or creating storefront drop-in centers, the reductions in fear were much greater. Skogan speculated that this difference was due to the increased visibility of police engaged in these nontraditional activities. At this point, the lesson from community-policing evaluations is: The greater the increases in the visual presence of the police, the greater the reductions in fear of street crime. The community-policing literature may have more specific things to say about the effects of opportunity reduction on fear of terrorism when the various programs that were created during the mid- and late 1990s are parsed in terms of their specific components, and these

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components related to levels and change in fear (see Greene, Chapter 10, this volume). This work is currently under way. Evaluation of Specific Opportunity Reduction Initiatives. There have been studies of the effects of specific opportunity reduction strategies on fear of street crime independent of the community-policing programs. Studies of the effects of street lighting on crime, for example, have been mixed, but the more rigorous evaluations show a decrease in fear in public places with increases in street lighting (Painter and Farrington, 1997). Similar results have been found for evaluations of closed-circuit television and other changes in environmental design. The fear reduction resulting from increased lighting is presumed to occur either because it reduces the objective or subjective risk of victimization, or because it gives the residents confidence that someone is doing something about the crime problem. These same processes could be operating in the case of terrorism. The public may believe that the screening and other opportunity reduction policies at airports and other places reduce the risk of terrorist attacks. Even if they do not believe that these policies are particularly effective or efficient, they may feel reassured that someone is doing something about it. Like the studies of community policing, these evaluations of the effect of opportunity reduction on fear of ordinary street crime have not been synthesized, and the effects of specific subcomponents have not been isolated. There is, however, some reason to believe that some opportunity reduction programs reduce fear of street crime. Rigorous meta-analyses of studies examining the relationship of opportunity reduction and fear of street crime would tell us more, and some of this could be usefully applied to the investigation of the link between opportunity reduction and fear of terrorism. Again, we must ask how relevant these results for ordinary street crime are for the reduction of fear of terrorism. In previous sections, I have argued that terrorism is very different from street crime, but in the case of fear generation, the two types of crimes may be more similar. The major differences between common law crime and terrorism cited earlier had to do with our ability to identify a priori likely terrorist targets and to discourage displacement and substitution. In some sense, none of these are relevant in the case of fear reduction.

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Potential victims of crime and potential victims of terrorist attacks may have similar reactions to opportunity reduction strategies than victims of street crime do. They may perceive that they are safe, irrespective of their actual risk, or they may be relieved because they see that someone is doing something about the problem.

CONCLUSION

Situational crime prevention has been successful in reducing crime, and has demonstrated that OTs of crime are useful in understanding why ordinary street crimes occur. The large body of work that has accumulated on opportunity reduction has produced a framework of growing complexity that can aid specific efforts to reduce ordinary street crime. This framework has not yet achieved the specificity of a theory that can be used to guide in great detail efforts to control ordinary street crime. Practitioners must take the general concepts of OT and adapt them to fit their unique street crime problem. In the case of terrorism, it is not immediately clear that even the OT framework can be applied to reducing terrorist acts. Differences in the nature of terrorism and street crime make it more difficult to apply basic opportunity concepts to situations and to assume that a substantial amount of substitution and displacement will not occur. Moreover, the rare-event nature of terrorism relative to ordinary street crime makes it difficult to do the empirical investigations that were so useful in establishing the basic tenets of OT in the case of street crime. The use of case-control designs with the limited archival data that are available may be of some use in building an empirical basis for applying the opportunity framework to terrorism. This is not to say that the opportunity framework may not be usefully applied to terrorism, but rather that the work done thus far is not immediately transferable to terrorism, and there are some questions as to whether it ever could be. The initial step taken by Clarke and Newman in applying OT to terrorism is very speculative, but also suggestive. It needs to be supported by some solid empirical work employing research designs and data appropriate to the rare-event nature of terrorism.

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Another fruitful and logistically simpler line of inquiry would examine the association between opportunity reduction efforts and fear of terrorism. Because the generation of fear is a distinguishing feature of terrorism, the impact of opportunity reduction on fear may be as important as its effect on terrorism itself. Certain forms of opportunity reduction such as announcing color-coded preparedness levels may raise fear without measurably reducing risk. Massive as opposed to selective screening of airline passengers may have a calming effect on a public that views it as evidence that someone is watching. The accumulated literature on opportunity reduction and fear of street crime may be of some use here. More rigorous meta-analyses of these studies may provide some useful information about the effects of opportunity reduction and fear that are useful for anti-terrorism efforts.

RE F E RE N CE S Addington, Lynn A. “Students Fear After Columbine: Findings from a Randomized Experiment.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 19, Number 4, 2003, pp. 367–387. Anderson, David and Kenneth Pease. “Biting Back: Preventing Repeat Burglary and Car Crime in Huddersfield.” In Ronald V. Clarke (ed.) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies. (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Barr, Robert and Ken Pease. “Crime placement, Displacement and Deflection.” In Michael Tonry and Norval Morris. (eds.) Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol. 12 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Becker, Howard. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. (New York: The Free Press, 1963). Brown, Ben. “CCTV in Three Town Centers in England.” In Ronald V. Clarke (ed.) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies. (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Chiricos, Theodore, Sarah Escholz and Mark Gertz. “Crime, News and Fear of Crime: Toward an Identification of Audience Effects.” Social Problems, Vol. 44, Number 3, 1997, pp. 342–357. Clarke, Ronald V. “Situational Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice.” British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 20, 1980, pp. 136–147. “Situational Crime Prevention: Its Theoretical and Practical Scope.” In M. Tonry and N. Morris (eds.) Crime and Justice, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

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“Situational Crime Prevention.” In Michael Tonry and David Farrington (eds.) Building a Safer Society: Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention. Crime and Justice, Vol. 19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Clarke, Ronald V. and D.B. Cornish. “Modeling Offenders’ Decisions: A Framework for Research and Policy.” In Tonry M. and N. Morris (eds.) Crime and Justice, Vol. 6 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Clarke, Ronald V. and Patricia Mayhew. “The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications.” In Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (eds.) Crime and Justice, Vol. 10 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Clarke, R. and G. Newman. Outsmarting the Terrorists (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006). Cantor, David and James P. Lynch. “Ecological and Behavioral Influences on Property Victimization at Home: Implications for Opportunity Theory.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 29, 1992, pp. 335–362. Cohen, Larry and Marcus Felson. “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, 1979, pp. 588–608. Cohen, Lawrence and David Cantor. “Residential Burglary Trends in the United States: Lifestyle and Demographic Factors Associated with the Probability of Victimization.” Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 18, 1981, pp. 113–127. Cohen, Lawrence, Marcus Felson and Kenneth Land. “Property Crime Rates in the United States: A Macrodynamic Analysis, 1947–1977: With Ex Ante Forecasts for the Mid-1980s.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 85, 1980, pp. 90–118. DiLeonardo, Robert L. “The Economic Benefits of Electronic Surveillance.” In Ronald V. Clarke (ed.) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies. (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Dugan, Laura, Gary La Free and Alex Piquero. “Testing a Rational Choice Model of Airline Highjackings.”Criminology, Vol. 43, Number 4, 2005, pp. 1031–1065. Enders, W. and T. Sandler. “Patterns of Transnational Terrorism, 1970–1999: Alternative Time-series Estimates.” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, Number 2, 2002, pp. 145–165. Felson, Marcus. Crime in Everyday Life (Thousand Oaks, CS: Pine Forge Press, 2002). Felson, Marcus and Clarke R.V. Opportunity Makes the Thief Practical Theory of Crime Prevention: Police Research series Paper 98 (London: The Home Office, 1998).

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Guerette, Rob. “The Push and Pull Expansion of Situational Crime Prevention Evaluation: An Appraisal of Thirty-seven Years of Research.” Crime Prevention Studies, Vol. 24, 2009, pp. 29–58. Greenberg, Stephanie, William Rohe and J.R. Williams. Safe and Secure Neighborhoods: Physical Characteristics and Informal Territorial Control in High and Low Crime Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 1982). Heath, Linda and Kevin Gilbert. “Mass Media and Fear of Crime.” American Behavioral Scientist, 39, 1996, pp. 379–386. Hindelang, Michael, Michael Gottfredson and James Garafalo. Victims of Personal Crime (Cambridge, MA: Balinger, 1978). Hesseling, R.B.P. “Displacement: A Review of the Empirical Literature.” In: R.V. Clarke (ed.) Crime Prevention Studies, Vol. 3 (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1994). Hope, Tim and Mike Hough. “Area, Crime and Incivility: A Profile from the British Crime Survey.” In Hope, T. and Shaw M. (eds.) Communities and Crime Reduction (London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1988). Lum, Cynthia, Leslie W. Kennedy and Alison J. Sherley. “The Effectiveness of Counter-Terrorism Strategies.” Campbell Systemic Reviews, Vol. 2, 2006, pp. 1–51. Lynch, James P. “Routine Activity and Victimization at Work.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 3, Number 4, 1987, pp. 283–300. Matza, David. Delinquency and Drift (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964). Mayhew Patricia, Ronald Clarke and D. Elliot. “Motorcycle Theft, Helmet Legislation and Displacement.” Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 28, 1989, pp. 1–8. Maxfield, Michael. “Household Composition, Routine Activities and Victimization: A Comparative Analysis. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1987, pp. 301–320. Miethe, Terrance and Robert Meier. Crime and Its Social Context: Toward an Integrated Theory of Offenders, Victims, and Situations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994). Painter, Kate and David P. Farrington. “The Crime Reducing Effects of Improved Street Lighting: The Dudley Project.” In Ronald V. Clarke (ed.) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Rountree, Pamela and Kenneth Land. “Burglary Victimization, Perceptions of Crime Risk and Routine Activities: A Multi-level Analysis across Seattle Neighborhoods and Census Tracts.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 33, 1996, pp. 137–180. Skogan, Wesley. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press, 1990).

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Skogan, Wesley and Michael Maxfield. Coping with Crime: Individual and Neighborhood Reactions (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1981). Taylor, Ralph. “Crime, Grime and Responses to Crime: Relative Impacts of Neighborhood Structure, Crime, and Physical Deterioration on Residents and Business Personnel in the Twin Cities.” In Steven Lab (ed.) Crime Prevention at the Cross-roads (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, Co., 1990). “Crime, Grime, Fear and Decline: A Longitudinal Look.” NIJ Research in Brief (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 1999). Tedeschi, J. and R.B. Felson. Violence, Aggression and Coercive Action. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994). Tseloni, Andromachi. “Personal Victimization in the United States: Fixed and Random Effects of Individual and Household Characteristics. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Vol. 16, Number 4, 2000, pp. 415–442. Warr, Mark “Fear and Victimization: Why Are Women and the Elderly More Afraid?” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 65, Number 2, 1984, pp. 681–702. Warr, Mark and Mark C. Stafford. “Fear of Victimization: A Look at the Proximate Causes,” Social Forces, Vol. 61, 1983, pp. 1033–1043. Webb, B. “Steering Column Locks and Motor Vehicle Thefts: Evaluations from Three Countries.” In Ronald V. Clarke (ed.) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies (2nd edition) (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1997). Weisburd, David, Laura Wyckoff, Justin Ready, John Eck, Joshua Hinkle, and Fran Gajewski. “Does Crime Just Move Around the Corner? A Controlled Study of Spatial Displacement and diffusion of crime control benefits.” Criminology, Vol. 44, Number 3, 2006, pp. 549–592. Wortley, Richard. Situational Prison Control: Crime Prevention in Correctional Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). “Situational Crime Prevention and Prison Control: Lessons for Each Other.” Crime Prevention Studies, Vol. 16, 2003, pp. 97–117.

chapter nine

Soldiers and Spies, Police and Detectives Tomas C. Mijares and Jay D. Jamieson

INTRODUCTION

Successful, effective, mutually beneficial military participation in what we would call civilian law enforcement is not unknown in history. Ancient Rome and the contemporary French Gendarmerie – who have an excellent working relationship with the rural population of France – might be included on a list of good examples. Unfortunately, the list of oppressive, abusive, even genocidal examples seems infinitely longer, and this list is surely a source of our national apprehension about using our military forces for standard police work. Our founding fathers were, of course, sensitive to this issue and sought to minimize the possibility that the American public would suffer oppressive use of the military by unethical government leaders. Indeed, although military resources have been utilized countless times in response to domestic disasters and catastrophes, we tend to focus our collective memory on the tragic results of hostile encounters like the New York draft riots, Kent State, or the Texas border country, where military force has been used in response to civilian behavior with tragic results. We simply do not want our military involved in law enforcement in civilian environments, or controlling civilian behavior of any type, especially when the use of force might be deemed necessary. It might be worth noting that the bright line that separates the military and civil sectors is less clearly drawn in most other advanced Western societies, largely because the insulation against invaders provided by two vast oceans is a luxury that European nation-states do not share. 183

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Aware of these problems, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of military forces to perform civilian governmental tasks unless expressly and formally authorized to do so under the Constitution. The act does not allow the use of the federal military in direct performance of civilian law enforcement activities, whether federal or state in nature. The distinction between direct performance and indirect assistance of civilian law enforcement officials has at times proved to be the source of litigation, and has been difficult for the courts to articulate clearly. Under certain conditions, the president may grant the request by a state governor for military personnel to perform emergency work for ten days following a disaster (42 U.S.C. 5170b). Through the secretary of defense, who must first determine if any transfer of assets may weaken the national defense preparedness, the president may also authorize the sharing of information gathered during military operations (10 U.S.C. 371), the supply of military equipment and facilities (10 U.S.C. 372), training and advice on the use and maintenance of military equipment (10 U.S.C. 373), and the maintenance and operation of military equipment for certain federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies (10 U.S.C. 374). Military personnel may also be made available to operate equipment in conjunction with counterterrorist operations, or help in the enforcement of counterdrug laws, immigration laws, and customs requirements. Military personnel may also be used to conduct surveillance, intercept vessels or aircraft near borders of the United States, operate communications and transportation equipment, and transport criminal suspects to the United States for trial (Doyle and Elsea, 2005). Military personnel may not be used to seize an industry critical to national security even during a national emergency (Youngstown County v. Sawyer, 1952), subject civilians to military tribunals for criminal prosecution while civilian courts remain available (Reid v. Covert, 1957), or compel state officials to execute federal authority (Printz v. United States, 1997). Despite various misgivings to the contrary, neither the law enforcement community nor the military establishment is attempting to usurp the response authority or the resources of the other. Indeed, influences in their external environments have resulted in relatively parallel courses in their historical development. Occasionally their

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paths have intersected during naturally occurring and man-made crises. Once the problem has been resolved, each entity has returned to a “business-as-usual” approach to their tasks. These questions of jurisdiction have become more complicated under the “war on terror,” which presents a particular dilemma for our systems of federalism and democracy. We have an unknown number of potentially violent people, some perceived to be foreign, in our civilian midst. As the enemy consists of terrorists determined to attack civilian and military targets on both foreign and domestic soil, our police and our military have a common foe. The range of possibilities for terrorist attacks in the United States makes this especially problematic. As an open, free society, we are a relatively easy target for terrorists. Historically, we have been relentless in our pursuit of attackers, criminal or military, but we are nevertheless quite vulnerable to any form of initial attack. Millions of people, many of them foreigners, travel in and out of the United States every year. Movement is relatively simple, and access to chemical ingredients, firearms, and technology is not especially difficult. Preventing terrorist attacks while preserving our customary levels of personal freedom is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task. Terrorist attacks in the future could result in damage and continuing danger that are beyond the response capabilities of our police and civilian emergency resources. This is particularly true if the attacks involve sophisticated biological agents, nuclear devices, or chemical agents. The 2005 Katrina crisis in New Orleans should be a great lesson to us. This naturally occurring catastrophe had been predicted, described, and feared for at least fifty years, and gave clear warning signs for nearly a week before striking. Still, local resources were easily and immediately overwhelmed. Despite even the best efforts to prepare civilian resources to respond effectively to mass-casualty homeland scenarios, coordinated surprise attacks with advanced weaponry could similarly overwhelm our traditional civilian services (Graham, 2005.) The military has long been involved in planning for response to domestic catastrophes, and since 9/11 has been deployed to prevent terrorist attacks against high-risk domestic targets during alerts, and for rapid response should an attack occur (Graham, 2005). Current contingency planning appears to coordinate the optimum use of

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military resources along with locally based police in a wide range of homeland-security roles, from block-level order-maintenance to aggressive, massive response, and to disasters resulting from multiple, sophisticated attacks. Although the publicity surrounding homeland-security planning stresses a supporting role for the military, it is likely that experience, equipment, training, and the capability of deploying significant assets rapidly would logically place the military in command of the response to a large-scale event (Graham, 2005.) Historically, the missions of our military and our domestic police have generally been distinct by design. Progressive police leaders, nevertheless, have wisely taken advantage of developments in military equipment and small-unit tactics, as they might be adapted to the operational environment of the police. Though this trend may have resulted in allegations of a militarization of American law enforcement, an examination of many scenarios, particularly in the drug traffic of organized crime, reveals a change in tactics by the criminal element. The change in tactics by police officers is a countermeasure to the increased violence displayed by criminal suspects (Mijares and McCarthy, 2008). Similarly, military leaders have recognized the subtle but steady change of warfare from large-scale battlefields complete with distinctive fronts to much smaller, yet equally treacherous urban environments that require protracted engagements and the cultivation of local citizens with methods similar to those employed in community policing. (See Greene, this volume). Such developments are the result of exhaustive research, testing, and operational experience. Just as innovations improve the effectiveness of soldiers, so will the selective adaptation of equipment, technology, and methods improve the effectiveness of the police and civilian emergency personnel. As the homeland security missions of police and military draw inevitably closer together in civilian environments in the future, the “militaristic” countenance of our police and emergency personnel is likely to increase as well. Should this be a cause of concern? How can we also exploit the advantages that cross-training, intelligence sharing, and experience can bring to the security mission? Various scholars strongly argue that the conventional distinctions between the United States military and the American criminal justice

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system have become increasingly blurred (Kraska, 2001). Claiming that the consequences of this obfuscation are both far-reaching and disquieting, several commentators have critically examined a wide variety of issues where they claim that the criminal justice system has adopted elements of the military model in terms of technology, culture, language, philosophy, and organization (Kraska, 2001). These commentaries suggest that for many reasons the primary beneficiary to this arrangement has been local police departments, but their increased effectiveness has come at the expense of civil rights. In his work entitled The Pentagon’s New Map, Barnett (2004) encouraged the transformation of our military into a more multidimensional system of resources with the capability of rapid response to a wide range of national needs, including traditional police roles. Indeed, it may be argued that this has been accomplished. Our military’s ability to respond effectively to natural disasters, such as hurricanes, far exceeds the ability of local and regional police to respond. It is logical to expect an enhanced military capability in any sort of unexpected or large-scale domestic need for order and control. It is worthwhile to review the concerns regarding the police-military nexus. Kraska and others have noted superficial similarities, such as the use of military language by criminal justice practitioners, but these discussions tend to overlook similar language use in other areas, such as sports, politics, entertainment, and the arts. Dunlap (2001) gives a more substantive historical analysis of the differences between traditional law enforcement and the military roles and how these roles have eroded with time. When analyzed in terms of other entities, such as the role of the church in the educational system, this perceived erosion cannot be considered unique to the current military–law enforcement paradigm. Haggerty and Ericson (2001) describe the transfer of technology, usually from the military to law enforcement. Similarly, no mention is made of how technology has been transferred in many other areas. For example, thermal-imagery technology was initially developed to detect heat leaks in machinery and buildings, thus enabling engineers to locate manufacturing anomalies and structural weaknesses. Much later, this technology was applied to military and law enforcement surveillance.

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Dunn (2001) examines the coalescence of military and law enforcement roles along the United States–Mexico border. Though it cannot be denied that this venture is condemned to failure unless appropriate training and adjustment of the “rules of engagement” are conducted, it has now become painfully obvious that popular opinion is demanding a less porous border. Decisions to augment law enforcement deployments along the border with National Guard personnel illustrate this reaction to public demand. Despite the concerns of the critics of the police-military nexus, the actual roles of the United States military and the American criminal justice system remain distinct. The appearance of any role overlap and subsequent merger of the two institutions is more the result of simultaneous, but independently occurring, historical changes in their respective external environments. Accordingly, the purpose of the remainder of this chapter is to describe the adjustments by each institution (military and police) in response to these changes in their external environments. In so doing, it is important to note that changes in the external environments of both the military and the police result in structural and operational changes. Recommendations will then be made to improve America’s ability to respond to terrorist threats and incidents while staying within the rule of law and without unduly alarming various elements of the populace.

CHANGES IN THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

Military If we learned only one thing from our experience in Vietnam, it should be never to underestimate the determination of a culture to resist forced change from a foreign power. Relentless opposition and uncompromising resistance over the long term eventually rendered U.S. goals illogical in the face of the military and political costs, no matter how disparate the relative strength of the opponents actually were. A second lesson that we should be learning now is that future armed conflicts are not likely to pit the world’s “superpowers” against each other. Wars in the future (and perhaps in the present) will probably arise from attempts by developed, technologically advanced nations

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to manipulate underdeveloped nations into more active participation in global economic and political interchange (Barnett, 2004). In Barnett’s view, the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States with no potential adversary of equal stature – no enemy with even a remote possibility of defeating our armed forces and occupying our homeland. Thus, it makes little sense to maintain a military designed to engage a massive force of infantry, armor, artillery, and conventional naval and air power. According to Barnett, it has not been easy for our military leaders to make the cognitive transition from anticipating warfare with superpowers to engaging determined little guys who seek to make the conflict as costly as possible, without any thought of actually defeating the U.S. military in a conventional sense. He goes on to trace how each branch of the military can expand operations on the administrative peacekeeping front. Police Beginning in the middle 1960s, American law enforcement experienced several changes in its external environment. These changes were not merely in magnitude and frequency because of the dramatic population growth after World War II, but they were also changes in kind that fundamentally altered the way in which police services were delivered. Perhaps the most divisive issue to be confronted by the people of the United States since the Civil War was the American involvement in Vietnam. Thirty years after the withdrawal of military forces, the conflict still remains a controversy, as major players in that debate are still trying to justify their perspectives and actions (McNamara, 1996; Fonda, 2005). On one hand, it was law enforcement’s responsibility to ensure that the antiwar demonstrators were able to exercise their First Amendment rights to free assembly and free speech in a safe manner. On the other hand, the demonstrators could not be allowed to violate others’ constitutional rights, civil rights, or destroy the property of others. To complicate the issue, dissidents from other causes often joined the antiwar demonstrators. Initially, the civil rights and antiwar movements converged in the 1960s. Later they were joined by a myriad of other causes ranging from environmentalism to abortion rights advocates and opponents of the death penalty. For a variety

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of reasons, the law enforcement community often found itself in the center of the storm. Police officers were hardly recognized as individuals, or even as law enforcement officers, but rather as the prototypical and readily accessible symbols of the hated “establishment.” These demonstrations frequently became hostile and destructive riots, demonstrating how the tactics, techniques, and technology of American law enforcement were lagging behind the abilities and motivations of the protesters. Police administrators soon realized that the intuitive and traditional response to these large-scale disorders was inadequate (Gates, 1991). As the size of the problem grew in magnitude and frequency, the simplistic solution was to introduce more officers and resources. For example, during the riot of 1967 the Detroit Police Department required assistance initially from the Michigan National Guard and later the United States Army to deal with the magnitude of the crisis. Similar solutions had been sought during the Watts Riot of 1965 and the Texas Tower Incident in 1966. However, without plans, established procedures, coordination of effort and resources, and training the efforts by law enforcement were not only ineffective but counterproductive. In each of these instances, the police and military were unable to communicate with each other because of incompatible communication systems and an unclearly defined chain of command. The inability to coordinate activities often led to disruption: Many response units were assigned to some calls for service, while many other calls went unanswered. A second change to the external environment came from the quantum increase in the drug culture. Historically, illegal drugs had been limited to artisans and people of low income, particularly minorities from the inner cities. This trend, too, changed in the 1960s with emergence of the youth and drug cultures and their glamorization by the entertainment media. Respectable mainstream America had perceived itself as unsullied by such a plebeian form of entertainment and stress relief. There are many theories about this rapid and expansive growth, but one of the effects was a realization that illegal drugs could no longer be contained to a specific area of geography or society. Because the offenders were free to cross jurisdictional boundaries, law enforcement was forced to develop new tactics, techniques, and technologies to deal with the problem.

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Coinciding with the growth of the illegal narcotics trade has been the marked increase in violent encounters by perpetrators within the drug trade. Members of traditional organized crime groups had been much more discreet in their use of violence as a disciplinary tool or as a means of dealing with competitors. They simply wished to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to their illegal activities. As novices entered the drug marketplace, such caution was not applied. Fatal force directed toward police officers by members of traditional organized crime groups was generally the result of escape attempts. Accidental shootings of innocent bystanders were often met with organizational internal discipline, and were occasionally followed by monetary apologies to families to discourage formal complaints through the criminal justice process. However, the newly emerging groups are less discriminate in their use of force and have incurred the ire of much of the public. Abadinsky (2007) attributes the increase in violence by organized crime in particular to the corresponding rise in numbers and power of non-Sicilian organized crime groups who have not yet learned the “rules” of behavior. Specifically citing Russian organized crime groups, Abadinsky suggests that the newly emerging groups have not yet been in the United States long enough to have developed a proper work ethic. Abadinsky also cites La violencia of the Latin American groups wherein criminal drug traffickers come from areas where they have totally discounted the legitimacy of political and economic institutions, and thus embrace extreme violence with an indifference to death. There has been an emerging body of evidence that a symbiotic relationship is developing between Middle Eastern terrorists and Latin American drug dealers who are peddling their wares in the United States (CSIS, 1997; see also Abadinsky, 2007 and Mallory, 2007). The arrests in July of 2005 of several illegal immigrants with connections to both al Qaeda and the Latin American organized crime groups exemplify this phenomenon. In addition, anecdotal information from various drug-enforcement personnel indicates that many former members of the now-defunct Soviet military have found lucrative employment performing security and training for various elements of the Columbian drug cartels. The combination of the opportunity provided by organized crime with the

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means made available by the former members of the Soviet military and the motivation fostered by the presence of Middle Eastern terrorists has produced a violent alliance that has little regard for the sanctity of life (including the lives of the members themselves). A fourth change in the external environment came through technological advancements. Except for changes in transportation and communication systems, there had been relatively few technological changes in American law enforcement since the first American uniform-patrol forces of the first half of the nineteenth century. The motorized patrol car, two-way radio, and the initial use of forensic technology changed policing substantially through the 1960s. Computers, DNA analysis, and computerized crime analysis technologies changed it much afterward. Requirements for technological changes in different fields began to have a later application to the specific area of law enforcement. For example, the need to increase the effective range of electronic communications systems while reducing the size and weight of the hardware was mandated by the space exploration program. The discoveries in this field ultimately led to the use of portable two-way radios for police officers. Similarly, the development of chemically produced fibers that were stronger and lighter than the steel used in construction led to the invention of ballistic-resistant personal body armor. Thermal imagery to identify structural and mechanical weaknesses led to the development of electronic surveillance equipment. In most cases, this technology, which was often beyond the budgets of many law enforcement agencies, also became available to criminal users through both legal and black-market sources. It was also beyond the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct the research that must be done before the technology is made part of the inventory. The legal, economic, social, and political requirements and issues associated with vetting innovations in American law enforcement, though intended to promote organizational accountability and transparency, have had a side effect of producing a lengthy and arduous application process that may make the technology obsolete before it is operational. Meanwhile, criminal opponents are consistently improving their own technological capabilities. Terrorist opponents such as

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al Qaeda, which will probably encounter domestic police more in the future, have extensively field-tested and refined more lethal bombing and signaling devices on the Iraq urban landscape and roadway system. In addition, the legal parameters that guide law enforcement’s use of any technology are always in a continuous state of interpretation and evolution in the criminal world. Criminal users of technology are not bound by the legal constraints of court decisions such as Frye v. United States (1923),1 operational budgets, or formalized research needed to justify decisions to obtain and use newly developed technology. Consequently, creative funding practices and reliance on research from other fields (e.g., military and industry) are needed to keep pace with strides in technology made by the criminal element of society. For example, the use of thermal imagery,2 complete with its legal and operational critics, has its original interpretations stemming from Katz v. United States (1967) and continuing to the present with United States v. Porco (1994) and United States v. Cusumano (1995). These cases arose from the same set of facts whereby narcotics investigators used thermal imagery to detect the heat anomalies associated with the indoor cultivation of marijuana in private residences. The defense argued that the investigators possessed neither probable cause nor a warrant to conduct an electronic search of the premises. These most recent interpretations of the legality of thermal-imagery technology state that its use is limited to corroborating evidence gathered from other sources such as a confidential informant. Irrespective of the type of alleged illegal activity being investigated, the technology cannot be used in a “fishing expedition” to uncover criminal activity. The Katz, Cusumano, and Porco cases differed in terms of the areas being searched, the evidence being sought, and the technology being used. However, in each case the issue was the expectation of privacy and how it is to be observed by law enforcement personnel. 1

2

This case requires the prosecution to demonstrate the scientific basis of any technology used to obtain and analyze evidence, and that the technology has gained recognition among experts before the evidence is introduced. Whereas normal photography makes images of differences in light waves, thermal imagery makes images of differences in temperature. The thermal imagery used in military and law enforcement surveillance was initially developed for industrial uses to detect heat losses and structural defects.

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Finally, changes mandated by court decisions had a great impact on the delivery of police services. For example, Downs v. United States (1975), though not necessarily binding on local police departments, resulted in judicial notice that special situations dictate special responses. This case involved an attempt to rescue hostages by personnel from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had been called hastily to the Jacksonville, Florida airport after a small commercial aircraft had been seized with the attempt to fly it to the Bahamas. The incident ended in tragedy when the untrained, unpracticed, and unequipped investigators were unable to contain, control, and de-escalate the situation. The court thus indicated that responses to critical incidents should be handled by personnel who have received the specialized training, practice, and equipment needed to resolve events of this magnitude safely. The changing nature of crime from individual offenses to large-scale events such as drug raids, hostile crowd control, school shootings, and hostage rescues means that more police officers and consequently more coordination of resources and efforts are now required. As early as the Watts Riot of 1965 and the Texas Tower incident in the following year, administrators slowly realized the need to be able to respond immediately to large-scale and much more dangerous situations without depleting the ability to respond to routine calls for police service. Although the factual circumstances of these cases differ considerably, they share the dimension that the continuous addition of more police assets prevented the Los Angeles and Austin police departments from responding to routine calls for service. During these incidents, requests for police responses to auto accidents, home burglaries, street muggings, or any other types of inprogress crimes were subordinated and often ignored because of the belief that simply adding more police personnel to the major event would ultimately resolve the situation. This trend was largely done on an individual-city basis and without any form of mandates from the courts or legislatures. However, City of Winter Haven v. Allen (1991) specifically precluded the traditional ad hoc responses for critical incidents. In this case, an investigation by a unit from the sheriff’s office led to the issuance of a search and arrest warrant. Because the building to be searched was a large structure, local municipal officers were requested to assist. In

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the course of serving the warrant, a deputy sheriff gave chase to a fleeing suspect. Because of a lack of communication and the coordination that comes from group training, the deputy was caught in a cross-fire and mortally wounded by one of the local officers. When the deputy’s widow sued, the court agreed that this sort of makeshift approach to a potentially critical incident was clearly inappropriate. This decision has had many implications for the various managerial functions of a law enforcement agency. It has become obvious to administrators that law enforcement agencies must not only provide special responses for special circumstances, they must do so in a manner that does not violate existing legislation, such as Section 1983 of the United States Code, and that remains consistent with all relevant litigation.3 Because the courts are powerless to initiate changes without a specific case being brought for consideration through the appropriate legal channels, the managerial and operational evolution of police responses took place at a faster rate than the legal mandates occurred. Law enforcement managers have a professional and moral obligation to seek continuous improvements in the methods employed in the suppression of criminal activity. The Downs case, the Winter Haven/Allen case, the Los Angeles riot, and the Texas Tower incident have all led public managers to realize that extraordinary situations were becoming more frequent, and that using a cohesive and well-trained specialized unit was much more effective than dealing with these events with large numbers of unprepared personnel and improvised equipment.

ADJUSTMENTS TO THE CHANGES

Military Since the end of the Cold War, our military has gradually placed increasing priority on readiness for encounters such as operations in 3

Chapter 42, Section 1983 of the United States Code specifically states, “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage of any state or territory or the District of Columbia, subjects or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.”

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Panama, and more recently, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rapid strikes by conventional forces, followed by indefinite periods of occupation and order-maintenance while the political environment stabilizes, will probably characterize the majority of our overseas military missions in the foreseeable future. The operations in Iraq reveal how extremely difficult this tactic can be in the face of a determined and brutal array of opponents, and how politics and media representations at home can have substantial impacts on operations on the ground. Remarkable developments in technology have enhanced the rapidstrike capability of the U.S. military immeasurably. Global-positioning systems and the ability to communicate and observe the Earth in close detail from space have enabled the continuing development of precise target-identification and acquisition systems, weapon-guidance systems, order-of-battle and battlefield-intelligence systems, and command-communication networks. As noted earlier, the terrorists also benefit from these technologies, even if at a cruder level. At the individual level, soldiers are equipped with weapons and technology that facilitates small-team operations in buildings and densely populated urban environments. Night vision, thermal imaging, and sophisticated communication links with command and intelligence assets have continually increased the effectiveness of small-unit missions, as has the availability of heavy weapons and medical evacuation resources when needed. They are also equipped with digital cameras and Internet capabilities that, together with more transparent reporting, bring their daily activities closer to home and to others. Although the military maintains the ability to effectively engage an enemy with significant conventional military resources, preparation for the future will most likely involve increasing attention to engagement with insurgent forces, and managing the consequences of terrorist-type attacks on both military assets and civilian populations. Our intelligence capabilities have shifted fairly drastically from human intelligence to signal intelligence over the past fifty years, and now we are paying the price. It is clear that we need a significant strengthening in competency in Arabic, Farsi, and other foreign languages of places where terrorism has roots.

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Police Law enforcement has adjusted to the changes in its external environment in several ways. First, immediately after the passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, local law enforcement agencies were given substantial block grants to improve and increase their inventories of equipment. Admittedly, some of these innovations and acquisitions may have been extravagant, and in some cases irrelevant to the real needs and mission. In terms of material purchases, most of the allotted funds were spent to obtain weapons, protective equipment, personal communication devices, and vehicles. Simultaneously, the American military was upgrading its own inventory for its increased role in Vietnam by reducing its inventory of outdated equipment still in use from World War II and the Korean War. Consequently, many surplus and obsolete items were made available to local law enforcement through various programs. In the early stages of this program, a local law enforcement agency was required to be quite active in the pursuit of this surplus military equipment to supplement existing stocks of equipment and resources. A second reaction by law enforcement to changes in the external environment was the establishment of specialized units. With the exception of the extremely large police departments, local agencies had historically specialized only in terms of general patrol and criminal investigation (i.e., detectives). Shortly after the end of World War II, sub-specialties were initiated within these two general categories. This development was largely due to the dramatic growth in the nation’s population after World War II and to the increasing complexity of overall society. As problems have arisen, local law enforcement agencies have specialized in response. The development of local specialized units for antiterrorism in the United States is a normal part of this police evolutionary process; it saw its structural beginning with the Kefauver Committee in the 1950s in a move to unify the fragmented approaches to intelligence gathering and sharing in the particular area of organized crime. Through an improvement in technology, the patrol function saw the development of areas such as traffic-enforcement units,

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street-decoy operations, and canine patrol, whereas criminal investigation units were subdivided into areas such as homicide investigation, vice enforcement, and robbery detection. A by-product of organizational specialization over the next several years was the sharing of information about tactics, techniques, and technology with members of other organizations with similar assignments and concerns. This sharing was both formal, through participation in conferences sponsored by professional organizations such as the National Tactical Officers Association, and informal, based on the subsequent friendships formed by the formal arrangements. Whether formal or informal, the sharing among peers from other organizations was much more frequent and detailed than the information exchanges within the parent organizations. It was a natural course of action that this sharing later included military police units and other specialized units. Although their missions, organization, and clientele may differ slightly, the tactics and techniques that were initially developed at the local police level are often shared with their counterparts in the military. It has been noted elsewhere in this volume that in today’s world, these bridge-building approaches have clear implications for human intelligence and winning hearts and minds on the ground. A good example of such cooperation has been the development of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) program for training first responders in “active shooter” environments. The federally funded ALERRT curricula include training for small-team tactics in response to deadly violence in crowded areas, buildings, lowlight conditions, mixed-unit cooperation, dynamic entry, hostage negotiation, and the like, all of which are common to law enforcement and military encounters. Initially developed by law enforcement experts in the field, the curricula and training have been continuously refined over the years with new technology and experiential input from the military, domestic law enforcement, and foreign law enforcement. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed to give federal aid to local law enforcement agencies to meet the increased demands identified during the middle of the decade. The bulk of this funding was directed toward the education and training of personnel.

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A concurrent phenomenon was the recognition that dedicated training programs were needed for in-service personnel in response to specifically identified shortcomings in the delivery of police services. Historically, any training beyond the recruit level was directed primarily toward firearms proficiency. However, changes in the external environment identified several shortcomings in the knowledge, skill, and abilities of police officers that could be addressed by restructuring the training paradigm. These changes resulted in a move to certify police personnel in specialized assignments such as breathalyzer operators, motorcycle officers, and radar unit operators, and necessitated training programs dedicated to developing the expertise required for satisfactory job performance. These certification programs were usually identified by civil litigation for negligence in training, mandated by state legislatures, and administered through the respective state commissions on law enforcement officer standards and training. States such as California, Montana, and Texas have now mandated that the officers tasked to respond to incidents of terrorism follow a specific training curriculum. However, the costs for training were expensive and the resources were slight, particularly for the officers whose normal and recurring duties involved tactical responses to in-progress violent criminal behavior. The traditional methods of firearms training had usually been nothing more than timed shooting at paper bulls-eye targets. This sort of training, however inexpensive, was irrelevant and ineffective. Accordingly, alternative sources and methods were necessary to maximize effectiveness. Because many of these officers had already received a measure of tactical training during their military enlistments, it was only logical and natural to call upon their previous experiences, and to renew old contacts for using existing military facilities and resources. Similarly, military combat experts had recently recognized how combat had switched from the traditional large battlefield of World War II to a more tactical form, close quarter battle (CQB). Consequently, a sharing of information, equipment, and facilities between law enforcement and the military was mutually beneficial. These developments have clear relevance under the emergence of the threat of terrorism and the need to protect subways, tunnels, heavily populated centers, and other unconventional targets. The leads

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initiated by the British SAS and the German GSG-9 have well demonstrated the efficacy of national-local cooperative efforts. Perhaps the most significant and important means by which the gap in coordination during large-scale events continues is the informal basis among the responders themselves. For example, the response by local law enforcement officers to contain the Branch Davidian incident after the first assault by the ATF was initiated spontaneously, independently, and simultaneously. According to discussions with these officers,4 the response was conducted without the need and interference of formalized agreements by elected politicians and politically appointed agency heads. The relatively well-coordinated response was viewed largely as the product of these officers, who were members of the tactical units in their departments, having trained together through conferences and coursework developed by the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association. These courses are also attended by military police units from the many Air Force and Army bases located in Texas. Similarly, when rescue workers realized the magnitude of the situation at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and requested assistance, firefighters and emergency medical service personnel literally from around the country did not wait for political permission or public funding to allow them to render aid. They drove through the night, usually at their own expense. The actions of the officers were based on the recognition that the magnitude of the situation would require additional personnel. Their response was not based on predetermined formal arrangements or on any agenda, but fully on the belief that it was the proper and humane thing to do. Finally, as the storm clouds grew over the Gulf of Mexico prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, approximately two hundred police officers from around Texas had gathered in Pasadena for the annual SWAT competition sponsored by the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association. The four-day competition was cut short when the officers volunteered to drive approximately two hundred miles to provide security during 4

Eight of the first responding officers were students at Southwest Texas State University (now Texas State University). Three were assigned to the Austin Police Department, two others were from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and three were from the Travis County Sheriff’s Office.

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military rescue efforts. Again, there was an absence of the bickering over responsibilities, chains of command, expenditures, and resource allocations that had characterized the formal relations between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State of Louisiana. Though some critics may wonder about their motivations, there was no discussion of whether the intention was to assist the federal officers or their fellow officers. Their intentions were to assist the citizens who would be trapped by the flood surge. Similarly it is not uncommon for American firefighters to cross the Rio Grande to assist with fires that could endanger both sides of the river. Debates concerning their intentions serve no purpose, and tend to ignore the basic altruism found in those who choose this line of work. One side would say that they were assisting the feds and the military; the other might argue that they were used to having mutual-aid agreements with other police and fire jurisdictions. So this was a natural extension of such mutual-aid pacts, even if no formal pacts were in place. It’s like firefighters from all over the country responding to California’s seemingly endless series of broad and dangerous wildfires. In none of these examples were the responding officers guided (or hampered) by any form of existing official mutual-assistance pact. Admittedly, this well-accepted practice requires continuous evaluation to answer questions about administrative issues such as overtime pay, equipment maintenance, chain of command, and the like. Although the final outcomes were neither perfect nor even to the complete satisfaction of most of the general public, the response would likely have been even more disastrous if left to the “turf wars” and internecine strife usually found among bureaucrats, politicians, and formalized agreements. Whether the situation is a man-made calamity such as a terrorist incident or a natural disaster such as a hurricane, local law enforcement personnel have displayed a remarkable ability to set aside issues and differences in abilities, funding, and organizational structure in their response to a common cause. This symbiotic relationship between the military and law enforcement has developed from its informal beginnings during the Revolutionary War to a more official operation. Each war has brought more formalization to the program, with the largest amount of legislation taking place during the Vietnam War era. The last major

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legislation affecting veterans’ preference occurred under the Defense Appropriations Act of 1997, which accorded preference to anyone who served in the conflicts in the Middle East, as well as the peacekeeping efforts in the area formerly known as Yugoslavia. Today, a premium is given to personnel who wish to apply their military experience and training to a civilian law enforcement context in the form of preference points for veterans during screening and hiring. A fairly common career path has been to attend a college or university, enlist in the military and gain valuable experience and contacts, and then pursue a career in civilian law enforcement, often with increased opportunity for continuing education and advancement under various programs. Recently this trend has become more pronounced because of national economic trends that have resulted in veteran law enforcement personnel staying on beyond their normally anticipated retirement date, as well as corresponding cutbacks in police recruit classes. Simply put, job applicants in any field are now required to bring more tangible qualities to the employment table. Thus, because of societal demands and external opportunities, police training has truly evolved into an interorganizational phenomenon. Similarly, police officers experienced in community policing have increasingly been used to train peacekeeping officers in the former Yugoslav republics. One needs only to examine the recruiting efforts of corporations such as Halliburton, Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), and DynCorp to see the premium placed on experience that crosses military and law enforcement functions. Might we see a similar cross-training in this opposite direction to our own military, under the scenario predicted by Thomas Barnett?

CONCLUSIONS

Whether an event is a major criminal action, natural disaster, largescale industrial accident, or an act of terrorism, the natural reaction of emergency responders is to go to and deal with the problem. This tendency was clearly evident on September 11, 2001, when all sorts of police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians were seen going into the World Trade Center to assist and evacuate the injured when everyone else was trying to escape. As the dust from the

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collapse of the buildings settled and the operation shifted from one of rescue to recovery, public safety personnel from around the country poured in to help. Even in the absence of a formalized agreement of mutual assistance, emergency response personnel are noteworthy for their ability to come together to resolve a critical situation and then return to some measure of normality once the emergency is over. Though cynics may claim that the success of military and public safety personnel to deal with a problem on an as-needed and impermanent basis is the result of Constitutional safeguards, an equally important and accurate explanation may be found in the character of the individuals performing these tasks, and in the freedom enjoyed to use their resources and abilities properly and appropriately. From a more constructive perspective, it should be recognized both formally and informally that each entity has something to gain from the other. Events such as the Detroit Riot of 1967, where members of the 101st Airborne were sent to assist the Detroit Police Department, demonstrate how this principle has effectively worked after the situation had been federalized. The law enforcement community benefited from the extra personnel, and the military learned the importance of cultivating good relations with the local people. Similarly, during the natural disasters of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Ike in 2008, members of the United States Coast Guard and the United States Air Force – with a federal mandate – provided immediate law enforcement, rescue, and medical assistance to the affected areas. The success to date has largely been a function of their mutual ability to recognize both their organizational independence and their operational interdependencies. Many state and local large-scale events would have resulted in even greater numbers of casualties if the understaffed, under-equipped, and often untrained local, county, and state responders did not have immediate federal military assistance.5 5

Some critics claimed that the military was slow in responding to the storm. However, in anticipation that there would be many casualties, the United States Navy had several ships ready to assist, but were kept out of the storm’s path to prevent damage to the rescuing assets. In addition, units from the United States Air Force Reserve responded from bases in Texas as soon as the storm had passed.

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It is ironic that active engagement in warfare, with the attendant misery and destruction, usually results in relatively rapid advancement in medicine, science, and technology (Schaefer and Hyland, 1994). Our military’s active participation in engagements in recent history, from Somalia and Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq, has certainly resulted in remarkable increases in medical capability that have been transferred to civilian emergency medical responders. For example, workers who have been injured on oil rigs, particularly burn victims, are now routinely flown to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, where the same medical procedures developed to treat massive battlefield trauma are used to treat the civilian population. University research for military needs, often funded through the Defense Applied Research Projects Agency, in applications as diverse as protective clothing, soft body armor, vehicles, and even diet and exercise programs, have had a marked impact on domestic policing, and can be immediately seen in many law enforcement conferences and training sessions. Despite the media-generated misperception of doughnuts and boredom, our police are always engaged. Because of budgetary limitations, our police generally do not enjoy the time or the wide resources for research and training that facilitate the development of military capabilities. Consequently, it has been wise for police leaders to adapt advances in military technology and experience to the civilian law enforcement environment. The interchange between our law enforcement and military has been mutually beneficial. The concern about militarism in American law enforcement seems to be largely an issue of appearance. Apprehension about losing the accustomed distinctions between police and military, or the glorification of the tools of violence, might be an indication of a deeper fear that our police will become an army, and be used domestically as an oppressive force. Police veterans are likely to agree that this is impossible, and that such fears are unfounded, just as military veterans are likely to agree that there is no desire at any level to expand the military mission to include any involvement in domestic law enforcement. Historically, the military and law enforcement elements of our system have worked well together without the formalized prescriptions and proscriptions seen in other countries. For example, during the

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Detroit Riot of 1967, the military immediately recognized their own operational limitations, and formed teams of three soldiers with one police officer who acted typically as both a guide and as a form of a supervisor. Nevertheless, we do not want our police officers to look or act like soldiers. We will be uncomfortable if the police presence in our streets includes assault rifles and tanks. What then, is to be the future of American law enforcement if our police and military must join forces and work in cooperation to prevent, minimize, and manage the effects of terrorist attacks in the United States? The issue might be resolved if police leaders made a conscious, systematic effort to avoid military appearance. When Robert Peel put his London “bobbies” in navy blue uniforms in 1829 to emphasize professionalism with the capacity to use force, he took care to ensure that the public did not confuse the police with the military, and so it should be today. To accomplish this goal of mutually beneficial autonomy, there must be a recognized chain of command established prior to the development of the crisis. In some cases, the transfer of command has even involved a formally signed document analogous to a contract (Perkins and Mijares, 1996). The most memorable example of this organizational principle took place on the international level in 1979 when the British Special Air Service took control of the Iranian Embassy situation. Recognition of the proper chain of command and a formal transfer of authority preceded the successful resolution of the problem. In addition to establishing a formal chain of command, it is necessary that both sides break any existing barriers to the sharing of information of mutual concern. As indicated earlier, information on such topics as tactics, techniques, and technology has usually been shared. A mere observation of the various tactical police conferences or the many training programs hosted by the military clearly illustrates this point. However, intelligence concerning the activities of terrorists and other criminal suspects and groups is usually withheld. Historically, the military has been reluctant to share this information under the claim of national security, whereas the law enforcement community has declined to do so citing prohibitive legal restrictions such as evidentiary rules and mandated procedural practices.

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Finally, continuous mutual-training exercises must be considered to be part of the solution. Learning the substance of the training is one issue. Applying it to realistic scenarios is another. Learning the position and assignment of each part of a well-oiled machine is still another, and is necessary to achieving an automatic response. A relatively predictable reaction and acceptable level of performance can be achieved only through unremitting and relevant training.

REFERENCES Abadinsky, Howard, Organized Crime, 8th edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson/ Wadsworth, 2007). Baldwin v. Seattle, 55 Wn.App.241; 776 P.2d 1377 (1989, Wash.). Barnett, Thomas P. M., The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the TwentyFirst Century (New York: Putnam & Sons, 2004). Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS Task Force Report: Russian Organized Crime (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997). City of Winter Haven v. Allen, 541 So.2d 128 (Fla. App. Dist.1991) and 689 So.2d 968 (Fla. App. Dist.1991). DeMichele, Matthew T. and Kraska, “Community Policing in Battle Garb: A Paradox or Coherent Strategy?” in Peter B. Kraska, ed., Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police (Boston, MA: Northeastern University, 2001). Downs v. United States, 522 F.2d 990 (6th Cir., 1975). Doyle, Charles and Elsea, Jennifer, Terrorism: Some Legal Restrictions on Military Assistance to Domestic Authorities Following a Terrorist Attack (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2005). Dunlap, Charles J., “The Thick Green Line: The Growing Involvement of Military Forces in Domestic Law Enforcement,” in Peter B. Kraska, ed., Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001). Dunn, Timothy J.,“Waging War on Immigrants at the U.S. Border: Human Rights Implications,” in Peter B. Kraska, ed., Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001). Fonda, Jane, My Life So Far (New York: Random House, 2005). Frye v. United States, 421 U.S. 542 (1923). Gates, Darryl, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (New York: Bantam Books, 1991).

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Graham, Bradley, “U.S. Military Plans Responses to Domestic Terrorism.” The Washington Post (August 8, 2005). Haggerty, Kevin D. and Ericson, Richard V., “The Military Technostructures of Policing” in Peter B. Kraska, ed., Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2001). Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). Mallory, Stephen L., Understanding Organized Crime (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2007). McNamara, Robert S., In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1996). Mijares, Thomas C. and McCarthy, Ronald M., The Management of Police Specialized Tactical Units (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2008). Perkins, David B. and Mijares, Tomas C., “Police Liability Issues Associated with Interagency Mutual Assistance Pacts,” Police Liability Review, Volume 8, Number 1 (1996), pp. 1–5. Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997). Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957). Schaefer, Todd and Hyland, Paul, “Technology Policy in the Post-Cold War World,” Journal of Economic Issues, Volume 28, Number 2 (1994), pp. 597–607. United States v. Cusumano, 67 F.3d 1497 (10th Cir., 1995). Porco, 842 F. Supp. 1393 (D. Wyo. 1994). Youngstown County v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

chapter ten

Community Policing and Terrorism Problems and Prospects for Local Community Security Jack R. Greene

INTRODUCTION

Since September 11, 2001, communities throughout the United States and elsewhere have struggled with the question, “How to provide security in an increasingly uncertain world?” As events subsequent to 9/11 have unfolded, U.S. policing, most particularly at the local level of government, has increasingly become responsible for protecting communities from terrorism as well as crime and social disorganization. This role, however, is largely unspecified, and except for the very largest cities like New York and Los Angeles, often beyond local governments’ financial grasp. Nonetheless, it is generally recognized that like politics, all terrorism is ultimately local, at least in the consequences of such events. In the last five years or so, the demarcation between local, state, and federal policing in the terrorism arena has become blurred with overlapping functions, and at times, with competing goals and objectives. For example, whereas federal agencies may be singularly focused on interdicting and preventing acts of terrorism (internationally and domestically), local agencies are invariably tied to responding to terrorism and mitigating its impacts once such events occur, while at the same time providing a sense of community order and safety (see chapter by Maguire and King, this volume). Moreover, the ability of local policing to develop intelligence broad enough to address terrorism is structured both by the size and complexity of the local jurisdiction, but also by the larger set of linkages that the police have within their jurisdiction (see Brodeur, this volume). It is argued here that building

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on these local relationships offers considerable promise to local-police attempts to address and respond to concerns of terrorism. At the same time, the ability of the local police to use these relationships is largely dependent on local trust and confidence in the police, which is at times stressed by concerns of police intrusiveness. Though local policing may have some incremental effect on preventing terrorism, the ability of local police to manage community fear and social panic in the face of terrorism is likely a positive by-product of recent programs of community-oriented policing (COP) and problem-oriented policing (POP). Community- and problem-oriented policing, and their progeny, programs that have followed in the footsteps and traditions of COP and POP (e.g., “reassurance policing”), provide vehicles for strengthening a local-police role in dealing with terrorism by providing local grounding for security-focused efforts. These efforts must be grounded in the communities’ acceptance of police interventions, rooted in the ability of the local police to understand community dynamics and accepted modes of intervention, and must also address public fear of terrorism. This chapter focuses on the role of the local police in addressing terrorism through the lens of community- and problem-oriented policing, most particularly on the problems and prospects of local police embracing a role in terrorism prevention, response, and mitigation. It is both hopeful and cautious. This discussion is rooted first in a consideration of democratic policing, followed by what is known about community- and problemoriented policing and their likely impact on an emerging local-police terrorism role. Finally, the chapter concludes with a consideration of the role that COP and POP can play in addressing issues of terrorism as it plays out at the local level of government. DEMOCRATIC POLICING AND COMMUNITY TOLERANCE FOR POLICE INTERVENTION

Democratic policing continually struggles with the tension between preventing or suppressing crime and maintaining social order. Perhaps the single issue most confronting democratic policing is how to transparently connect the means and the ends of law enforcement;

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that is, how to focus on procedural as well as substantive justice (Tyler, 2001; Tyler and Huo, 2002). The history of policing in the United States reflects this tension, attempting to balance police practice with its social and legal ramifications. For example, attempts to limit or structure police discretion are initiated largely from a recognition that such discretion may introduce bias, resulting in a loss of respect for the law and law enforcers. If the community does not view the police as legitimate, efforts to prevent crime and social disorder are rendered impotent. On the one hand, the police as modeled by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 in England – a model transported widely throughout the “New World” – were first and foremost a preventive agent of social control (Critchley, 1967). In point of fact, one of the major obstacles policing had to confront in its early stages was assuring a wary public that the police were not the surveillance arm of the ruling elite. The hallmark of policing was and continues to be the prevention of crime, although such a goal has often proven elusive. Emerging models of policing have led to several “reforms” of the police, each in some way seeking to make the police more civically accountable, community sensitive, and focused on crime prevention. On the other hand, policing has also been criticized as being a mechanism for maintaining the status quo, and correspondingly, the political power of the ruling class (Center for Research on Criminal Justice, 1975; Chevigney, 1995). Since the late 1980s, policing in Western societies has continually been seen as strengthening its role as a repressive agent of social control, as part of a larger process of class segregation that results in the police focusing their efforts on the underclass and out-groups. Most recently, David Garland (2001) suggested that, especially in the United States, England, and Australia, a “culture of control” has emerged via government legislators, and is supported by a public sense of fear of crime and insecurity. Justice system philosophies and practices have shifted from a progressive and liberally focused crime control agenda found principally in the first half of the twentieth century. This agenda emphasized what Garland (2001: 27) calls a “penal-welfare” structure “combining the liberal legalism of due process and proportionate punishment with a correctionalist commitment

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to rehabilitation, welfare and criminological expertise”(27). In its place, over the second half of the twentieth century, justice philosophy and practice have embraced populist sensibilities, have become considerably more punitive (less proportionate) in orientation, and have abandoned concepts imbedded in the welfare state. Rather, they have adopted neo-conservative ideologies emphasizing what Garland calls “supply-side” criminology (2001: 129). Governments are “shifting risks, redistributing costs, and creating disincentives.” Collectively such changes have resulted in a broad “get tough” emphasis at all stages of the justice process. In the midst of these macro-justice-system changes, policing has itself been the object of nearly a century of reform. Policing in the United States and elsewhere has struggled to find its place on the crime prevention/control continuum, where the choice of place often sets the tension between organizational performance and institutional legitimacy in sharp relief. Some have argued that the police continue to perpetuate an institutional myth of being well organized to respond to crime in part to maintain institutional legitimacy, even in the face of dwindling performance and public suspicion (Crank and Langworthy, 1992). In some ways, policing in the post–September 11 world, most particularly at the local level, is being “stretched” in role and functionality, which in turn has the potential to diminish civic legitimacy. Tensions between police agencies’ focus on performance-measurement and the crime-attack model associated with police deployment around hot spots (Sherman, 1992) and community perceptions of police legitimacy and fairness in the application of the law (Tyler and Huo, 2002) are made all the more complicated in the new world order of international security and terrorism. The complexity of stretching police roles to prevent terrorism – in addition to the many other roles that they perform –across so many jurisdictions with varying degrees of risk and capacity has proven a complicated matter for local policing in the United States and elsewhere. In the last half of the twentieth century, much of the reform of American policing focused first on making the police more professional, and then on making them more transparent and community friendly (Greene, 2000). Reform of the police during this

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period included the introduction of stronger administrative organization (to separate the police from overt political control), the introduction of police and community relations, the “war on drugs,” team policing, followed by community- and problem-oriented policing, and finally wrapping up the century with “zero-tolerance” (Greene, 2000). Given the rapid succession of changes imposed on the police (though they were certainly able to shake-off many of these efforts) there are fragments of several of these reforms that affect the tenor of policing today. Perhaps the two that have received the most attention are community- and problem-oriented policing, although each of the reforms mentioned has a literature and ardent adherents – most particularly those associated with zero tolerance. Community- and problem-oriented policing have had limited impact on crime and social order, but large effects on police and community interactions, fear reduction, and the legitimacy that local communities extend to their police (National Research Council, 2004). It is in this arena (community engagement, acceptance of the police, and fear reduction) that the prospects of COP and POP emerge for localpolice responses to terrorism. As Manning (2003: 41–43) suggests, a working definition of democratic policing includes concern for legal guidance of the police, who should be individually focused. It should not include involvement in group politics, terrorism, or matters of homeland security for that matter. He suggests that what the police do, or do not do, affects their social acceptance and legitimacy, and that such legitimacy “is a negotiated acceptance of the scope of the occupation’s claims, [and] not an absolute or unchanging matter”(42). Broadening the police role to specifically focus on terrorism and related matters shifts the local-police role in a substantial way, and at the same time, such a shift has implications for public acceptance of police actions and intentions (see Manning, 2003, especially chapters 2–3). A general idea raised here is that policing designed with a communityor problem-oriented platform can potentially adjust responses and routines to new roles such as preventing and responding to public fear of terrorism, but only within the constraints of a democratic policing platform.

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THE RISE OF COMMUNITY- AND PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING

American policing, unlike its British counterpart, was suspect from its inception (Miller, 1977). Early attempts to create organized police forces in the United States were complicated by public concerns about the police being uncivil, corrupt, and taking on a political surveillance role (Walker, 1977 and 1980). To be sure, British policing as originally cast in London, with the formation of the London Metropolitan Police, also raised concerns with how the police were to be used politically; but the police of London were soon accepted, primarily because they were organized, uniformed, seen as linked to the law, and generally civil (Miller, 1977). By contrast policing in the United States was particularized, nonuniform, and uncivil – even violent. So from its onset, U.S. policing struggled with civic legitimacy. This struggle continues. Reform of U.S. policing is said to have shifted from political to administrative and then to community concerns (Reiss, 1992: 51–98). In each of these transformations, U.S. policing was pressed for greater control and transparency. Initially slipping the grasp of political machines, policing entered an era of administrative reform focused on producing an orderly and professional police response. Such a response was necessary for several reasons. First, policing in the political era was unpredictable, corrupt, and nonresponsive to interests other than those of a political nature. Second, policing was losing legitimacy; consequently, part of the administrative reform of the police was to at least create the “appearance of control” (Manning, 1977), assuring those external to police agencies that they were organized and generally impartial in the administration of the law and local ordinances. Finally, administrative reform of policing can also be seen as a process that focused on improving the status of policing, which embraced an ideology and some of the trappings of professionalism. Even before the administrative era of the police took hold in American law enforcement, there were vocal concerns about the lack of evenhandedness of the police. These concerns often involve

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public reaction to what Brodeur (1983: 513) calls “high policing,” which is “actually the paradigm for political policing: it reaches out for potential threats in a systematic attempt to preserve the distribution of power in a given society.” When the police in the United States and elsewhere have strayed too far into high-policing activities, they have been most criticized and their institutional legitimacy has been thus affected. Nonetheless, Brodeur argues that in Western societies, high policing is increasingly more an operating model of the police. Such a model of policing gains currency in times of crisis. Moral panic (Cohn, 1972) is fertile soil for high policing. Perhaps the administrative reforms of the police worked too well. In adopting a control-centered model of organization and a military sense of professionalism, the police distanced themselves not only from politicians, but from the public as well. By the mid- to late 1950s, the police had lost their community context; they were an administrative organization, loosely coupled with politics, but mostly driven by internal organizational norms (Greene, 2004: 30–54). One of the first reforms of the police in the 1950s and 1960s was focused on improving police and community relations (Radelet, 1969). This reform agenda called for a series of conversations between the police and the public, often emphasizing cultural and racial tolerance, community-police partnerships, and adherence to matters of procedural justice – the lack of which often enflamed police and community contacts during the era, producing some of the nation’s most costly and deadly riots (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968). The police and community relations (PCR) era (roughly 1955–75) sought to sensitize the police to social and ethnic differences in local, most especially urban communities, and then to design police programs that included the public in police process. The interventions associated with the PCR movement focused on racial stereotyping by the police, and the need to rebuild trust and legitimacy, particularly in communities of color. This era yielded to new experimentation in the 1970s that was framed under the idea of “team policing.” Team policing had several characteristics. Chief among them was community engagement and the de-specialization of policing, particularly as it is played out in local communities. Teams of police officers

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were to be consistently assigned to geographic areas, thereby increasing police and community contact. It also established geographic accountability while improving local acceptance of the police, as well as police knowledge of local mores. Police specialization was incorporated into the “team” so as to minimize the historic practice of police specialists, who had little contextual knowledge of local areas, and who trampled local relations in the name of the specialty. Though short-lived, team policing set much of the stage for community- and problem-oriented policing (Sherman et al., 1973; Schwartz and Clarren, 1977). Community policing and then problem solving gained popularity in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Both COP and POP gained currency in part because of the consistently negative critique of traditional approaches to policing. By the late 1980s, there was considerable evidence that traditional patrol practices lacked preventive power, that follow-up criminal investigations were also limited in impact, and that the public expected more of the police but was getting less. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable experimentation in the use of foot patrols and other community-focused police responses (Greene, 2000), but most produced mixed or inconclusive results (National Research Council, 2004). Nonetheless, it was clear that by the late 1970s the police needed a better model of crime prevention, civic engagement, and accountability (Goldstein, 1977 and 1990). Community policing is cast rather broadly, but its core elements include the reassertion of crime prevention as a central police role, improved dialogue and interaction between communities and their police, the activation of communities in crime-prevention activities, and the creation of partnerships with communities and with other government and private-sector agencies. At the same time, community policing broadened the deliverables of the police to include public safety improvements, crime prevention, reduction in fear of crime, and improved community quality-of-life. Community policing seeks to build community capacity to both resist crime and work with the police to prevent and mitigate the affects of crime (Mastrofski et al., 1995). Partnership has become the watchword for most community-policing efforts. The approach asserts that the police must partner with the

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community and other public and private agencies who serve a local community and who have some impact on community quality-of-life issues (Skolnick and Bayley, 1986). Partnerships with schools, civic and religious organizations, other government agencies, and the private sector are seen as necessary for mobilizing public and private resources and support for crime prevention, as well as building trust, and hence legitimacy, of the police. Though it might be argued that partnerships in policing are more rhetorical than real, there is some evidence that the police have indeed begun the process of horizontally integrating themselves with other local social, cultural, and economic institutions (Roth, 2000). Moreover, it is also possible that those in the community now see the police as more legitimate in the advent of community- and problemoriented policing approaches. Under the broad umbrella of community policing, paying attention to community fear and disorder, and preventing it by organizing the community, speaking with offenders (particularly for minor crimes), and changing the physical environment within which crime occurs are interventions that focus on the broader problems and issues associated with such behaviors. Moreover, though community policing is a generalized model of policing, in contrast to problem solving (see later), it is rooted in notions of community sociology and social psychology, where individuals’ identity and affiliation with a community is a precursor to reducing social disorganization and increasing individual and community social capital.

PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING: AN APPLICATION

Though the police mandate under the community model is broad, problem-oriented policing is considerably more focused on discrete crime and social-order problems. Problem-oriented policing emphasizes the analytics and interventions of the police. As Eck (1993: 63) suggests, “under the problem-oriented approach, the problem, not the criminal law, becomes the defining characteristic of policing.” Herman Goldstein, the father of problem-oriented policing, in refocusing police efforts and strategies, suggested that the police were too means-focused (the traditional model), and not ends- or

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outcome-focused, specifically on the impact of their interventions (Goldstein, 1990). Historically, the police measured effort, such as the amount of time spent on patrol, the number of calls responded to and the speed of the response, or the number of criminal investigations initiated or arrests made. Goldstein (1990) suggested that the police should focus on outcomes – problems resolved or mitigated. To be sure, problem-oriented policing has some overlap with community policing to the extent that the community is often engaged in problem identification and definition, as well as in discussions about interventions. In contrast to traditional policing, problem-oriented policing also makes police decisions and actions more transparent to both the public and police supervisors. Problem-oriented policing has important implications for how the police go about their business, how they organize and supervise police work, and how police agencies are structured (Greene, 2004). Additionally, under the norms of problem solving, police organizations must improve organizational intelligence; that is, their understanding of how police interventions work.

ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICING

In recent years U.S. policing has witnessed yet another emerging style: zero tolerance. Some argue that this style of policing is actual the result of misinterpreting or misrepresenting community- and problemoriented policing (Rosenbaum, Lurigio, and Davis, 1998: 192–194). Others argue that zero tolerance is the application of community- and problem-oriented policing to its fullest (Henry, 2001). The zero-tolerance emphasis got its greatest boost in the early 1990s in New York, as the police there adopted many aggressive street tactics. As crime in that city and throughout the country declined, zero tolerance was portrayed as the cause of such declines. Under this model, the police attack order problems in communities in the hope that such an approach will dissuade and otherwise deter more serious criminal behavior. Zero-tolerance policing has its roots in the suppressive aspects of policing, and in some ways, it returns the police to their more traditional law enforcement role. Such an approach to policing has

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considerable implication for police and community interactions, and for the legitimacy the public extends to the police. For example, in mobilizing communities, one of the central features of both community- and problem-oriented policing is public acceptance of their role in working with the police on matters of crime prevention. Under the zero-tolerance approach, the demand for order may result in a deterioration of law, particularly the lawfulness of the police. Events in New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, and New Orleans involving police assaults on minority group members have cast doubt on the efficacy of zero tolerance in policing, most particularly the policing of minority communities. These events have been witnessed in several American cities, and in most instances they occur through aggressive police street tactics, not unlike the precipitous events of the urban riots documented by the Kerner Commission in the 1960s. Such actions reveal the delicate relationship between the police and those policed. Moreover, there is evidence that the promise of zero tolerance, like the underlying model of “broken windows” on which it is built, has several theoretical and analytic problems (Harcourt, 2001).

EXTENDING COMMUNITY-, PROBLEM-ORIENTED, AND ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICING TO TERRORISM – THE PROBLEMS

Prior to September 11, 2001, local policing in the United States had little to do with homeland security (then called national security) or terrorism, although the police have for nearly three quarters of a century developed criminal and other intelligence1 used to address organized crime, drug trafficking, and gangs (Greene and Decker, unpublished). In the interim, the police have continued to respond to community calls for service, organize communities for crime

1

Here the intelligence functions of the police beginning in the 1920s and continuing intermittently to the present include the collection of information on organized crime, gangs, drug syndicates and networks, political subversives, and those exercising political dissent. Though some of these activities are not particularly well sanctioned by the public, they do represent evidence of the capacity of the police to collect information and use it for intelligence purposes.

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prevention under the rubric of community policing, and solve problems, mostly crime-related. In many ways, the police role has been slowly stretched over the past century, despite the fact that much of what constitutes the bulk of police activity in the twenty-first century (patrol response and follow-up criminal investigation) has a distinct root in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the police role has indeed been stretched a bit under community- and problem-oriented policing, the stretch was not particularly institutionally uncomfortable. This is the case for two primary reasons. First, through a major federal initiative to “put 100,000 cops on the beat,” the U.S. federal government underwrote the large investment in U.S. policing from about 1992 to 2001. These efforts focused primarily on institutionalizing the precepts of community policing and problem solving (for a review of federal efforts organized as part of the COPS program, see Roth, 2000). The viability of these substantial police investments remains an open question relative to impact and opportunity cost (Roth, 2000; National Research Council, 2004). Nonetheless, at a time when crime was seen as rising at an alarming rate (late 1980s and into the early 1990s) such federal investment certainly helped local-police departments “beef-up” their forces, while at the same time attempting to assuage public concerns about police legitimacy.2 One reason supporting the adoption of community- and problemoriented policing as preferred modes of police functioning is related to concerns about police accountability, and ultimately to the institutional legitimacy that communities give to or withhold from their police. As previously indicated, much of community policing is focused on community engagement and the building of trust. As a corollary to community policing, problem solving focused police discretely on forms of crime and disorder. To the extent that police have had some success in problem solving, community support of the police has 2

Ironically, in a post–September 11, 2001, world, much of the federal effort has been redirected to homeland security, and resources for local-police personnel have effectively ended – at the very moment when police agencies took on a terrorism-prevention role, and when local governments were least able to afford more police officers. Most of these resources have been redirected to federal initiatives.

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generally been forthcoming (for a review of the effectiveness of problem solving (National Research Council, 2004: 243–246). Problem solving has also been importantly aided by shared agreement as to the object of police interventions. Much of the problemsolving literature examines police interventions in crime hot spots or in drug markets, whereas a smaller number of other projects have examined problem solving across forms of violence and property crime (National Research Council, 2004). In each case, the target crime was generally known and accepted by the community. Such acceptance is important (as discussed later) because it establishes a normative sponsorship within which police activity occurs. This is to say, using a problem-solving approach police typically have a clear crime target, community awareness of the target and of the selected police response. This is not to be construed that the community is immediately supportive of the police; rather, it suggests that the police generally work under a legitimacy umbrella provided by the community and that COP and POP have helped expand the reach of that umbrella (Cordner and Biebel, 2005). MAPPING COP/POP TO TERRORISM PREVENTION, CONTROL, AND RESPONSE

In mapping community policing or problem solving from crime to terrorism responses, several issues must be confronted. First, how have these approaches worked with crime, fear, and community consensus building? Second, have these approaches produced information that would inform terrorism prevention, and at what cost (social or other)? That is to say, can the analytic routines and information sets that inform COP/POP be extended to terrorism, and with what likely outcome? Third, do the strategies and tactics of community policing and problem solving lend themselves to addressing issues of terrorism? Simply put, can COP and POP activities be employed on the new terrorism front? Fourth, can the partnerships and alliances now associated with both community policing and problem solving be broadened to include terrorism? And fifth, does the extension of community policing and problem solving to terrorism affect the institutional legitimacy of the police – most especially how the public perceives police behavior and practice?

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CAN COP/POP BE MADE TO WORK FOR TERRORISM?

Community policing and problem solving have been associated with policing for nearly twenty years. Each in its own right was hailed as the “new paradigm” for policing, connecting the police and the public and effectively addressing crime and social-order problems. Through these strategies, the police were to be accountable – transparent in their interactions with the public and effective in addressing public safety, crime, fear of crime, and community quality-of-life. So what of the evidence? It is not particularly clear that community policing and problem solving have been thoroughly implemented, except in a few agencies, or that they have fully worked. That is to say, both evidence of the implementation and effectiveness of these approaches are mixed. For example, Roth and his colleagues (2004: 24–25) report that implementation evidence from the field suggests mixed and sometimes conflicting implementation patterns. They suggest that At least at the level of announced agency policy, reported use of community policing tactics proliferated between 1995 and 2000 . . . With respect to problem solving, more agencies began reporting that they were using elements of Goldstein’s paradigm . . . Yet on site, problem solving turned out to have an astonishing variety of meanings . . . There is ample evidence that the police field has accepted the viability of partnership-based problem solving and prevention strategies as relevant and useful to their mission of crime fighting . . . Involving other agencies in specific aspects of problem solving has not been a difficult leap for police departments to make. Establishing community partnerships, however, is more difficult, as they must involve some level of power sharing with the community.

A close reading of Roth (2004 and 2000) and his colleagues in this and an earlier report on the National Evaluation of the COPS Program suggests that the institutional shift from crime suppression to prevention expected in the advent of community policing has not fully materialized. Roth and his colleagues did find greater police acceptance of partnerships (public and private), and greater police inclusion of others relevant to crime-prevention activities. Finally, the National Research Council (2004: 232–235), in what is the most thorough review of police research to date, concluded that the effects of

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community policing are also mixed, owing in part to the wide array of programs and interventions that fall under the COP umbrella, and the rather weak research designs to evaluate these programs. Though the crime and social-disorganization findings relative to the impact of community policing are mixed, there is broader support for a COP effect on community fear of crime. As the National Research Council reports: There is also evidence that community policing lowers the community’s level of fear when programs are focused on increasing community-police interaction. Community policing strategies are expected to influence fear of crime by making the police an easily accessible and more visible presence, or reducing the sense of physical, social and psychological distance between ordinary citizens and police officers, or both … studies show that policing strategies characterized by more direct involvement of police and citizens, such as citizen contract patrol, police community stations, and coordinated community policing, often have the predicted negative effect on fear of crime among individuals and on individual level of concern about crime in the neighborhood. (2004: 234–235)

With respect to problem solving, the evidence is also mixed. In a review of why problems don’t get solved, Eck (2004: 185–206) suggested that several issues contribute to problem solving’s mediocrity. They include: (1) The analytic skills required for problem solving do not presently exist; nor are they necessarily part of police professional development; (2) police managers are not particularly facile with problem solving; nor can they effectively discriminate between quality and superficial problem-solving efforts; (3) little is actually known about what works; (4) police problem solving often skips over the analytic processes associated with this approach, often going right to solutions and interventions, and not approaching problems in a systematic manner; and (5) problem solving is made more difficult because we do not know much about the problems to be solved (2004: 190–193). Eck’s assessment has been reinforced by other assessments of problem solving, including those of Clarke (1998), Read and Tilley (2000), and Cordner and Biebel (2005). Although there are many reasons for the fledging and often fragile nature of community- and problem-oriented policing, what is clear

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from the COP and POP literature is that the police are more engaged with their communities than ever before, that this engagement is relatively well accepted by the community, and that community concern and fear of crime are potentially ameliorated by police strategies that insist on community-police involvement. In point of fact, it may be this platform (community engagement) that policing terrorism most vitally needs – one focused on fear management, response, and mitigation, rather than prevention. Interestingly, in the “war on terrorism” in Iraq, the military broadened its strategies from the “attack” mode to include a “nation- or community-building” mode, reflecting its understanding that long-term success in dealing with terrorism is as much tied to reducing community fear, establishing community ties, and engagement, and otherwise linking more directly to the community in matters of social control (Fukuyama, 2006). Other nonmilitary U.S. agencies have also expanded their nation- or community-building roles as well. USAID, for example, implemented an Iraqi Community Based Conflict Mitigation Program that reflects many of the precepts of community policing.3

ARE COP/POP INFORMATION AND ANALYTICS USEFUL TO UNDERSTANDING TERRORISM?

Policing in one form or another has always been about collecting and processing information about crime and social disorder. Initially, information about crime was collected about victims and offenders, but today information is also collected spatially and temporally, aggregating individual victim and offender data (for a critique, see Garland, 2001). So the question might be asked: Can the local police reasonably collect information on terrorism as they do on crime through such processes as watch-and-warrant systems? In today’s new security-conscious world, the slogan “all crime is not terrorism, but all terrorism is criminal” reflects the general idea that the information collected by the police might be simply applied to the 3

This program emphasizes community conflict assessment and peace building, the implementation of an Iraqi Peace Foundation engaging academic and civic leaders, and a series of youth peace-building initiatives carried out through the creation and facilitation of youth groups (see www.usaid.gov/iraqi).

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issues of terrorism. How this is to occur is presently unresolved, and it may not lend itself to easy resolution. Whether police information about crime and other social conditions can be turned into intelligence to be used in homeland security is not yet established, although some argue that the processes for such a conversion are within the grasp of the police (Carter, 2004). This is true largely because the ability of the police to understand problem sets is not well grounded. In practice, problem solving often proceeds from the surfacing of some aggregate-level patterns. These patterns are then pursued, but typically with traditional police responses, like saturation patrol, sweeps, crackdowns, and targeted investigations. In some respects, crime or social disorder is revealed to the police by street-level behaviors that are witnessed by the police themselves, or by individual complaints about negative behavior or crime (Wilson, 1968; Black, 1980), for which there is some shared agreement. Either the police directly observe a behavior, or the community mobilizes the police by calling for assistance. This is as true today as it has been for nearly a century. So whether the community or the police can discern the precursors to terrorism from the information they collect on crime and social disorganization is yet known. The problems here relate to the volume of information the police collect, and its ability to actually be a predictor of future terrorism. Looking for terrorism in traditional police information systems might be likened to drinking from a fire hose; you will get some water, but you are also going to get very, very wet. Even with advanced datamining techniques, scaling down police information to the subset that might be more useful than others is a difficult task, and not yet conceptualized or validated. Furthermore, although police information systems have become more sophisticated over the past several years, aiding in the detection and arrest of Timothy McVeigh through a license plate, for example, they require much care and nurturing. How the police will integrate data from several sources to address terrorism is yet an unresolved question (see Brodeur, this volume). The question of the prediction of terrorism also is quite problematic. Information will be necessary to better understand if police call-for-service and crime data have any predictive capacity for terrorism prediction, except in some post hoc way. Perhaps these two

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information sets overlap, and perhaps they do not. What is clear is that the police collect much information, only a small portion of which they actually use, and the information collected is generally collected in the same way it has been for one hundred plus years, although it is now automated. Just as important, retrospective analyses that suggest that the police had contact with a terrorist because of a speeding ticket, requires a leap of inference that such information (ticket) is therefore a predictor of terrorism. Searching for known terrorists among all who receive traffic tickets is probably not very useful. Understanding the connection between types of behavior and police information sources might be more revealing, however. Linking risk to these information sets could also benefit police understanding of behaviors in areas where risk is higher. Such a shift in analytic focus might benefit local police if they are to have a role in anticipating terrorism events. Most recently, a set of analytics called COMPSTAT, pioneered in New York City and touted as a major vehicle for reducing crime and ensuring police accountability (Silverman, 1999; Henry, 2002), has captured the imagination of American policing. As a generalized process and set of analytics, COMPSTAT patterns crime spatially and temporally, presenting the results of such analysis to police managers with the question “What are you going to do about this pattern?” In addressing the COMPSTAT patterns presented, police commanders are seen as being more accountable as they pursue strategies and tactics focused on the patterns. Though over the years some of this analysis has indeed become more sophisticated (perhaps even approaching some form of network analysis, see below), the underlying model described earlier still captures much of what is now called crime analysis or crime mapping. On the surface this looks very analytic, and indeed a science of spatial and temporal crime analysis has emerged in criminology (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1984 and 1991), although not much of this scientific development directly informs police crime analysis. Nonetheless, the patterns and analyses presented via COMPSTAT and its progeny simply aggregate crime and social-order problems, and then map them according to the geographic areas of the police (typically beats, sectors, precincts, and the like). The resulting “hot spots”

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are then addressed through police tactics of one form or another. These analytic techniques actually compress time and space in interesting, yet potentially problematic ways. Moreover, the data used for such analyses are the same inputs that the police have always used: calls for service and reported and observed crime and disorder. More sophisticated analyses now take into consideration sociodemographic and land-use data, but in their aggregation it is not clear how these data can inform police strategies and tactics. Though such analyses have gained considerable importance in describing among other things community social disorganization (Sampson, 1989), it is not clear that police strategies for crime control can or should operate directly on aggregate social information. Such social data can, however, create a context for sensitizing the police to local social and economic conditions; but they do not in and of themselves provide clear direction for police action in individual cases. Nonetheless, such analyses as applied to understanding community dynamics, and hence new forms of crime, might prove useful in better understanding terrorism and community fears of terrorism. It is also important to recognize that the crime-analytic approaches of the police are largely ex post facto explanations of crime and social disorder. They rely on historical data, and it is presently unclear if such analyses can predict crime events. Rather, they may predict areas in a community where the likely probability of crime occurring is greatest. Although these analyses do help inform the deployment of police resources on a broad scale, they almost always do so in reaction to an emerging problem, rather than as a method of preventing the problem in the first place. Moreover, much of this analysis is univariate or bivariate – in a criminological world defined by multivariate problems. Perhaps the largest concern relative to mapping current police analytic techniques from crime to terrorism is what we know about the analytic and conceptual differences between the two (e.g., Krebs, 2001). Most important among these, according to Sparrow (1991), is the general absence of forms of analytic thinking that might be useful in examining terrorism, most notably, applied network analysis. Sparrow (1991: 272) suggests: Existing concepts from the discipline of network analysis have been shown to be relevant to the analysis of criminal intelligence … The

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law enforcement community, being largely unaware of the methods and concepts developed within the discipline of network analysis, has not yet had the opportunity to enunciate its needs for more sophisticated tools.

Moreover, analyses of criminal and terrorist networks suggest substantial differences in their patterning and structure. These studies have implications for how the police operating under community policing or problem solving might approach terrorism. For example, research by Krebs (2001) among others suggests that terrorist networks, such as those involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, are characterized by a dense under-layer of long-standing trusted relationships that is effective in isolating those in the network from externals. Such networks are “serpent in structure” – sparse and elongated, distancing individual actors in the network from one another, thereby gaining a greater degree of invisibility and secrecy. As Krebs (2001: 39) indicates, “A strategy for keeping cell members distant from each other, and from other cells, minimizes damage to the network if a cell member is captured or otherwise compromised.” This structure is not often demonstrated in drug markets, where needing the resources from drug sales (profit) makes the network more visible to buyers and to the police, and where linkages among dealers and suppliers are many (Morselli, 2005). Such networks, though exhibiting many of the characteristics of covert social systems, make different tradeoffs between secrecy and stealth and moving the product (drugs). Terrorist networks balance the need for secrecy and stealth and goal attainment (Baker and Faulkner, 1993). Terrorist goals can be longer term, revealing less about the network until such time as it acts. Simply applying notions about drug networks to terrorism, for example, will not comport with what we know about terrorist networks (Morselli, 2005). And using traditional crime-analytic techniques has the potential to ignore more sophisticated network-analytic techniques thought more useful to addressing terrorism. Clearly, the “all hazards” approach to criminal intelligence gathering and analysis advocated by some (Carter, 2004) is not likely to collect the appropriate terrorism-related information, nor pattern it using applied network-analytic or other more sophisticated approaches.

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CAN COP/POP STRATEGIES AND TACTICS INFORM TERRORISM RESPONSES?

In practice, it may be difficult to implement COP/POP strategies that can effectively address terrorism, at least from the perspective of prevention. What can be said of police tactics that surround community policing is that general tactics like foot patrol, storefront offices, and advisory committees may have some salutatory effects on community perceptions of the police and on the reduction of fear of crime, but how they are to be integrated into a “terrorism prevention system” remains unknown. As will be discussed later, however, such community investments can go a long way in building police responses to terrorism and to the mitigation of the effects of terrorist acts, including fear. To the extent that such approaches have increased the dialogue between the community and the police while increasing information sharing about local crime and disorder problems, then the extension of community policing to terrorism might be characterized as increasing information about something (terrorism) that the public may perceive as alarming, but not in a criminal way. Such an interpretation of police-citizen interaction brings to mind Bittner’s definition of policing (1974: 17–44, and reported in Klockars, 1985: 16–17) as “something-ought-not-to-be-happening-about-which-somethingought-to-be-done – Now!” This represents a generalized citizen dissatisfaction with some aspect of communal life that is perceived to warrant police intervention. Furthermore, though the general citizenry can reasonably identify issues of social disorder and crime, it is not clear that any consensus exists about what constitutes potential terrorism, except perhaps in the most stereotypical ways. Training the public on ways to identify potential terrorism, again with exception for the most obvious activities (someone making a bomb in plain view), will not be easy. Nor will it be easy for the police to respond to wide variation in public attitudes toward out-groups, immigrants, and others not like “us.” Moreover, even when the public has reported activities they want addressed in their neighborhoods, it is not clear that the police can respond. A summary of much police research is that the community is often focused on questions of social order, whereas the police are focused on crime. Such gaps in public

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and police orientation in public safety are likely to be exacerbated when considering definitions and signs of terrorism. Tactics employed in problem solving have been critiqued as largely involving traditional police responses to crime and social disorder – saturation patrol, crackdowns, targeted investigations, and the like. How such interventions are to be linked to terrorism prevention, raises an important question illuminated by Eck (2004): “What is the problem and what are its dynamics and dimensions?” Generally speaking, local policing has little familiarity with such questions. But what is also clear is that when the police have ventured into intelligence gathering, they have taken on a risk that has historically led to the loss of institutional legitimacy.

CAN PARTNERSHIPS BE EXTENDED TO TERRORISM PREVENTION?

In both community policing and problem solving, the idea of partnership is emphasized. Simply speaking, community policing emphasizes partnerships and interactions, especially with social and business communities (typically those at the street level), whereas problem solving, perhaps, stresses more complex partnerships between police, other government agencies, and the private sector. As discussed earlier, the police have often succeeded in creating limited partnerships with business, mostly those focused on a particular crime, but have had less success consistently engaging social communities. Aggressive partnership initiation, development, and maintenance are perhaps the most important contributions that COP and POP bring to the question of addressing local responsibilities for terrorism. Revealing terrorism networks and intentions, as briefly alluded to earlier, will require a collective focus and the sharing of information about what terrorism is, how to identify it, and what to do with this information once acquired. Moreover, it is in the area of partnership development that the police have succeeded most, and hence there exists a potential for mobilizing partnerships for crime prevention to include terrorism prevention as well. Police success in establishing partnerships is most related to the response role of the police, rather than the prevention role, however.

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That is to say, local policing (state, county, and municipal or town) has for a number of reasons been less successful with primary interventions, mostly those associated with prevention. In fact, policing in the United States and elsewhere, though espousing a prevention rhetoric, has in reality been most focused on rapid responses (a secondary intervention) and the mitigation of harm (a tertiary intervention). This is the case largely because local policing in the United States and elsewhere was first organized as a “watch and ward” reactive system that has been consistently criticized when local police took on too vigorously a criminal intelligence role (Greene and Decker, unpublished). Nonetheless, much of the success attributed to community policing and problem solving can be associated with building relationships with external others (for a model of police interventions and discussion of the roles that the police can effectively play in addressing terrorism, see Figure 10.1). Partnerships remain complicated for the police, particularly in light of their emerging homeland security and terrorism-response roles. This results from the position local police find themselves relative to usable information about potential terrorist acts, and the range of actions that the local police can take in these processes. Let’s briefly consider three issues concerning partnerships and their impact on policing for terrorism: directionality, horizontal and vertical integration, and concerns with privacy and secrecy. In many of the relationships the police have developed, the direction of interactions is from the police to the focal partner, whether that partner be a community group, other government agency, or privatesector interest. This has largely resulted in unidirectional relationships and communications that are often characterized by asymmetric communication and power. In respect to community groups, the police have all but directed the activities of these groups, shaped the community agenda, and often controlled access to information and decision making within police circles. At the local level, this is also the case for police relationships with other local government agencies and with the private sector. The historical reason for such asymmetry in the relationships between the police and external others is that the police have, generally speaking, been unwilling or unable to share power. As information

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Time 1

Time 2

Time 3

Primary

Secondary

Tertiary

Prevention

Emergency response

Mitigation

High

Intrusiveness

Low

Low

Legitimacy

High

COP/POP Roles Community awareness Fear reduction Information gathering

Emergency response Community reassurance Coordination of Order maintenance Resources, evacuation routes, quarantine, etc.

Building partnerships

Figure 10.1. Community- and problem-oriented interventions for terrorism.

and decision making are instruments of exercising power, the police have historically controlled and limited access to both. Even throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when the idea of task forces crosscutting government, community leadership, and business were proffered, the tone and tenor of such relationships was often police-centric, and research on these task forces was quite limited (Hayslip and RussellEinhorn, 2003). Thus, the level of interaction and information sharing capable at the local level of government from the perspective of policing continues to be shaped by the police control of these relationships, and often by the struggle that external others have in working with the police. In developing an intelligence-led model for policing, Carter (2004) reinforces the need for the police to build intelligence networks that are more inclusive and share information more broadly. But even if such partnerships are indeed created, much of the information that the police collect is not well thought out, documented, or systematically connected. Manning (2003: 148–150) suggests that

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even when technology is introduced to speed up and systematize police information, often the initial information is problematic, lacking or not particularly capable of such organization. Despite the preceding commentary, it should be stated that police horizontal integration into local communities, local government structures, and with the private sector is better off today, given the emphases on COP and POP for such partnerships. Such horizontal integration has resulted in the police being better linked with other sectors of local government, the private sector, and community agencies, each of which has an interest and capacity for preventing crime. This foundation might become a platform for a limited local-police role in terrorism prevention, but perhaps a larger role in terrorism responses and mitigation efforts. It is also a platform for fear reduction (see Forst, this volume). Unfortunately, the vertical integration of the police across local jurisdictions and with superordinate jurisdictions (e.g., with the federal government) remains problematic, even with the emphasis given to homeland security. At a tactical level, local policing has increased its interaction with federal law enforcement and prosecution services through what are known as Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF). Localpolice interactions within a JTTF framework have produced mixed results – some positive and some less positive. Most police interactions in task forces have confronted several communications and information-sharing barriers common in law enforcement settings. They include: (1) different orientations about crime, safety, and terrorism as one moves from the federal to the local level of government; (2) different organizational jargon and cultures; (3) the general absence of a sharing ethic among both federal and local agencies; and (4) a concern with the security of information and hence limitations on sharing information with unknown others – including police sharing this information with one another (e.g., federal agencies v. local agencies) (Hayslip and Russell-Einhorn, 2003). Interagency collaboration among police agencies in the United States and elsewhere is complicated by matters of jurisdiction (enforcement of federal v. state or local law); the maintenance of secret information and a general unwillingness to share information (either through matters of government clearance levels for information access, or through the keeping of information as power); and

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conflicting organizational cultures and missions. Such barriers are readily observable in police task-force operations, having yet to be seriously resolved (see Brodeur, this volume). Moreover, historic conflict between federal and local law enforcement agencies, often based on agency jealousy and rivalry, continue to haunt the development of effective vertical linkages among locals and external others. Building effective terrorism information sharing and intelligence networks will require attention to establishing and sustaining horizontal and vertical relationships, and reducing what are known barriers to each (see Brodeur, and Maguire and King, this volume). Perhaps one of the largest barriers to building effective networks for collecting and sharing information on terrorism are those involving concern for privacy and secrecy. Each of these ideas raises and counters claim to the legitimacy of the other in that advocates for privacy seek to, among other things, reduce secrecy in government, whereas those advocating for the need to increase secrecy under the umbrella of homeland security inevitably must confront matters of privacy. Responses to the events that unfolded on September 11, 2001, have included “[t]he devotion of new resources and authority to law enforcement entities, the further militarization of the police … and the rapid incorporation of crime detection technology” (Brandl, 2003: 133). These changes in policing have resulted in the police being more able to capture and process information about individuals, groups, and places – hence, more intrusive. Such capacities raise concerns with constitutional protections and individuals’ sense of a right to privacy. Building effective partnerships for terrorism prevention, response, and mitigation will have to squarely address issues of privacy and secrecy; to do so only within the police community invites continued criticism of the police, leading to broader concerns about institutional legitimacy.

WHAT ABOUT INSTITUTIONAL LEGITIMACY?

From its initial formation, the U.S. police have continuously struggled with issues of legitimacy – first in their initial formation, and subsequently for how much their activities intrude into the private lives of citizens (Donner, 1990; Theoharis, 1990; Klinger and Grossman, 2002; Giroux, 2004; Greene and Decker, unpublished). To the extent that local policing deviates from its public-place safety mission,

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concern for police spying and the broader surveillance of public space gives rise to questions of police institutional legitimacy. In the new era of homeland security, intelligence gathering and the general cloak of secrecy that wraps around these matters create the possibility for the processes of the police and other government actors to become less visible and, consequently, more subject to public concern. Community policing especially seeks to improve police transparency in decisions and actions, thus helping to improve public acceptance of the police and their institutional legitimacy. Processes to engage and include the community (Greene, 2000), a hallmark of community policing, will be threatened to the extent that homeland security matters move the police away from such civic transparency. Balancing the need for information collection and assessment with the legitimate concerns of the community that certain individuals or groups will not be targeted as terrorists is a challenge if COP and POP are to become a platform for preventing terrorism, particularly as exercised by the local police. Recent immigrants to local communities will especially need assurance that they are not the focus of police intelligence-gathering and terrorism interventions. Moreover, how the community is to be engaged in terrorism prevention is not particularly clear. Historically, the police viewed the public as passive “eyes and ears” to observe and report suspected crime (or criminal behavior) and then to wait for a police response. In many respects, the same role is ascribed to the public in their engagement in homeland security. The difference, however, is that whereas “suspected crime” may be a somewhat vague term to the public, “suspected terrorism” is even more elusive. Beyond obvious situations where someone is overheard discussing or directly seen in an act that involves a crime or act of terrorism, expecting the public to discern terrorist activities may be wishful thinking. Instead, cultural and other stereotypes will likely underpin public reporting of suspected terrorism, further complicating the police response to immigrant or culturally sensitive communities. Given current assessments of terrorism networks, it is not clear that terrorism will actually reveal itself to community residents in ways that are observable, and hence capable of being amplified. Perhaps most important is the maintenance of a police posture that supports constitutional provisions and lawfulness. The moral panic

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(Cohn, 1972) that is associated with events like terrorism can exacerbate relationships between social groups. Since 9/11, persons of Arabic heritage have felt that they are subject to greater police intrusiveness, singularly because of their customs and/or language. Localpolice legitimacy often rests on such perceptions. Police adherence to constitutional protections – not engaging in racial or religious stereotyping – is a central concern in such communities. Local-police protection of perceived out-groups and their constitutional liberties will become an important tool in maintaining community engagement, particularly in marginalized communities. Taken together, it does not appear that stretching COP or POP concepts or tactics to terrorism is likely a smooth transition, most especially when the focus is on intelligence gathering. If specific terrorism problems could be identified, then local police might engage in problem solving, but given Eck’s (2004) critique, it is more likely the case that (1) terrorism problems may be more difficult for the police to specify and understand; ( 2) scanning for terrorism will be equally problematic, given its secrecy and low-visibility prior to terrorist events; and (3) the application of traditional police responses to terrorism is unlikely to fully address these situations, except in the way that the police are prepared for emergency response to catastrophic incidents.

THE PROSPECTS FOR COP AND POP AS TERRORISM RESPONSES

This critique of the role of COP and POP as responses to terrorism, most especially among local police, has been dimly cast. This is largely the case because the evidence on the effectiveness of COP and POP is indeed mixed. Although there remain a number of issues that confront terrorism responses at the local level, COP and POP do hold some promise for local-police strategies for terrorism. They do so in ways that deemphasize intelligence gathering and emphasize police responses to and mitigation of terrorism events, including fear. What follows is a bit of conjecture, but is consistent with the precepts and limited evidence about the effects of COP and POP. In Figure 10.1, a model of terrorism response for local police is explored. The model has been used in the medical community to separate out the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary

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interventions. The model is time-bound such that Time 1 represents opportunities for prevention, Time 2, opportunities for response, and Time 3, opportunities for mitigation. Seen in the context of current or proscribed police responses to terrorism, Time 1 represents activities associated with gathering intelligence to prevent or interdict terrorism, Time 2 represents emergency responses to terrorism events, and Time 3 represents efforts to mitigate the effects of terrorism or in some sense to recover. As shown in Figure 10.1, police actions often reflect tensions between police intrusiveness and the legitimacy the police receive from their publics. In a general sense, as the police move toward more intrusiveness, the less legitimacy they might be accorded. This model comports reasonably well with the history of American police over the twentieth century. Community- and problem-oriented policing schemes do offer some important insights into how local policing can minimize its intrusiveness and maximize its legitimacy when dealing with matters of terrorism. On the front end, those involving primary interventions, COP and POP provide several avenues for local police. They include increasing community awareness, reducing fear, gathering information, and protecting out-groups. Each of these activities, though intrusive, borrows from the community contexts the police have learned, the local partnerships they have built, and the legitimacy they have been accorded by their local communities (residential and business). Moreover, such approaches fit well with prior police actions in dealing with family and spousal abuse and community crime prevention, among others. They can actively involve the community in ways that dispel the idea of police spying, while responsibly engaging the community in the general observation of community conditions warranting police attention. Developing community awareness, akin to crime-prevention efforts, can (1) produce useful community information including the contexts for that information, and (2) reduce unwarranted fear and stereotyping of out-groups. These actions do not approach intelligence gathering in the same way, but do provide a useful vehicle for local police to send information into agencies that organize or process information for intelligence. At the same time, social and cultural

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knowledge of the communities they police can be important in assuring that constitutional protections are fully exercised, thereby moving the local police to a less intrusive and perhaps more socially supportive role in preventing terrorism. Given the ways in which we understand terrorism networks, such information will almost always be beyond the reach of a single jurisdiction. States and the federal government have a broader intelligence-gathering and analysis role, and though the local police are indeed loosely connected to these functions, they do not represent a corollary for an intelligence-gathering function at the local level, except perhaps in the largest cities and most densely populated regions. Rather, terrorism analysis is a matter of aggregation, beyond single jurisdictions, requiring a strong role for states, regions, and the federal government. In fact, the history of the police has witnessed many problems when intelligence gathering was a local-police role. This does not mean that local police abrogate their responsibilities for protecting life and property. It does mean that the local police cannot go this alone; rather, they need to be part of a larger process, but not the central driving component. The partnerships that local policing has developed over many years form an important foundation for planning and implementing emergency responses to terrorism and other alert systems. Coordinated first-responder systems, the protection of critical infrastructure, and public/private responses to terrorism afford the local police a rather natural leadership role in secondary responses to terrorism. Much like the police response to crime, secondary responses are important for saving lives, minimizing damage, and investigating terrorism events. They build on accepted police roles and improved police practices that have accumulated over many years. Finally, the COP and POP experiences of the local police suggest that they have a very broad role in post-emergency responses, including such functions as reassuring the community after a trauma, providing order in time of major disruptions, and implementing a form of democratic policing that assures for an orderly and lawful return to civic processes that might be disrupted by terrorism. Mitigating the effects of terrorism comports well with problem-oriented policing to

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the extent that the lessons learned and analyzed can provide useful information for future strategies and programs aimed at prevention. The roles that COP and POP might suggest for local policing are yet emerging, but they have import for balancing the response to such events while at the same time keeping an established trust of the police – something central to democratic policing. As police information, analytics, and technical systems continue to improve, the local police may have a broader role in the prevention of terrorism. And certainly local-police actions that result from intelligence provided by both the public and private sectors to disrupt terrorism planning or execution are indeed positive. Having said this, it must be remembered that local policing is constrained by many factors including jurisdiction, fiscal resources, analytic capacity, and public acceptance, among others. Such constraints do not preclude a local-police role in terrorism response; rather, they condition the range of effective responses that can be implemented. Building on the limited successes of COP and POP can nevertheless provide a foundation for local-police participation in terrorism responses.

CONCLUSION

In a post–September 11, 2001, era, the police have entered Huxley’s Brave New World, often a world of shadows and intelligence gathering, a world characterized by low-visibility planning and activity among terrorists, by risk and uncertainty (Beck, 1992), and by a public wariness – wariness of terrorism and of how the local police might handle this new homeland security role. The characteristics of this new world places public law enforcement, particularly local policing, in an institutionally stressful role. On the one hand, as the first responders to crime or terrorism, local police are likely hard pressed to “do something,” as they are institutionally positioned to feel the first consequences of a terrorist incident. Furthermore, though risk is surely not evenly distributed, the public is rather risk averse, and there is a heightened public insecurity and fear of the new world order. It is clear that the local police face an important institutional dilemma. If they are too vigilant in detecting and preventing terrorism, they risk public criticism for overstepping

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their bounds and for trampling on constitutional rights. As Manning observes, the local-police assumption of a role in terrorism may actually diminish the idea of democratic policing (2003, Chapters 1–2), thereby weakening their institutional legitimacy and escalating public concerns with the overreach of police actions. It may be that as the police move from their role of prevention to response and mitigation, they move from uncharted to more charted waters. The public accepts the police response to incidents and their investigation in a post-incident time frame. The public also generally accepts the police in a mitigation role, which seeks to minimize harm through target hardening, tighter security in public places, and other intrusions that might be warranted under the circumstances. It is not clear however, whether the public expects that the police will gather and act on intelligence gathered locally through public informants. It is equally unclear that terrorism prevention should be a generalized response among local police. Local policing has been organized around responders and investigators, with more of the former and fewer of the latter. How the police are to blend community- and problem-oriented approaches to policing (both generalist approaches) with terrorism approaches (currently a specialist approach) is not clear, but it warrants further exploration. What is clear is that superordinate agencies in states and in the federal government have the resources, charter, and missions to address international and now domestic terrorism. Clarifying their role in working with local police agencies is a major undertaking, and one not well specified (Carter, 2004). Terrorism prevention, though local in impact, is likely understood in extra-local places. Addressing terrorism in primary ways through COP or POP is not likely an effective approach, despite much rhetoric suggesting otherwise. This is because COP and POP remain rather fluid, affording much latitude in interpretation. Nonetheless, COP and POP have created stronger social linkages between the police and social and business communities at the local level of government. This is an important foundation upon which to build a revitalized role for local policing in terrorism. By adopting a COP and POP approach to addressing issues of terrorism, local police build on several historic and well-accepted community- and problem-solving roles. From the perspective of prevention,

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local police can build partnerships, harden targets, share information, and reduce community fear of terrorism and the moral panic that has accompanied these events. At the same time, police can protect constitutional liberties for Muslims and other out-groups, thereby reducing social conflicts that may be associated with fear of terrorism from majority groups. From the perspective of responding to terrorism, local police can improve their first-response strategies and capabilities, coordinate response approaches and technologies with other responding agencies, and link public and private responses to terrorism. They can also keep lines of communication open with the public and other audiences to dampen likely panics associated with terrorist events, which also helps maintain transparency and trust. Such a coordinative role builds on the horizontal improvements the police have experienced through COP and POP over the past twenty years or so. Regarding local police tertiary responses – those associated with mitigation and recovery – police can invest in reassurance policing, protect constitutional processes that may have been damaged in the aftermath of terrorism, and quickly and effectively reestablish order in what will likely be a disorderly and stressful time. Such a recovery role for the police will also likely increase their institutional legitimacy. COP and POP represent important applications for the stretch of local policing into the homeland security and terrorism-response arena. They do so, however, by building on police legitimacy and principles of democratic policing, extending gains made in community acceptance, and expanding the ability of the police to work with others to solve problems.

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chapter eleven

Go Analyze! (Connecting the Dots) Jean-Paul Brodeur

Government security intelligence services have been the subject of numerous studies both before and since the attacks of September 11, 2001 (hereafter, “9/11”). These studies, generally undertaken by official government commissions or committees, were begun in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, following disclosures of abuses of citizens’ rights by the FBI and CIA in the United States, and by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in Canada (for disclosures, see for instance Hersch). Triggered by allegations of abuse, the studies tended to take a legal-normative approach toward the review of intelligence services. Two prominent U.S. congressional reports came forth in 1976: that of the Senator Church inquiry (United States, 1976) and that of the Congressman Pike inquiry, leaked to the The Village Voice. In Canada since the late 1970s, one commission of inquiry reported on the RCMP Security Service – the McDonald Commission (Canada, 1981a, b) and two others, the Keable Commission (Québec, 1981) – and since the creation in 1985 of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which oversees the operations of CSIS, Canadian focused on the conformity of intelligence operations to Canadian law, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Such legal normativeness is reflected also in books focusing on CSIS (Cléroux; Mitrovica). By contrast, there are few U.S. or Canadian studies on the effectiveness of security intelligence and police services in the prevention of terrorism. To study this issue one must refer to the reports published in the United States following the numerous inquiries into the failure of the U.S. intelligence services to prevent 9/11. The most important 245

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of these, but far from the only one, was the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States (United States, 2004). Prior to it, a joint congressional committee had considered the same issues. A valuable source of information concerning the difficulties encountered by the U.S. intelligence community in preventing 9/11 is provided by an appendix to the latter committee’s report comprising the additional views of one of its members, Senator Richard C. Shelby, who was then Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (United States, 2002). Despite their usefulness, these reports are often written by those with little field experience in policing and in counterterrorism. They tend to overestimate the value of processing intelligence in preventing terrorism. More particularly, a careful reading of these reports shows that the analysis of intelligence – connecting the elusive dots – is viewed as the new panacea for all that went wrong in the failure to prevent 9/11. The general argument of this chapter is that improving our capacity to prevent terrorism requires that reforms should be made at levels that are more basic and more concrete than the processing of intelligence. Sound judgment is much more needed than analytic sophistication. Intelligence is an important instrument – perhaps the most important – in preventing terrorist attacks. So it should come as no surprise that the agencies responsible for collecting and analyzing security intelligence would be subject to such extensive scrutiny and, when failures occur, to criticism. This can be summarized in a single phrase that has become a catchphrase in intelligence studies: The U.S. intelligence services are said to have failed to “connect the dots” before 9/11. Such failure of analysis was to be remedied by increasing the analytic capacities of the various agencies involved in counterterrorism. “Go analyze!” became the new mantra (Levine). Before proceeding further, it must be emphasized that we do not share a common definition of intelligence or of analysis. In many dictionaries on policing (Wakefield and Fleming) or on terrorism (Thackrah) and in encyclopedias on terrorism (Combs and Slann; Kushner), there are no specific entries defining either intelligence or analysis. Intelligence is not defined in itself, but in context – for instance, in the context of intelligence-led policing – and the definition varies according to context. Tentatively, I would define intelligence as confirmed information

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that is potentially actionable for a specific purpose under definite circumstances. Technically, analysis means breaking down an entity (e.g. a situation, a substance, or a problem) into its constituent parts. The word has also a generic meaning and refers to any operation of the mind when it is reflecting upon a subject. The same conclusion that applies to intelligence also applies to analysis: It is defined in the context in which it is performed. I shall now characterize the meaning of analysis in the context of global counterterrorism. To assert that these agencies could have “connected the dots” implies that they had both the data and a specific procedure for doing so. This procedure – analysis, I argue – has two characteristics: 1. If the different “dots” or clues come from different sources – that is, different intelligence agencies – then the information is pooled, or brought together in one place for analysis. 2. The clues are then analyzed. Schematically, this is done by starting from a given clue (“dot”) and linking it to another one, reiterating the process until all the dots have been connected and the intelligence authorities have a complete picture of the situation. The peculiarity of this process is that the clues are not identical – in fact, they may not even be similar. It is only by carefully examining a “dot” that the analyst can connect it to another one by inference or deduction. So much for the contextual description of analytical intelligence work, but this is really a schematic, idealized vision of what analysts do. In this chapter, I consider the practicalities of this task of “connecting the dots” with which we entrust our intelligence services. How, exactly, do they do that? Or to put the question another way, does the on-the-ground work of connecting the dots resemble the schematic description of intelligence work – data pooling and analysis – just presented? In attempting to answer this question, I will review some examples of criticism leveled at the U.S. and Canadian intelligence services for failing to connect the dots.1 After all, it may be possible to infer how

1

My analyses are based on a review of all U.S. governmental reports published since 9/11, with particular attention to the additional views of Senator Shelby.

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intelligence should work from a description of how it failed to work. We may be able to draw a line around the negative space – the intelligence lapse(s) – so as to better fill that space. To that end, I have divided the remainder of this chapter into five parts. In the first two parts, I review two important manifestations of the U.S. intelligence services’ putative failure to “connect the dots,” referring to them as “counterexamples” because they display how a security agency ought not to operate. Because these counterexamples involve communication failures between a security agency (CIA) and a policing organization (FBI), I briefly address in a third part of this chapter the issue of the police role in counterterrorism. The fourth part is devoted to highlighting some crucial features of the analytical process from the standpoint of logic. In the last part, I discuss and elaborate on several of the reforms that have been proposed to rectify the situation. Thus, the criticism is not strictly negative; much of it is constructive.

FIRST COUNTEREXAMPLE: THE CASE OF AL-MIHDHAR AND AL-HAZMI

According to the various inquiry commission reports, the task of connecting the dots involves four procedures, at least in theory: (1) separating the wheat from the very large mass of chaff among the information gathered; or, as this stage is commonly known, “separating noise from signals”; (2) searching for patterns by data mining; (3) inference; and (4) deduction. A Lapse of Surveillance Before presenting this counterexample, I want to deal briefly with the 20–20 hindsight fallacy. As is well known, a terrorist from Canada, Ahmed Ressam, driving a car filled with explosives, was intercepted by a customs officer in 1999. Ressam had planned a bombing at the Los Angeles International Airport for the advent of the new millennium. Although he had been under surveillance by various Canadian policing agencies, notably by CSIS, he skipped out of the country to train in Afghanistan in 1998, and came back undetected to Canada carrying a valid (nonforged) passport under the name of Benni Antoine Norris in February 1999. He prepared his terrorist attempt

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without being hampered by CSIS or any police force, and left for the United States, where he was arrested before succeeding with his plan. In its review of the Ressam affair, CSIS’s oversight committee, the SIRC concluded that it saw “no evidence that it was a lack of vigilance on the part of the service that contributed to Ressam’s ability to escape detection after his return in 1999” (SIRC: 2002–2003, pp. 6 and 71). SIRC’s assessment surely lacked a critical edge. Yet as far as we know, lacking any indication that they might be the same person, it was nearly impossible for CSIS to connect the dots between Benni Antoine Norris and Ahmed Ressam. The situation, as we shall see, was quite different in the case of Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi, who never changed their identity and lived under their own names in the United States, where they took part as two of the 9/11 suicide bombers. This case is probably the only one on which all critics of the U.S. intelligence community agree that there was unexplained negligence. The U.S. State Department has what it calls a “tip-off list” of individuals subject to special scrutiny when they apply to obtain or renew a visa to the United States. The list mainly consists of names supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). These two agencies, in particular the CIA, are said to have gravely neglected their task of updating the tip-off list before 9/11. Shelby’s figures (United States, 2002: 26) are striking: In the three months prior to 9/11, the CIA added 1,761 names to the list, whereas in the three months following 9/11, this number rose to 4,251. Two of the terrorists on board the plane that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 were Khalid Al-Mihdhar (KAM) and Nawaf Al-Hazmi (NAH). In early March 2000, the CIA learned that KAM and NAH had attended a meeting with numerous al Qaeda–linked terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The CIA also knew that NAH had entered the United States in December 1999 and that KAM held a multiple-entry visa for the country. On March 15, 2000, less than two weeks after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, the CIA learned that KAM had just entered the United States. His name had not been added to the tip-off list, nor did the CIA consider his presence in the United States to warrant any particular action. The decision not to keep NAH and KAM under

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surveillance allowed the two to live under their own names in San Diego until December 2000. KAM used his name to obtain a vehicle registration and rent an apartment, while both attended a flight school in May 2000. In July 2000, NAH obtained an extension of his visitor’s visa under his own name. KAM, and perhaps also NAH, left the United States on December 15, 2000. The next month, the CIA learned that one of the terrorists at the Kuala Lumpur meeting, attended by KAM and NAH, had later taken part in the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000; the al Qaeda network claimed responsibility for this attack. In June 2001, KAM applied for a U.S. visa in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Following the usual procedure, the State Department authorities in Jeddah searched the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS) database, linked to the tip-off list. Because the CIA had not added KAM’s name to the list, they found nothing out of the ordinary. Likewise, in June 2001, when CIA agents met with their FBI counterparts, they did not relay any intelligence on NAH or KAM. Both men returned to the United States that same month and went about preparing the 9/11 attacks. It was not until August 2001 that the CIA decided to put them under surveillance and to alert the FBI to their presence in the United States, but by then it was too late. The rest is history – the terrible history of 9/11, in which NAH and KAM played their deadly part. What Went Wrong? In every major report critical of the intelligence services – here, the CIA – this case is cited as an instance of failure to connect the dots. But what exactly did the CIA fail to do? Two things. First, it declined to share with the FBI the information it had on KAM and NAH. Second, and more crucially and inexplicably, it failed to put the names of NAH and KAM on the tip-off list. Both terrorists applied to the State Department on several occasions after March 15, 2000, regarding visas, and both crossed the U.S. border several times. If they had been on that list, they could have been intercepted and interrogated. It is noteworthy that the authorities ran a tip-off verification on KAM when he applied for a visa in Jeddah in June 2001. One cannot state unequivocally whether it was the CIA’s reluctance to share information with another agency or if it was simple neglect that caused the

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problem. But it was clearly not so much a matter of sharing intelligence – as, for example, with the FBI – as of putting two suspects’ names on a surveillance list. In the case at hand, then, the failure to connect the dots does not constitute a lapse in the processing and analysis of intelligence. The CIA did not fail to use the intelligence-processing procedure just described – to connect the dots by means of analysis, inference, and deduction – but rather, it failed to take two concrete actions, whether through reticence or neglect: (1) to share information with the FBI; and (2) to add two names to a State Department surveillance list. The nature of these omissions must be stressed: Contrary to what is evoked by the phrase “connecting the dots,” they were not lapses of intelligence analysis, but instances of a dramatic failure to act – indeed, to take the most straightforward of actions. This first counterexample illustrates the general argument developed in this paper: The failures occurred at a much more basic level than the analysis of intelligence. SECOND COUNTEREXAMPLE: GENESIS OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS

It is not my intention in this second part to present the results of indepth research into the genesis of the 9/11 attacks. This research has not been rigorously carried out, and it is unlikely that all the information necessary to do so is currently available. Instead, I will discuss the intelligence that was available to the American security services in the years preceding 9/11, as revealed by the inquiry commission reports that reviewed their activities following the attacks. The approach taken by these reports is essentially to discuss a set of intelligence information possessed by the security services, and then to criticize them for failing to connect the dots contained in that information. I will begin by presenting the information in question, then go on to assess the nature and merits of the argument that the agencies failed to connect the dots. The Looming 9/11 Attacks Five aspects of this episode are particularly significant: 1. First – and this is not systematically mentioned by the inquiry commissions – the twin towers of the World Trade Center

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(WTC) were the target of a devastating attack in 1993. Thus, it was common knowledge that the Twin Towers were a terrorist target. Furthermore, it should have been clear to any observer that the terrorists had learned the lesson of what they saw as an initial failure; they had to take a different approach from planting bombs in underground parking lots. The bombs had caused casualties and damaged the lots but had not been powerful enough to affect the structure of the towers. What else might work? 2. A terrorist named Abdul-Hakim Murad2 linked to al Qaeda (in particular, to Ramzi Yousef3) was arrested in Manila in 1995. He was interrogated (and possibly tortured) at a Philippine military facility for over two months. Following this incident, the CIA and the FBI learned that al Qaeda–linked terrorists planned to hijack twelve commercial airliners and either bring them down in the Pacific ocean or fly them into buildings. By then Murad had confessed to his role in a conspiracy to do the latter – specifically, to fly a small plane packed with explosives into the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia – and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States in May 1998. Since Murad’s implication in a plot targeting the CIA does not appear in his indictment, it appears that the American agencies “forgot about” this affair. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that the CIA was aware of a foiled plan devised in 1995 to use an aircraft as a projectile with which to hit a building of great symbolic value. 3. The third item in this case is a ten-page report commonly referred to as the “Phoenix Memo,” written on July 7, 2001 by an FBI agent detached to Phoenix, Arizona (United States, 2004, pp. 272–273).4 The agent noted that persons on a list of suspected al Qaeda–linked terrorists were taking flying lessons

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Not to be confused with the Islamic studies scholar Abdal-Hakim Murad of the University of Cambridge. Ramzi Yousef was one of the perpetrators of the 1992 attack on the WTC. He was arrested in 1995 and brought to justice in the United States. The full text of the memo is available at www.thememoryhole.org/911/phoenixmemo. The 9/11 report is a paraphrase of the memo.

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at Arizona schools. He feared that these suspects would obtain pilot’s licenses and use them to infiltrate the U.S. civil aviation community. The memo begins: The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by USAMA BIN LADEN (UBL) to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended civil aviation universities and colleges in the State of Arizona. The inordinate number of these individuals attending these types of schools and fatwas … [redacted passage] gives reason to believe that a coordinated effort is underway to establish a cadre of individuals who will one day be working in the civil aviation community around the world. These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets. (Italics mine)

The memo expressed no concern about the possibility of flight students’ committing suicide attacks; such concern would come later. At this stage, the main point was that al Qaeda–linked terrorists might try to get jobs in the civil aviation industry and use their positions to commit terrorism. The memo’s author proposed that all U.S. flight schools be placed under surveillance to determine whether al Qaeda–linked suspects were being trained there. But his supervisors did not follow up on his recommendations, which they considered unfounded and too costly to apply. A graver mistake was that they did not investigate any of the names submitted by the agent. This was regrettable, to say the least, because the main suspect named in the Phoenix Memo had a classmate named Hani Hanjour, who would become one of the nineteen perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. 4. The fourth item in this case was the August 16, 2001, arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, because of his suspicious behavior at a Minnesota flight school. Following his arrest, Minnesota FBI agents made sustained efforts to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui’s computer, but those efforts were squelched by superiors, who went as far as to call the agents alarmists. Yet, as was revealed at Moussaoui’s trial in March 2006, one of the Minnesota agents had defended himself against this accusation by stating that he was trying to prevent someone from flying

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strategies for Intervention a hijacked aircraft into the Twin Towers. Could he have put it any more bluntly?

By this time (the summer of 2001), the FBI was aware that Moussaoui had briefly, and unsuccessfully, taken flying lessons at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma before going to Minnesota for further training. The FBI also knew that Osama bin Laden’s personal pilot had been trained at Airman two years earlier. Among Moussaoui’s friends was Richard C. Reid, who would become notorious in December 2001 when he tried to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoes. As alarming as they were, these clues were not the only ones. After Moussaoui was arrested, FBI agents determined that he had not only taken flying lessons, but also purchased box cutters of the type later used on 9/11, received money from Germany (the origin of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta), and frequented the incendiary Finsbury Park mosque in London (whose activities gave the city the moniker “Londonistan”). All this information was entered in evidence at Moussaoui’s trial. 5. Zacarias Moussaoui was the paradigmatic Phoenix Memo suspect, a conclusion reinforced by the evidence discussed earlier. The FBI’s striking missteps in this case were eventually denounced by Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent with the Minnesota division. Her statement garnered much media attention and she was named one of Time Magazine’s three women of the year for 2002. (Lacayo and Ripley) What Went Wrong? Let us again focus on the meaning of this failure by the security services to extract from the information in their possession the increasingly specific intelligence that it contained. To reiterate, the CIA and the FBI knew the following: 1. Murad’s interrogation had revealed a terrorist plan to hijack commercial airliners and use them as missiles against symbolic targets (buildings). 2. The Phoenix Memo reported that suspects linked to active terrorist organizations were taking flying lessons at American schools without a credible motivation for obtaining a pilot’s license.

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3. A suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, who fit the profile described in the Phoenix Memo (as indicated by the information gathered at the time of his arrest), was in custody. The American intelligence services did not pool or share this information as expeditiously as they should have, and they did not engage in joint analysis of its meaning. But the real lapse is found elsewhere: in the inadequate action taken on the information possessed. This lapse, it must be stressed, has nothing to do with the inability to reason from one clue to another – to connect the dots. What tripped up the intelligence services was not the task of reconstituting a message by putting together different pieces of a puzzle. By and large, the whole message was present in the first piece: A plan existed to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. The two subsequent pieces merely reiterated this message, each one more specifically than the last. By the time of Moussaoui’s arrest and initial interrogation, all the relevant details were known: A suspect in a terrorist plot was under arrest and ostensibly able to provide detailed information about his accomplices. In short, the information-processing failure was much more elementary than the failure to reason from point A to point B: The intelligence agencies failed to recognize the repetition of a single message that changed only by becoming more specific. Being on the lookout for the repetition of a threat does not require sophisticated skills. THE ROLE OF POLICE IN COUNTERTERRORISM

The role of police in counterterrorism is a topic of its own, and it is addressed in other chapters of this book (Klinger and Heal, Chapter 2, this text; Greene, Chapter 10). My remarks will be limited to the role of the police in the gathering and analysis of intelligence. This role, as I shall try to argue, is currently problematic. The Police and the Cult of Evidence In his Additional Views, Senator Richard Shelby (Alabama) is quite trenchant in his judgment on the involvement of police in intelligence work: “Intelligence analysts would doubtless make poor policemen, and it has become very clear that policemen make poor

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intelligence analysts” (United States, 2002, 62).5 Shelby encapsulates his diagnosis of this police failure in denouncing the “tyranny of the case file.” The tyranny of the case file has several implications, all of which are detrimental to the collection and analysis of intelligence. The police payback is essentially a court conviction – the bigger the convicted criminal, the bigger the reward. A conviction is secured by presenting evidence in court. The court standard of proof for such evidence is that it be beyond “reasonable doubt.” In contradistinction, intelligence is usually the result of probabilistic inference that would not stand up in court unless probability could be transformed into near certainty. Several consequences follow from this initial divergence of intelligence from court evidence: (1) Focusing on courtroom tactics in a single case at a time, police tend to compartmentalize information that may connect several different cases; they lack a comprehensive strategic perspective. (2) Filing cases upon their clearance by conviction, police organizations have a weak intelligence memory. When attempting in August 2001 to establish whether Zacarias Moussaoui was a terrorist, FBI agents from the local field office visited the flight school in Norman, Oklahoma where Moussaoui had been taking flying lessons; they were not aware that their own field office had previously been concerned about that very flight school because the personal pilot of Osama bin Laden had also trained there (United States, 2002, 65). (3) Because of its low payback, intelligence work is viewed as a less prestigious appointment within police organizations, and is not sought after by the highest performing officers. Research that I have recently conducted on criminal investigation in Canada confirms Shelby’s diagnosis (Brodeur and Ouellet, 2005). Working from the file of a major Canadian urban police force, I collected a sample of 153 cleared cases of homicide involving 191 suspects who were prosecuted between 1990 and 2001. All gathered information was coded according to 163 variables. The results of the statistical analyses were used to conduct in-depth interviews with 5

Senator Shelby closes the section of his additional views devoted to the FBI by reiterating this assessment: “As one former director of the National security Agency (Gen. William Odom) has suggested, ‘cops’ cannot do the work of ‘spies’” (United States, 2002, 74).

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homicide investigators, which provided strong confirmation of the quantitative findings. Among the most general findings were: A criminal investigation is divided into three segments. First, there is the identification inquiry, where the investigator tries to identify the perpetrator(s) of an offense. Secondly, there is the location investigation, which consists in finding the perpetrator(s) when they are on the run. Lastly, there is the building of the court file, which implies bringing together all the elements of proof that are to be presented in court to secure a conviction. These three kinds of inquiries are different in their methods and are submitted to different standards. The most important difference is the following: it is only the third segment of the investigation – building the court case – that is submitted to the higher standard of evidence (proof beyond reasonable doubt). The two first segments of the investigation – identification and location – must obey the requirement of “probable cause,” which allows for probabilistic inferences and for the trial-and-error approach that is typical of the first stages on an inquiry. Thus both the police and the intelligence officers use probabilistic inferences and the true difference between their respective modus operandi is not to be found there. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the securing of a court conviction is the real payback for the investigators and justifies elaborate procedures such as the protection of the crime scene. In 80% of cases, the suspect eventually prosecuted is identified within 24 hours or less (in 53% of cleared cases, the suspects were identified immediately by police answering a 911 call). In 68% of the cases identified suspects were arrested within 24 hours. (In 44% of these cases arrest coincided with identification and was immediate.) Key factors leading to the identification of suspects charged with homicide were the testimony of an eye witness still present at the crime scene (22.5% of cases), spontaneous confession by the suspect (20.5%), and denunciations by various people (police informant, accomplice, friend, family member or spouse (30%). In almost all homicide cases the police are thus able to identify a suspect because someone tells them who he or she is. Investigative work, electronic surveillance, forensics, and, most of all, criminal intelligence are of marginal importance and were significant in fewer than 2% of the cases. Although computerized data banks are routinely consulted in every case, they yield no decisive information for solving a case. Key factors in the arrest of an identified suspect closely parallel the findings for identification: patrolmen and women arrest 23.5% of suspects in flagrante delicto, and suspects give themselves up in an

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additional 20% of cases. Criminal investigation and other factors listed above, such as intelligence, play a marginal role here as well. The use of forensics and all types of expertise (DNA, polygraph, hypnosis) and intelligence were also examined. One of these factors was determinant of the outcome of a case in less than 3% of the cases, with the exception of the polygraph, which essentially serves to eliminate potential suspects. There was no indication that either private security or private security intelligence played any role in clearing homicide cases.

These results are in line with the research literature. Although his U.K. sample was limited (twenty cases), Martin Innes found that half the cases he examined were “self-solvers” (Innes, 2003, p. 292). Recent research conducted in the United States on a sample of 589 cleared homicide cases found that the key determinant for solving a case was information provided by eyewitnesses and other informants (60.5 percent of cases; Wellford and Cronin, table 9, p. 27). They also found that half the homicide cases in their sample were solved in less than a week. The importance of police patrols in solving criminal cases was recognized early by Richard v. Ericson in his study of general crime investigations (p. 136). He characterized the role of investigators as limited to processing suspects already made available by the patrol officer. The upshot of these findings on police investigations is that the police are much less dependent on intelligence to succeed in their actions than are agencies involved in protecting national security. The intelligence units of police forces are generally very small and staffed by civilians who do not enjoy a high degree of acceptance from the sworn police personnel (according to my own research, they rarely mix outside the working hours). The RCMP is in Canada the main police force that is charged with protecting Canada’s national security. Its intelligence unit is composed of one senior civilian analyst assisted by as many as four junior staff members. At a 2009 meeting held with national security officials from the RCMP, I asked if there was a procedure for centralizing in some RCMP fusion center (e.g., at headquarters) all the local information on national security that was collected by the regional detachment of this police force. The answer was that the implementation of such a procedure was

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under way, but it was only in its initial stage. Police forces seem to compound the bureaucratic impediments to change with the lack of flexibility of militarized organizations (see Greene, and Maguire and King, this volume). The police cult of evidence impedes their cooperation with security service agents. However, it is not the cult of evidence as such that impedes the sharing of intelligence, but rather one of the implications of proving one’s case in court. Court proceedings are governed by an ethos of publicity. Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done. This requirement implies that all witnesses must testify in public, including police and security service informants. As the following example will show, it is this prerequisite that informants testify in public – thus potentially revealing their identity – that is the real bone of contention between the police and the intelligence community. A bomb hidden on board Air-India flight 182 from Montreal to New Delhi via London exploded when the aircraft was flying over the coast of Ireland in 1985, killing 329 people (another bomb exploded on the same day at Narita airport, killing two persons, apparently as part of the same plot). This was by far the most murderous terrorist attack in all of Canadian history. Although the event also triggered the costliest investigation in Canadian history, it was never solved;6 two Sikh nationalists were indicted in 2005, but they were later acquitted for lack of evidence (Bolan, 2005). In 2000, a CSIS agent admitted in an interview to the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail that he had destroyed up to 150 hours of taped interviews with key informants on the case (Mitrovica and Sallot; also Mitrovica). The agent claimed that he was ordered in 1986 to turn over his tapes and his informants to the RCMP, and that he destroyed the tapes because he felt morally obliged to do everything within his power to protect the identity of his sources. He is quoted as saying, “unless we could get an ironclad 6

The RCMP announced in 1999 that the investigation had already cost them 26 million in Canadian dollars (Mitrovica and Sallot). The investigation resulted years later in the indictment of two members of the Canadian Sikh community, who were acquitted in 2005. We must then assume that the investigation is still going on (2010) and involves more police organizations than just the RCMP. At the end of 2006, the Canadian government established a commission on the AirIndia bombing and its aftermath.

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undertaking that these people wouldn’t appear in court, it was a no go” (Mitrovica and Sallot). The clash between the cultures of public evidence and of confidential intelligence is underlined by this incident. The purpose of gathering evidence is to secure post facto convictions in public court proceedings, whereas the goal of collecting intelligence is to covertly prevent terrorist attempts from ever happening. In operational terms, the true difference between prosecution and prevention is not that the former takes place after the fact and the latter before. The significant difference is that criminal prosecutions are public proceedings, whereas the prevention of terrorism is largely a stealthy affair, usually involving the use of informants and undercover operatives working in the twilight zone between proaction and entrapment. Hence, when a large number of suspects are rounded up in a preventive operation, they have to wait for their trial for a long period of time; most are usually released without charges after having been neutralized for a time. Notwithstanding the importance of ever-present turf battles, the need for security clearances, and tension between the policing and national security cultures, the greatest impediment to the sharing of information is that the intelligence community has – or believes it has – a much stronger commitment to protect the identity of its sources, which would be threatened by public court proceedings. New Police Cultures Police tactics and strategy has evolved so much since the end of the Second World War that we could devise a policing mini-Scrabble with the spate of letters used to form the acronyms referring to these new policing models – e.g. team policing (TP), community-oriented policing (COP), problem-oriented policing (POP), comparedstatistics policing (COMPSTAT), intelligence-led policing (ILP), and most recently “terror-oriented policing” (TOP) (for this last one, see Simonetti Rosen, 2004b). In the same way that George Kelling claimed that zero-tolerance policing was a “distortion” (Nislow. p. 2), if not a “bastard child,” of the Broken Windows approach, one can ask whether the transition from COP, POP, and ILP to TOP can be made without warping the original impulse that triggered the development of these alternative models. Although the models are

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different from each other, there is one common thread strongly running through them. COP, POP, and Broken Windows approaches all involved moving away from the narrow and crippling definition of policing as criminal law enforcement. It would seem that TOP would imply a refocusing of policing on crime through the struggle against homegrown terrorism. Will such refocusing generate distortions? I will tentatively examine this question with respect to the two issues connected with the central subject matter of this chapter, the processing of security intelligence. The first of these issues is local knowledge. There is a consensus among researchers that community policing is an invaluable source of firsthand information about neighborhoods, which is presently underutilized (Innes, 2006; Peterson; Simonetti Rosen, 2004b; Greene, this volume). This information is so valuable because community policing means, by definition, policing in symbiosis with the community. There is, however, another name for this close relationship that is much more ominous: infiltration. As terrorist expert Brian Jenkins emphasized in the interview he gave Law Enforcement News (Simonetti Rosen, 2004a, p. 11): “[The police] don’t want to do things that are going to alienate the very community that they set out to help, and want to have helping them do their police job. And one can see that. There’s not an easy answer to this. Domestic intelligence gathering is going to be an extraordinarily sensitive topic, as it should be in a democracy.” A second issue is related to possible distortions of the meaning of intelligence as it transits between police and security intelligence agencies. In a public talk given in 2005, RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli remarked that ILP “reeks of secret service, spy agency work – the capital “I” in “Intelligence” (Zaccardelli). At the time, the RCMP and its commissioner were under investigation by a federal commission of inquiry – the O’Connor inquiry – for having shared with their U.S. counterparts unchecked intelligence on the involvement of Canadian citizen Maher Arar and others in terrorism. The information – which turned out to be false – led to the extraordinary rendition of Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was detained and tortured for several months. The RCMP was blamed by the commission for its insensitivity to the consequences of sharing incriminating intelligence with U.S. security agencies for an individual suspected of terrorism (Canada, 2006, vol. III).

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In an article significantly entitled “Intelligence Led Policing or Policing Led Intelligence?” Nina Cope raised the question of whether intelligence would be the driving force of police operations or whether the police would configure intelligence to fit its own internal organizational priorities. She found analysts were frustrated because the police did not “action” the work they produced, and the result was a chasm between the theory and practice of intelligence-led policing and the current role of analysis (Cope, pp. 197 and 201; also Innes, Fielding, and Cope). Whether police intelligence units can collect and process information to meet the needs of other agencies involved in counterterrorism is a question we are not now in a position to answer. It is all the more difficult to predict the future given that information sharing between police and security intelligence agencies tends to be a one-way street oriented toward the latter. The police lack in a vast number of cases the security clearance to be given access to national security intelligence.

THE LOGIC OF CONNECTING THE DOTS

In a stimulating article, Innes et al. (2005, p. 39) rediscovered the relevance of “providing an epistemologically oriented critique of some of the key techniques associated with crime analysis.” Although there is some examination of the standards of valid reasoning at academies that train security intelligence agents (Rieber), the discipline of logic, which has studied human reasoning for millennia, is seldom referred to in security intelligence studies. Because this chapter focuses on the analytical process of making connections between different pieces of information, I now want to make several points on the basis of what logic has taught us. I will first discuss three examples of inferential processes, and then discuss their implications for the processing of intelligence. Let us begin with examples. The paradigmatic expression of connecting the dots is given by the conditional sentence: “If … then …” (e.g., “If Benedict is a celibate, then he is unmarried”). But all conditional sentences are not logically equivalent. Putting capitals for sentences, the bracketed conditional can be expressed through symbols

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in the following way: P → Q (“if P, then Q” or “P implies Q”).7 Let us now reflect upon these three conditional sentences: (1) If Mary is a mother, then Mary has given birth to at least one child. (2) If Socrates is man, then Socrates is mortal. (3) If KAM met with al Qaeda members, then KAM is plotting against the United States. These three conditional sentences are actually quite different, although the latter two are of the same logical type. All three can be symbolized as “P → Q”. The only one that may qualify as a valid inference is the first one.8 The first meaning of the word “mother” according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth.” Substituting the definition for the defined word, conditional (1) can thus be translated into: (1) If Mary is a woman in relation to a child or children to whom she has given birth, then Mary has given birth to at least one child.

Conditional (1) may qualify as a valid inference only because it expresses what is called a tautology (the meaning of “Q” is the same as the meaning of “P”, which is why it can appear to be derived from it). The case of conditional (2) is wholly different. This conditional is like a logical nursery rhyme. All students of logic have stumbled upon it at one time, and it has become Western cultural shorthand for a valid inference. What came to be forgotten is that conditional (2) is literally a piece of shorthand, and that it does rest on a tacit premise usually taken for granted and asserting that all men are mortal. The fully developed syllogism is thus: “Because all men are mortal, if Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal.” The crucial difference between conditional (1) and (2) is that conditional (2) is not true on the basis of the 7

8

The logical connective symbolizing a conditional (if … then) is usually expressed by a sign resembling a horseshoe or by a small arrow. Expressed as a conditional, sentence (1) logically derives from a universal analytic judgment: “All mothers have children.” For some logicians, no conditional of the form “if … then …” expresses a valid inference, even if it embodies an analytic statement – a statement where the predicate (having a child) only explicates what is already implied in the meaning of the subject (mother).

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meaning of words only. It rests on the empirical generalization that all men are mortal, which is drawn from experience. (If individuals physically resembling us came from another planet, we wouldn’t know just by looking at them, and by applying to them the designation “men” whether they were mortal or not.) We are now blind to the empirical character of the statement “All men are mortal” because it has become such a cultural commonplace that it stands for the archetypical statement of the obvious. Conditional (3) reminds us that a conditional not expressing a tautology rests on external empirical evidence. The full syllogism that is backing conditional (3) is similar to that on which conditional (2) rests (with an important difference): “Because all persons meeting with members of al Qaeda are plotting against the United States, if KAM met with al Qaeda members, then KAM is plotting against the United States.” The difference is the following. “All men are mortal” expresses a true fact, whereas we do not only ignore whether all persons meeting with members of al Qaeda are actually plotting against the United States, but we also suspect that this might be false (e.g., they may meet with al Qaeda to negotiate the release of U.S. hostages and for other purposes beneficial to U.S. interests). In the same way that the word “man” does not contain in its meaning the notion of mortality, the clause “meeting with al Qaeda members” does not encompass in its very meaning the notion of “plotting against the United States.” Whether it actually (or probably) does is a question of fact only to be solved empirically through some field research. The upshot of this discussion has been variously expressed by logicians. In his Elements of Symbolic Logic, Hans Reichenbach (p. 70) stated that the conclusion of an inference is tautologically implied by its premises; in a similar way, Lemmon (p. 77) demonstrated that all derivable assertions are tautologous. Equivalents of such statements are found in all classic textbooks of logic, as for instance in Kalish and Montague (p. 185) and in Manicas and Kruger (p. 49). Now, a tautology is no expression of triviality, as it took centuries to derive some of the tautologies making the backbone of mathematical logic. (As we saw in the second counterexample, merely noticing recurrences or redundancies would have connected the dots.) However, tautologies show only the implications of the meaning that we give to the

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signs – the various languages – that we use. They do not tell us anything new about the external world. For that, we need field research and fresh information. The implications of this discussion for the processing of intelligence are immediate. First, if we require that the analysis of intelligence measure up to the canon of logical demonstration, rather than to the trial-and-error process that characterizes probabilistic inference, the only dots that will be connected through analysis will be mirror images of each other – statements that are merely synonymous – and we will learn little that is new. Second, and more important, the linguistic sequence “if P, then Q” is never valid when purporting to say something about the external world, unless it is also backed by a set of facts that are not automatically given as part of the meaning of either “P” or “Q”. It may well be that an analyst already has under his sleeve the factual statements that will allow him to complete his probabilistic chain of inference. Going back to conditional (3), it may be that the analyst already has at his disposal the information that one of the al Qaeda members that met with KAM was involved in the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole. This would allow him to progress further in connecting the dots. It may also be that this information or some other that is vital to completing the picture beginning to emerge through connecting the dots is not yet available to the analyst. In this case, there must be a way for him to reach out to some field agent to complete and check out the limited but promising intelligence he is processing. If analysis is dichotomized from field work, as is often the case in policing and security intelligence agencies, it will only go round in circles. Some of these circles may be informative, but many will be empty and redundant. Third, the most frequent procedure used in processing intelligence – particularly criminal intelligence – has little to do with analysis. This procedure consists of linking photographs of suspects by variously oriented arrows in order to depict a criminal or a terrorist network. Technically, this procedure has little to do with analysis, and each link between suspects should be validated by external empirical evidence. The post-9/11 critique of the intelligence community was based on the fact that unanalyzed raw data was next to useless. Such criticism now appears to be the “new normal,” or better still, the new common

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sense. But the reverse is no less true: Analysis that is not continuously buttressed by fresh facts only begets diminishing returns and ends up preying on itself. As the philosopher Kant famously said: Sensedata without concepts are blind, but concepts without sense-data are empty. Finally, I will make a case for the hunt of redundancy. Two things should be done to separate the signal from the noise. First, information should be validated, that is, confirmed by more than one source whenever possible. Security intelligence services are well aware of this need. There is however a second requirement that must also be met: putting aside the mass of information that may be accurate but useless for action, from relevant “actionable” intelligence that meets operational imperatives. Redundancy may be a guide for this second task. The discovery of modus operandi and more generally of patterns is essentially a search for repetition in the flow of information. Hence, there is a point, even urgency, in perusing what appears at first to be semantic tautologies, but what may reveal on closer examination to be invaluable pointers for the prevention of acts of terrorism. This is the upshot of the “flight lessons” negligence.

PROPOSED REFORMS

Since the 9/11 attacks, a considerable number of recommendations have been made to correct these logical problems. Any reforms adopted should take account of the strikingly elementary nature of these problems. Our governments should be wary of attempting to turn the intelligence authorities into clairvoyants; what is needed is not a modern deck of Tarot cards in the form of high-tech artificial intelligence software. Here, I present and elaborate on three oftrepeated recommendations: 1. The most basic recommendation is to implement structures allowing for better pooling of information. This recommendation has become a commonplace, but it is nonetheless worth revisiting. The first requirement in implementing it is to reassess the principle of information ownership, which underlies the proprietary behavior characteristic of the intelligence services, based on the

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Figure 11.1. Traditional paradigm.

Analysis

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Figure 11.2. New paradigm.

following principle articulated by an intelligence specialist who testified before the Shelby Committee: “‘ownership’ of information belong[s] with the analysts and not the collectors” (United States, 2002, 36). The application of this principle entails nothing less than a shift from the current paradigm (Figure 11.1) to a new one (Figure 11.2): There are two advantages to such a paradigm shift, which is already under way. The first, as expected, concerns the pooling of information, such that all sources can be analyzed together (known as “all-source fusion”). The second and equally important advantage is that one can be assured that the information will in fact be analyzed, because analysis is the common node toward which all information sources converge.

2. Several important obstacles to the establishment of the new paradigm must be eliminated. The primary of these is administrative and legal in nature: Members of the intelligence community do not all enjoy the same security clearance level,

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making it difficult if not impossible for information to be shared among them. More specifically, the police do not have the same clearance level as the security intelligence services. It must be ensured that all analysts responsible for the fusion of information sources, regardless of agency, are cleared to access the relevant sources. A second obstacle is the general acceptance of the “need to know” principle in the intelligence community. This principle makes sense from an operational standpoint, but must be reinterpreted for the purposes of intelligence analysis. A third obstacle is the duplication of intelligence collection efforts. Not only is duplication detrimental to efficiency, but it also illegitimately fosters secrecy. When someone deliberately follows in another’s footsteps, it is often to observe him clandestinely and exploit what he learns for different purposes. 3. In intelligence analysis, emphasis must be laid on guaranteeing that the single most elementary information-processing operation – the methodical identification of recurrence in collected information – is carried out systematically and competently. Specialists can then determine the degree of importance to be assigned to different recurrences and attempt to discern meaningful patterns in the data. I did not put analysis above collection in Figure 11.2 to show that analysts should be in the commanding seat over data collectors, but rather to emphasize that they should be able to task field collectors to check out and complete information needed to connect the dots. This was the point made in the previous section of this chapter: Collection and analysis must be a two-way street with intense traffic.

CONCLUSION

Policing is fertile ground for myth making, as an unending string of police reforms has shown since 1945. A recurrent feature of this reforming process is its bipolarity, as it moves from insulation to community, from crime to disorder, from deprived areas to “hot spots.” The intense criticism to which the intelligence community was subjected in the aftermath of 9/11 led me to believe that we were

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preparing for yet another trip, from the Arctic of data collection to the Antarctic of data processing. As much as the previous intelligence motto was “Go collect! (signal intelligence or SIGINT),” the new word would now be “Go analyze! (human intelligence or HUMINT).” In this chapter, I left aside for future treatment the important topic of SIGINT vs. HUMINT. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, no intelligence icecap was going to be melted unless we blended intelligence collection with intelligence analysis and developed a feedback process looping them together. The first “don’t” examined here was not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of acting on the clear and present danger revealed by intelligence. Putting intelligence into action meant in this case sharing it with others, which was not done to a puzzling degree. Intelligence divorced from common action is an exercise of the mind without benefit to security. The second “don’t” discussed was intended to show that intelligence is generally not the painful mind-slashing exercise that tries to extract a needle from a pile of glass. One guideline should be: Look for the obvious! The obvious is what recurs in the data and keeps popping back through field verification. Because the counterexamples examined here involved a failure of communication between the CIA and the FBI in the first case, and a neglect of pursuing a police lead in the second one, it is essential to give further thought to the relationships between cops and spies. Two issues are of utmost importance. The first is that policing and security agencies will not share intelligence as long as: (1) the police fail to develop a culture of prevention with the attendant rewards for preventionist cops, and (2) the police are refused the security clearance needed to contribute to national security to the extent of their capacity. The second issue is that there is a threshold beyond which the past is transformed into something else that perverts it. With respect to that great police capital – trust – there is truly a world of difference between community policing and community infiltration policing. Promoting ambiguity between these policing strategies will have destructive consequences for democratic policing (See Greene, Chapter 10, this volume). Infiltration policing will supersede community policing only at the cost of bastardizing it in the same way that

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zero-tolerance policing was said by George Kelling to be the bastard child of the Broken Windows approach. Finally, it must be emphasized that intelligence analysis is no silver bullet. It can turn into a circular information boomerang if disconnected from fieldwork. More importantly, agencies involved in cryptology such as the U.S. NSA and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) never shied from using the knowledge of mathematicians to break up secret codes. To the extent that they are involved in the analysis of data, the policing and the intelligence communities should not refrain from using the professional skills of people who have devoted their work to clarifying the nature of analysis and to making it more valid and efficient.

REFERENCES Bolan, Kim, Loss of Faith: How the Air India Bombers Got Away with Murder, (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005). Brodeur, Jean-Paul and Geneviève Ouellet, “L’enquête criminelle,” Criminologie, Volume 38, Number 2 (2005), pp. 39–64. Canada, Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Freedom and security under the law – Second report (Ottawa: The Commission, 1981a). Canada, Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Certain R.C.M.P. activities and the question of governmental knowledge (Ottawa: The Commission, 1981b). Canada, Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, Report of the Events Relating to Maher Arar – First Report (Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing, 2006). Cléroux, Richard, Official Secrets: The Story behind the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990). Combs, Cindy C. and Martin Slann, Encyclopedia of Terrorism (New York: Facts on File, 2002). Cope, Nina, “Intelligence Led Policing or Policing Led Intelligence? Integrating Volume Crime Analysis into Policing,” The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 44, Number 2 (2004), pp. 188–203. Hersch, Seymour, “Huge C.I.A. operation reported in US against Anti-War Forces,” The New Times, December 22 (1974), p.1. Ericson, Richard V., Making Crime, 2nd edition (Toronto: Butterworths, 1993[1981]).

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Innes, Martin, Investigating Murder: Detective Work and the Police Response to Criminal Homicide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). “Policing uncertainty: countering terror through community intelligence and democratic policing,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 605, Number 1 (2006), pp. 222–241. Innes, Martin, Nigel Fielding, and Nina Cope, “The Appliance of Science? The Theory and Practice of Crime Intelligence Analysis,” The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 45, Number 1 (2005), pp. 39–57. Kalish, Donald and Richard Montague, Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964). Kushner, Harvey W., Encyclopaedia of Terrorism, (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003). Lacayo, Richard and Amanda Ripley, “Persons of the Year: Sherron Watkins of Enron, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom,” Time, week of December 30, 2002/January 6, 2003. Lemmon, Edward J., Beginning Logic (London: Thomas Nelson, 1969). Levine, Robert A., “Go Analyze! Lessons for the War on Terrorism,” The Herald Tribune and New York Times, August 26 (2002), p. 6. Manicas, Peter T. and Arthur N. Kruger, Essentials of Logic (New York: American Book Co., 1968). Mitrovica, Andrew, Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crimes Inside Canada’s Secret Service (Toronto: Random House, 2002). Mitrovica, Andrew and Jeff Sallot, “CSIS agent destroyed Air-India evidence,” The Globe and Mail, January 26 (2000), pp. 1–2. Nislow, Jennifer, “As clear as glass: With the ‘Broken Windows’ thesis, George Kelling puts things into focus for policing,” Law Enforcement News, Volume 29, Numbers 611/612 (2003), pp. 1–3. Peterson, Marilyn, Intelligence-Led Policing: The New Intelligence Architecture, (Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Assistance of Clearinghouse, 2005). Québec, Ministère de la Justice, Rapport de la Commission d’enquête sur les opérations policières en territoire québécois (Québec: Ministère de la Justice, 1981). Rieber, Steven, Better Intelligence Analysis through the Scientific Study of Human Judgement, Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Intelligence and Security (Ottawa: 2004). Reichenbach, Hans, Elements of Symbolic Logic (New York: The Free Press, 1966). Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), Annual Report 2002–2003 (Canada: Minister of Supply and Services, 2003).

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Simonetti Rosen, Marie, “The LEN Interview: Brian M. Jenkins, Rand Corporation terrorism expert,” Law Enforcement News, Volume 30, Number 623 (2004a), pp. 9–14. “Terror-oriented policing’s big shadow: 2004, A retrospective,” Law Enforcement News, Volume 30, Number 627 (2004b), pp. 1–4. Thackrah, John Richard, Dictionary of Terrorism, 2nd edition (London: Routledge: 2004). The Village Voice, “The Report on the CIA that President Ford Doesn’t Want You to Read” (the uncensored version of the Pike Report),” February 16 (1976). United States. Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee Report), (Washington, DC: Senate, 1976). United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence, September 11 and the Imperative of Reform in the U.S. Intelligence Community: Additional Views of Senator Richard C. Shelby, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (Washington, DC: Congress, 2002). United States. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004). Wakefield, Alison and Jenny Fleming, The Sage Dictionary of Policing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009). Wellford, Charles and James Cronin, An Analysis of Variables Affecting the Clearance of Homicides: A Multistate Study (Washington, DC: Justice Research and Statistics, 1999). Zaccardelli, Giuliano, Speaking Notes for a Presentation on IntelligenceLed Policing at the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Conference (Ottawa: August 23, 2005). Available on www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ speeches/sp_cacp_3_e.htm

chapter twelve

Managing the Fear of Terrorism Brian Forst

It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again. – Vice President Dick Cheney (2004)1 I approved this message: “I want to look into my daughter’s eyes and know that she is safe, and that is why I am voting for John Kerry.” – Senator John Kerry (2004)2

THE PROBLEM OF FEAR IN THE ERA OF TERRORISM

Prior to September 11, 2001, people in the United States were especially fearful of rapists and robbers, airplane crashes and cancer, hurricanes and sharks. On that day, and for years afterward, terrorism became Public Fear Number One. Although the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building were sensational events, they did not shake ordinary citizens to their core, as did the 2001 attack. Two great oceans had insulated the United States from serious acts of violence by foreign sources, and its citizens were protected by the strongest military on earth. The jet hijacking and suicide bombings that killed nearly 3,000 people, brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and inflicted major damage on the Pentagon in Washington raised fear in the United States to a new level entirely. In the days that followed, people throughout the United States bought 1 2

Milbank and Hsu Shapiro.

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millions of dollars worth of duct tape and gas masks, puzzled over the meaning of terror alert color codes, and became extremely suspicious of men in turbans and women covering their heads with scarves. Four days after the 9/11 attack, a Sikh gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was shot and killed in Phoenix by a local resident who thought Sodhi was a Muslim. This chapter inquires into the nature and sources of the fears that drive such behaviors. Fear of terrorism is clearly understandable, but to what extent is it useful and reasonable, and to what extent is it harmful and irrational? How are our fears related to objective risks? How is fear influenced by media and politicians? What can be said about the social costs of excessive fear? What, if anything, should public officials do about the public’s fear of terrorism? What can ordinary citizens do about them? These are the issues taken up in this chapter. Such questions about the fear of terrorism have received much less attention from media, politics, and the academy than have facts and speculations about terrorists: the dangers they present, the immoralities of and justifications for their behaviors, how we may be able to deter them, how we should respond to them, how to obtain information from them and sanction them, how to protect targets against their attacks, and how to destroy them and keep others from enlisting in their causes and doing more of what they do. Attention to these considerations is useful and necessary, but they deal only with what economists would refer to as the “supply side” of terrorism. They tell us nothing about the importance of our behavior as past and prospective victims of terrorism, and they ignore the public’s fear of terrorism, and how fear tends to aggravate the problem of terrorism. Criminologists have learned that fear of crime can impose costs on society that exceed those of crime itself – manifesting as reduced quality of life, wasteful expenditures on resources and measures that do little to prevent crime, stress-related illnesses and health costs, and related social costs – and that it is manageable (Cohen; President’s Commission; Warr). Terrorism is crime in the extreme, and fear plays a substantially more central role in terrorism than in conventional crime. Although fear is often used instrumentally to obtain compliance in rape, robbery, domestic violence, and a few other crimes, it is not an end in itself. In the case of terrorism, instilling fear is a primary

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goal of the act. It serves the larger political aim of the terrorist. Accordingly, our ability to understand terrorism and determine how best to deal with it publicly and privately depends critically on our ability to understand the nature and sources of fear and the harms that it imposes on society. Strategies for dealing with offenders and protecting targets against conventional crime have been found to be effectively complemented with strategies for managing the public’s fear of crime (Skogan; Warr). In the case of terrorism, the stakes may be much higher and the prospects much greater for complementing strategies that deal with terrorists and targets of terrorism by finding and implementing equally effective strategies for managing the public’s fear of terrorism. Fear is not all bad. As with fear of crime, reasonable levels of fear of terrorism are helpful to generate the sort of concerns that help us to develop coherent approaches to preventing terrorism in the first place and dealing with it effectively when it does occur. There are ample reasons to conclude, however, that the public’s fears of terrorism are inflated well beyond reason, and that inflated fears tend to harm us both in the short and long term. In the short term, acute fear diverts people from productive activities; it induces them to consume resources that may do little to provide real protection against harm; and it can produce severe stresses and reduce social capital and quality of life over an extended period. It can create detachment and distrust, and can harm emotional and physical health and economic well-being. In extreme cases it can produce public panics, severe social and financial disruptions, and sharp spikes in accidental deaths and injuries and suicides. New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik puts it succinctly: “Terror makes fear, and fear stops thinking.” Over the longer term, fear can induce politicians to pander to the public’s fears, reduce freedoms, and invoke responses at home and abroad that may serve more to alienate prospective allies, rather than to reduce the sources of the threats and thus enhance security. There can be good reason to fear fear itself, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned in his 1933 inaugural address. Today the public’s fear of the fear of terrorism appears to be too small, and the consequences of this lack of concern for the hazards produced by fear could be considerable.

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FEAR AND RISK OF TERRORIST ACTS

Terror is very much a matter of fear: Terrorism gets its traction from the public’s fear. Its power lies “almost exclusively in the fear it creates” (Martin & Walcott). The word “terror” means fear in the extreme. It is derived from the Latin verb terrere, to cause trembling. Acts of terror are most successful from the terrorist’s perspective when they create mass hysteria and induce target populations to implode, imposing much greater harms on themselves as a consequence of misplaced fear than from the immediate harm of the acts of crime. Receiving a substantially larger payoff than from the initial attack thus rewards the terrorist, providing incentives for further such acts. This cycle could be broken if prospective terrorists understood that their acts, even substantial ones, drew limited attention and had little subsequent impact on the target population. In our current fear-obsessed culture, however, this prospect seems unlikely. In the words of the legendary cartoon character, Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”3 The Nature and Sources of Fear Awareness of the central role of fear to the success of terrorist acts can open pathways for reducing the harms of terrorism through the development of policies for managing the public’s fear of terrorism. It is necessary, first, however, to understand the nature and sources of fear, and how fear is related to real risks and other factors. Fear is a natural human emotion, a sense of personal alarm caused by the anticipation of a threat, typically accompanied by physiological changes such as increased pulse, perspiration, rapid breathing, and elevated galvanic skin response (Mayes). People may fear for their own safety or for the safety of loved ones, or both. Fear is not all bad: It keeps us out of harm’s way. Some of it is innate – fear associated with abrupt physical change is clearly evident in newborn babies – but it is

3

“Pogo” was a popular comic strip created by Walt Kelly in 1951. The strip ran in hundreds of newspapers throughout the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. Pogo was a naive possum with keen powers of observation who hung out in the Okefenokee swamp with his friends: Albert Alligator, Howland Owl, Porky Pine, Beauregard the houn’ dog, Mallard de Mer (the seasick duck), Deacon Muskrat, Wiley Cat, and others.

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mostly learned, either the anticipation of a recurrence of a previously experienced harm, or the anticipation of a harm about which one person has been warned by another or others. In the case of crime, fear may be induced by an actual victimization, an immediate threat such as a menacing person behaving strangely in a high-crime area at night, by news of a series of violent stranger attacks in an area, or by other signals of danger ahead. Fear is a matter of biology: The emotion we refer to as “fear” is stimulated by physical phenomena. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux describes the mechanics of fear as centered in the amygdala, an almond-shaped mass of gray matter in the anterior portion of the temporal lobe, the “hub in the brain’s wheel of fear.” Stimulation of the amygdala generates an outpouring of stress hormones, including adrenaline, producing a state of extreme alertness, followed by secretion of a natural steroid, cortisol. Research physician Marc Siegel describes the result as follows: “The heart speeds up and pumps harder, the nerves fire more quickly, the skin cools and gets goose bumps, the eyes dilate to see better and the brain receives a message that it is time to act.” Though the triggers of fear vary from one species to the next, all animals with this brain architecture experience fear through this basic mechanism. Fear is in the genes. Some cognitive barriers that cloud one’s ability to recognize legitimate threats are inherited. Creatures with too little fear of genuine threats are more inclined to be killed by the threatening entities, and the genetic lines of those victims tend to diminish or vanish altogether as a result. Age and gender are obvious examples of biological factors behind fear, although the gene pool may not be altered as much over the long term due to greater risk of death to certain people based on these factors as by other factors. Younger people tend to be less fearful than older people, hence they more often engage in behaviors that bring greater risks to their own safety and the safety of others – due in part to lower levels of experience, but due largely as well to inherent differences in tastes for risk between the young and old. They are more likely to succumb to accidental deaths than are older people and more likely to be victims of crime. Furthermore, because males tend to be more aggressive and less fearful, they tend to experience higher rates of accidents and violent victimizations than females.

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Fear is also environmentally determined. First-born children tend to be more cautious than second-born (Forer; Harris; Sulloway). And fear is learned: Most of us are inclined not to repeat behaviors when we know from direct experience that the behaviors can hurt us, nor are we inclined to engage in them in the first place when we are told by influential others – parents, neighbors, teachers, media, and peers – that the behaviors are dangerous. Such direct and indirect experiences shape our sense of the risk associated with various threats; they give us an unsystematic empirical basis for assessing objective risks of harm. Fear and Risk Unfortunately, unsystematic evidence, whether experienced first-hand or learned indirectly, can be highly unrepresentative of reality. The nature of the event experienced directly may itself be unrepresentative of the class of events with which we associate the experience; the occurrence of the event may be more or less rare than we realize; our recollections of events change over time; and the filtering of information about events not directly experienced may distort our perceptions of the risk and typical nature of the thing feared. The confusion associated with the accumulation of these various distortions can be compounded by mixed messages given by others, who are likely to have different experiences. Parents often condition children to err on the side of caution – to overestimate threats. Peers often countervail against parental messages, encouraging their peers to engage in thrill-seeking behaviors. Social scientists have discovered that the net effect of this interaction of our unique innate predispositions with a vast jumble of mixed information from the environment and from others can cause our subjective assessments of risk of a particular threat to be often at considerable variance with the actual objective risk of the threat. We tend to blow some threats well out of proportion and underestimate others. Our understanding of the discrepancy between subjective assessments of risk and actual objective risks was informed by research conducted in the 1970s by experimental psychologists Daniel Kahneman,4 4

Khaneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his research on departures of individual behavior from the standard assumptions of rationality in neoclassical economics.

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Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic, and others, following the path-breaking research of psychologist and decision theorist Ward Edwards in the 1950s and 1960s. They found that people use a variety of heuristics– simple rules of thumb that are easier to use than more rigorous methods involving complex computations – to draw inferences and make decisions. They found further that people do so both in ordinary situations and to assess and respond to extraordinary hazards. The various heuristics used, however, contradict fundamental propositions of probability theory and tend to distort people’s perceptions of risk. Kahneman and Tversky (2000) refer to the tendency of people to distort probabilities as the psychophysics of chance. One of the most common distortions is the tendency for most people to give excessive weight to improbable events (pp. 1, 7–9, 209). They have difficulty distinguishing between small probabilities, like 1 in 100, and extreme rarities, like 1 in 1,000,000. The former is, in fact, 10,000 times more likely than the latter. These distortions tend to produce excessively risk-averse behaviors in most situations involving rare but sensational threats; incoherent behaviors in situations involving uncertainty in which facts are presented in convoluted terms; and excessively risktaking behaviors in situations involving large but uncertain benefits, as in lotteries with odds stacked against the bettor.5 Tversky and Kahneman (1982) refer to another such distortion as the availability heuristic (or simply availability): People tend to think that events are more probable when they have occurred recently. The events loom large because they are fresh in the memory. For example, people are inclined to fear earthquakes more when they have occurred in the past year than when they have not occurred recently, even though the risk may in fact be less a few months after an earthquake than years later, at the start of the next earthquake cycle. Cass Sunstein (2002) observes that the availability heuristic was readily evident in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when “many Americans were afraid to travel in airplanes and even to appear in 5

Kahneman and Tversky incorporated this principle as one of the basic elements of their prospect theory, which holds that people tend to make judgments and decisions myopically, based on the desirability of changes from current positions, rather than based on comparisons of the desirability of final outcome levels. This induces people to weigh losses more heavily than gains, and give greater weight to given changes when they start with smaller amounts.

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public places” (p. 50). Similarly, Gary Kleck et al., have found that perceptions of punishment are unrelated to actual levels of punishment. They speculate that these misperceptions are a product of the low relationship between highly publicized punishment events and the actual rate of routine, largely unpublicized punitive activities of the criminal justice system (p. 654). The challenge of discouraging the public from overreacting to prospective acts of terrorism thus has a clear parallel to the challenge of discouraging prospective offenders from committing criminal acts: Both involve the widespread misperception of threats. Inflated perceptions of threats are often exacerbated by vivid media images of victims of rare disasters. When people see the photograph of a victim of a one-in-a-million event on the evening news – a person killed by lightening or a shark attack, or by a suicide bomber in Madrid or London – their first reaction is typically not that it is virtually impossible for them also to be victimized by such an event. Even when they are told that the risk is less than one in a million, they tend to distort the risk when confronted with the incontrovertible image of a real victim of disaster. The photograph of a death scene accompanied by a photo of the previously live victim offers more palpable information about a threat, thus it is more compelling than the information that such episodes actually occur at an extremely low rate. Finucane et al. refer to this as the affect heuristic – the tendency for perception and behavior to be excessively influenced by images that trigger emotional responses. Cass Sunstein (2002) refers to the tendency for people to suspend rational inference in the face of the affect heuristic as “probability neglect.” He notes that the tendency for people to ignore probabilities and behave less rationally is particularly great in the case of terrorism:6 6

It must be noted that the risks of some threats defy objective assessment. It is one thing to observe precise miscalibrations between actual and subjective rates of mortality associated with shark attacks, tornadoes, commercial jet crashes, and lung cancer – about which we have a wealth of empirical information – and quite another to talk about excessive weight that a person gives to the risk of a nuclear terrorist attack, given the absence of any such event to date. Still, there are enough terrorist events about which ample evidence does exist to make such assessments of many sorts of terrorism. For example, the RAND Corporation and the U.S. State Department have collected data on terrorist attacks, and such data have been analyzed by Bruce Hoffman, Brian Jenkins, Robert Pape, and others.

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When probability neglect is at work, people’s attention is focussed on the bad outcome itself, and they are inattentive to the fact that it is unlikely to occur. Almost by definition, an act of terrorism will trigger intense fear, and hence people will focus on the awfulness of the potential outcomes, not on their probabilities. (p. 51)

Sunstein (2002) observes other factors that tend to distort people’s judgments in the presence of uncertain threats, including the following: when the threat is unfamiliar or misunderstood, when people have less personal control over the situation, when the media give more attention to the threat, when the situation is irreversible, when the threat originates with another person rather than from a natural phenomenon (p. 59), and when people are influenced by the fears of others – a process known as group polarization. (p. 88). Sunstein (2003) speculates that the millions of Americans who devoted time and energy to duct tape and emergency supplies would have been far safer had they spent the time and energy losing weight, staying out of the sun, driving carefully, and ending their smoking habits. Frank Furedi (2002a) amplifies many of these points in his book, Culture of Fear, arguing that perceptions of risk, ideas about safety, and controversies over health, the environment, and technology have little to do with science or empirical evidence. They are shaped more profoundly by deeply rooted cultural assumptions about human vulnerability. These forces have worsened in the post-9/11 era: “‘The end is nigh’ is no longer a warning issued by religious fanatics; rather, scaremongering is represented as the act of a concerned and responsible citizen . . . The culture of fear is underpinned by a profound sense of powerlessness, a diminished sense of agency that leads people to turn themselves into passive subjects who can only complain that ‘we are frightened’” (2004). The consequences of the public’s excessive fear of sensational events such as terrorism appear to be considerably greater than is widely understood. According to Marc Siegel: We feel the stress and become more prone to irritability, disagreement, worry, insomnia, anxiety and depression. We are more likely to experience chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness and headache. We become more prone to heart disease, cancer and stroke, our greatest killers … Worry about the wrong things puts us at greater risk of the diseases that should be concerning us in the first place.

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It remains to be determined precisely how much stress-related illness and injuries and other social harms have been stimulated by gross exaggerations of danger in media and political messages. In the meantime, existing evidence suggests that the social costs of fear are high. Gregg Easterbrook has speculated that people’s frenzy to buy duct tape in the days and weeks after 9/11 may well have caused needless traffic deaths and injuries that greatly exceeded the risks to safety from lack of duct tape. David Ropeik observes, in fact, that during the three months following the 9/11 attack, about 1,000 more people died in traffic fatalities than in the same period the previous year, due to a combination of factors that almost surely included a fear-induced spike in the demand for driving rather than flying distances of greater than 100 miles. Ropeik also anticipates an increase in deaths due to stress-related illnesses attributable to fear of terrorism. Virtually every day, someone somewhere becomes the widely publicized victim of a tragic but rare event. Yet for each such person, the quality of many thousands of other lives may be diminished substantially when they live their lives beyond reasonable precaution, in fear that they too might succumb to the unlikely tragic prospects that have befallen the few, about whom we may know more than is good for our own safety and well-being.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA

We learn about serious acts of violence generally, and terrorism in particular, through the media: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and increasingly, the Internet. In our free and open democratic society, the public is served with such information under the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Restrictions on such information would make it more difficult for the public to hold their elected officials accountable for failures to provide protection for which they are responsible. The public obtains useful information about terrorism principally through the media. At the same time, however, much of the information about terrorism conveyed through the media is far beyond useful. To this extent, the media serve as an essential instrument of terror: Without media,

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terrorists would have no stage on which to perform their acts of flagrant violence against noncombatants. The fear that defines terrorism requires media broadcasting; the wider the audience reached, the greater the fear and more effective the act. In an essay on the symbiotic relationship between the media and terrorists, international relations professor Paul Wilkinson (1997) puts it this way: It would be foolish to deny that modern media technology, communications satellites and the rapid spread of television have had a marked effect in increasing the publicity potential of terrorism . . . [W]hen terrorist leaders set up support infrastructures for terrorism overseas, the production of magazines, newspapers and other channels of propaganda generally becomes a key part of their activity . . . [A]lthough terrorism has proved remarkably ineffective as the major weapon for toppling governments and capturing political power, it has been a remarkably successful means of publicising a political cause and relaying the terrorist threat to a wider audience, particularly in the open and pluralistic countries of the West.

The public is especially fearful of extreme predatory acts of violence, acts against which they are powerless to defend or protect themselves. This sense of powerlessness surely contributes to the public’s exaggerated fears of terrorism, crime, and shark attacks. Media accounts of such attacks against innocent victims by predators seize the public’s attention indelibly. Accidents in cars and homes, in contrast, are more likely to be a product of one’s own behavior. Heart attacks can be prevented through better diet and exercise, and fatal falls from staircases or ladders can be prevented through more attention to safety. The sense of powerlessness that lies beneath the public’s exaggerated fears of predatory attacks offers vicarious thrills for those who sit safely in their homes and witness the aftermath of such attacks. In the weeks preceding the 9/11 attack, two of the most prominent items in the news were the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy and shark attacks. Sheer curiosity often attracts people to such events, presented as news, and secret pleasure may hold them there, so that they may behold from a distance sensational stories of predatory tragedies that befall hapless others. For the media, these curiosities and vicarious thrills stimulate enhanced audience shares and, in turn, more extensive media airing

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of such events (Schaffert). The disproportionate attention these events receive is often justified on the grounds that the media are simply satisfying the public’s demand. The if-it-bleeds-it-leads approach to media programming, however, brings with it a moral hazard: The disproportionate media attention given to extreme acts of predatory violence can further distort the public’s already inflated fears of terrorism and other predatory events. Disproportionate publicity given to such events leads people to perceive that the risks are greater than they actually are. Sunstein (2005) points to several examples of “this month’s risk,” including the Love Canal scare in the late 1970s, the Alar apple pesticide scare of 1989, and the summer of the shark in 2001 (pp. 78–98). Most Americans might be surprised to discover, as Anne Applebaum and others have observed, that in this era of terrorism, their lives are actually far safer, and they live much longer than just about any group in human history. One can imagine all this changing due to a cataclysmic terrorist event, but one should appreciate as well that such an event might be preventable through the management of fear. The public’s gross misperceptions of risk derive largely from the tendency of mass audiences to unconsciously take information provided over the airwaves and cables unskeptically as gospel. The late Marshall McLuhan, celebrated authority on the power of media, likened the public’s difficulty in distinguishing between media presentations and the real world to a fish that has no experience of life outside the pond: “We don’t know who discovered water but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish.” Perhaps the most serious consequence of media preoccupations with crime and terrorism is that they may contribute significantly to self-fulfilling cycles of fear and violence. Some of this is selfevident: Terrorists use the media as a tool for terror, taping videos of the beheadings of noncombatants, and broadcasting warnings of further attacks by jihadist leaders. Western media outlets ordinarily edit and often censor the more gruesome of these media images, but there can be little doubt that the widespread airings of these events and threats in news reports feed the fire of fear and give life to the self-fulfilling prophecy of clashing civilizations. Media coverage shapes public opinion, and public opinion, in turn, shapes public policy.

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Even in the domain of crime, where the perpetrators typically have little or no interest in making the public more fearful, evidence indicates a statistical association between fear of crime and media. Wesley Skogan and Michael Maxfield, for example, have found a systematic positive correlation between the fear of crime and the number of hours spent watching television, after controlling for crime rates and other factors. Linda Heath has found similar evidence in correlations between fear of crime and the reading of newspapers that emphasize the reporting of crime. Although such systematic evidence has not yet come forth for the case of terrorism, largely because frequent acts terrorism are a relatively recent phenomenon, the impact of 9/11 gives reason to expect a stronger association between media presentations and fear resulting from terrorism than from crime. The reporting of information about terrorism, crime, and other threats to public safety (including natural disasters, accidents, and illnesses) appears on the whole to be relatively reliable in all major media sources: The facts appear to be accurate. The topics selected and the way they are reported, however, provide an exceedingly invalid sense of the likelihood that an individual will be a victim of any of these threats. The media have more incentive to provide public information that is accurate – a growing corps of media ombudsmen has helped in this – than to ensure that the information is representative of ordinary life. Ordinary life is, by definition, less newsworthy. Rare, extreme events are more newsworthy than commonplace trivial ones, but the problem with even accurately reported extreme events is that they tend to overwhelm the senses. Mark Warr has noted that the reporting of such events typically provides insufficient historical or geographical context. Information that focuses on the extreme rarity of the most severe events is considered less interesting, hence less newsworthy. Warr proposes a thought experiment to illuminate the effect of crime reporting on the perceived risk of victimization, an experiment that applies especially well to the problem of basing assessments of the risk of terrorism on individual events: Imagine the prospect of one’s trying to estimate accurately the magnitude and causes of population growth in a city through nonrepresentative interviews with people who have left or moved into the city. The information might be interesting, but it

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would have little general applicability to the population of interest. The problem is likely to be worse with respect to terrorism. We have learned much more about the rates and causes of crime based on valid information in the United States and elsewhere; we have very little comparable evidence about terrorist events and their causes. Scary stories supplant such evidence, and however reliable those stories may be, they are no substitute for valid evidence of the prevalence of the threats described. Incentives for reliable media accounts of terrorism and other events that may stimulate public fear grow out of a responsibility for objective reporting. Reporters who fail to satisfy high standards of accuracy, and their employers, can become stories themselves, as has occurred in the cases of Jason Blair and the New York Times, Dan Rather and CBS, and Eason Jordan and CNN. Checks against biased, inaccurate, or otherwise irresponsible reporting is further enhanced by ombudsmen, noted earlier, and by a growing industry of media-on-media reporting, such as WNYC’s weekly On the Media program, Slate Magazine’s “Press Box” column, and numerous Internet media watch “bloggers.” Terrorism raises unique and extremely vexing questions about media objectivity. How do reporters balance their responsibilities to their employers for exciting stories with high standards of professionalism, and how do they balance both of those with their sense of patriotic duty when conflicts emerge among the three? How should a hostage event be reported when the reporting can itself influence the outcome of the event? How much detail should a reporter provide about the vulnerability of domestic targets if doing so might give new ideas to potential terrorists? Should reporters protect their sources of information when doing so can endanger innocent others? Why do terrorist events in the Middle East receive so much more attention than equally, if not more, serious events in Africa or Southeast Asia? Does “balanced” reporting require that every point of view, however unrepresentative or extreme, be included in the story? What rules and circumstances should determine whether an attacker is called a “terrorist” rather than an “insurgent” or “freedom fighter”? How, in short, does a reporter balance the right of the public to have accurate information when doing so feeds fear and terrorism? Several commentators have drawn conclusions about where reporters come down on these questions. Some argue that the reporting

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tends to favor the terrorists excessively (Alexander; Bassiouni; Cohen; Podhoretz), whereas others argue that reporters allow their sense of patriotism to overwhelm the objectivity of their reporting (Ewers). Still others assert that the reporting reveals the incivility of the terrorists and thus hurts the causes they intend to advance (Martin; Paletz et al.). A major difficulty in assessing objectivity is that such assessments are largely in the eyes of the beholder. Those who think FOX News’ reporting of terrorist events is objective will rarely be inclined to see Al Jazeera’s reporting of the same events as objective, and vice versa. Many regard both to be biased, with FOX News giving a distinctly proAmerican perspective and Al Jazeera reporting from a strong pro-Arab perspective. The facts reported by both may in fact be accurate, but the selection of events reported, people interviewed, and segments shown may not be at all representative of the respective populations from which each of these selections is made. The selection may, instead, be designed to feed the point of view of a particular audience. What compass should the print and broadcast media journalists and producers follow to guide them through this thicket of difficulties, balancing the public’s right to know with its right to be protected from harm? Several treatises have been written on the role of journalists and the standards of professional journalism. Most lists of such standards include commitments to reporting that is truthful and unbiased, responsible and in good conscience, engaged and relevant, comprehensive and proportional. Kovach and Rosentiel explain that it has been common, but is no longer acceptable, to evade commitments to standards and reduce journalism to simple platitudes like “We let our work speak for itself.” Instead, they write, “The primary purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing” (p. 17). This is particularly essential, they observe, in emerging nations. In advanced nations, and particularly the United States, they see another danger – namely, that “independent journalism may be dissolved in the solvent of commercial communication and synergistic self-promotion” (p. 18). They see the ideal of a free and independent press threatened for the first time not just by intrusive governments, but no less by commercial interests that may conflict with high goals of public service. Journalism professor Philip Meyer puts it starkly: “Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look

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like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment. The pure news audience is drifting away as old readers die and are replaced by young people hooked on popular culture and amusement.” Meyer sees the source of the problem in a shift in media ownership. Faceless investor-owned corporations now run media outlets that were previously owned by people with a stake in local communities. Columnist Jim Hoagland sees the commercialization of media as having dire consequences for both the responsible coverage of terrorism and the larger conversation on national security matters. He sees this as more disturbing even than the decline of civility in society: It is not so disturbing that the national political discourse has become detached from civility. That has been true, and not fatal, at other periods in American history . . . What is disturbing is that the national political discourse is increasingly detached from reality. The emotionalism and character assassination practiced by both sides … is mistaken for “politics.” Instead of turning out more engineers or scientists, American society seems at times more geared to forming consumers, producers and critics of a particularly bombastic kind of political theater, which comes in entertainment and information flows that are increasingly hard to distinguish.

Can the media find a way of controlling itself more responsibly and effectively in the face of these pressures? If it fails, what recourse can the public take? Philip Meyer argues that the only way to save journalism is to develop a new business model that rewards community service, one “that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility.” He observes that the nonprofit sector may be more amenable to responsible public service journalism, that support from foundations can be a more than suitable complement to conventional commercially supported media. Meyer regards National Public Radio (NPR) as a suitable model for nonprofit journalism:7 7

Some commentators see NPR and public television as biased (see, e.g., Farhi; Novak). These criticisms are valid largely to the extent that foundation support comes disproportionately from either the left or the right and with strings attached, explicitly or otherwise. Meyer’s argument for the nonprofit model recognizes this problem; it aims primarily to deal with the problem of commercial pressure for sensational reporting.

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While subscriber support is an important source of its revenue, more than 40 percent comes from foundation and corporate sponsors. NPR keeps a policy manual that spells out the limits of permissible relationships with funders. It does not allow grants that are narrowly restricted to coincide with a donor’s economic or advocacy interest.

There are other prominent nonprofit broadcast media outlets, including C-SPAN and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, created by Congress in 1967. C-SPAN is significant for its distinctly noncommercial format and educational mission. It presents unedited broadcasts of lectures, Congressional hearings, academic panel discussions, and book reviews on matters of public interest, policy, international affairs, science, politics, economics, literature, health, the environment, and ethics. One of the distinctive features of the nonprofit broadcasting media is that it presents more thoughtful, less sensational coverage of critical issues. Thus, nonprofit broadcasting offers an answer to William Raspberry’s lament of the “death of nuance” in contemporary media: Some of the blame for the death of nuance must be laid to the mindless divisiveness of those cable news outlets that treat politics as a blood sport. It’s hard to acknowledge that the other guy maybe has a point when he is determined to prove to the world that you have no point whatsoever. Nuance starts to sound wimpy.

Clearly, there are many ways to strengthen the ability of media to serve the public more effectively in the era of terrorism. Paul Wilkinson, director of the St. Andrews University Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, reminds us that the stakes are high and advises that the media should strive not to serve the interests of terrorism. He recalls Margaret Thatcher’s metaphor: “Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.” He concludes that this can be done without sacrificing the high standards of professional journalism. THE ROLE OF POLITICS

The media are not alone in feeding and inflating our fears. Politicians have learned as well that playing to the voters’ fear of crime and

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terrorism can win elections, and failure to do so can end political careers. In a televised debate with George H.W. Bush, in the presidential election of 1988, Michael Dukakis was asked about his opposition to capital punishment: Would he not support the death penalty for a hypothetical offender who had raped his wife? His deliberate, bland response, together with his having been held accountable for a heinous crime committed by convicted felon Willie Horton following a furlough release while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, all but sealed Mr. Bush’s victory. Few presidential candidates of either political party have expressed opposition to the death penalty since the Bush-Dukakis election, and it has become common practice for a political candidate to seek political advantage by “Willie Hortonizing” the opponent, attempting to persuade the electorate that the opponent is weak on crime. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry accused the Bush Administration of waging a thoughtless, insensitive response to terrorism, and that the result was a less secure United States. Vice President Cheney responded with this retort: “America has been in too many wars for any of our wishes, but not a one of them was won by being sensitive” (Milbank and Hsu). The pair of quotes that open this chapter, by Cheney and Kerry respectively, reflect the continuation of this sort of rhetoric in the presidential election of 2004. Though many saw the Bush team as the leading fear-mongers, sociologist Frank Furedi (2004) wrote that the “politics of fear” transcends the political divide: “In fact, Kerry is a far more sophisticated practitioner of the politics of fear than his Republican opponents.” Politicians who avoid fueling the fires of fear can be found in both major political parties, but many other politicians across the political spectrum have shown little hesitancy to exploit public fears about threats to domestic and foreign security in order to win votes, and they appear to be able to do so with impunity. Parents often aim to overcome their children’s lack of awareness of real dangers such as street traffic – and mythical ones such as razor blades in Halloween apples – by magnifying the risks, hoping to replace their children’s inexperience with protective information, however distorted. They often take the opposite approach to deal with imaginary threats such as monsters under the bed by reading calming bedtime stories. Paternalistic governments may be inclined

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to treat their citizens in much the same way, blowing some risks out of proportion and enacting overly protective laws – Furedi (2002b) and Sunstein (2005) refer to this as the “precautionary principle”8 – and underplaying others, especially when special interest groups (the tobacco lobby is a prominent example) make such distortions attractive. One of the characteristic strengths of an established free society is a bond of mutual trust and responsibility between the elected and the governed: Government ensures that the information the public has about domestic and foreign threats is accurate and balanced, and it trusts them to handle the information responsibly. Terrorism can erode this cohesion, and politicians who use terrorism for political ends may accelerate the erosion. Clearly, effective political leadership is the critical alternative to political pandering, especially in the face of threats to national security. One has only to consider Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s effective exhortations to the people of England, and Londoners in particular, to be courageous in the face of brutal and incessant blitzkrieg bombings by the Germans in World War II. He led both by both word and example, holding cabinet meetings at 10 Downing Street rather than in bunkers, often well into the dangerous nighttime as bombs exploded nearby. The people followed Churchill’s lead, and the courage of the British helped first to enable them to survive the attacks and carry on, and eventually to contribute in significant ways to the defeat of Germany. (On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, in 1955, Churchill remarked that it was Britain that “had the lion’s heart,” that he merely “had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.”) A memorable display of fear-reduction leadership echoing Churchill’s was revealed by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the hours and days following the 2001 attack on the World Trade Towers.

FEAR AND PUBLIC POLICY

Can we reduce the problem of terrorism by managing the public’s fear of it? We can address this question first by considering the relevance 8

Frank Furedi (2002b): “The aftermath of 11 September has given legitimacy to the principle of precaution, with risk increasingly seen as something you suffer from, rather than something you manage.” Cass Sunstein’s 2005 book, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle , addresses the consequences of the problem.

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to terrorism of fear-management strategies for conventional crimes. Then we can consider how those strategies might not apply to terrorism and how additional strategies might be appropriate. Fear-reduction strategies for conventional crime were first instituted in the 1980s, when police departments introduced them as an essential part of the community policing movement. A centerpiece of those programs was the idea that the police should be in closer contact with the public – largely through the use of foot patrols, bike patrols, the establishment of mini-precincts in local neighborhoods, and new incentive systems to induce police officers to become less authoritarian and more service-oriented (Cordner; Skogan). These programs spread to the courts and correctional sectors and to the community at large in the form of neighborhood-watch networks, thus making the control of fear a central element of community-oriented criminal justice systems, a complement to conventional court-centered strategies for preventing street crime. Many of these practices and policies may be applicable to the problem of terrorism, where the stakes may be much higher. Local authorities, after all, see acts of terrorism as extreme violent crimes under state law. From their perspective, these fear-management interventions should be highly relevant and useful. At the same time, however, some fear-reduction interventions for street crimes may be more relevant and practical than others for the prevention of terrorism. Effective outreach programs to mosques in neighborhoods with Muslim populations, for example, are likely to be more useful to deal with fear within both the Muslim and nonMuslim communities in those areas than programs aimed at removing graffiti. We would do well, in any case, to consider the full range of fear-reduction strategies and interventions to ensure that policies and practices that are applicable to the public’s fear of terrorism are not overlooked. These programs have proven their value in neighborhoods throughout the United States, and they are likely to have parallel applicability for individuals and institutions, public and private, to reduce the destructive effects of the fear of terrorism. At the federal level, homeland security officials are authorized and responsible as well to consider approaches that will effectively manage the public’s level of fear to ensure that it is neither excessively high nor too low relative to objective threat levels.

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To the extent that elevated fear is a key objective of acts of terror, public policy makers would do well to focus not only on interventions against terrorists and the protection of targets, but as well on managing the public’s fear of terrorism. Fear is not an immutable given, a phenomenon over which we have no control. It is manageable, both for individuals and groups, and by both public and private interveners. It is important, first, to be clear that the total elimination of fear is neither an attainable nor a desirable goal. Just as it would not be healthy to eliminate pain altogether, so would it be unsafe to seek a way to eliminate fear altogether. Some level of fear is necessary for us to feel compelled to take ourselves out of the path of immediate danger, and then to take measures to counter the sources of the danger (de Becker). In the case of both crime and terrorism, the goal should be twofold: (1) to make accurate objective assessments of the risks of threats, and then realign subjective assessments of the risks so that they correspond to the objective assessments, and (2) to remove elements of fear that serve no useful purpose. In much the same way that we can consider frameworks to assist us in finding an optimal balance of security and liberty, and can assess criminal sanctions in terms of the total social costs of crimes and sanctions (Forst), so might we do well to consider policies that aim for optimal levels of fear for various threats, levels that balance the cost of fear with the cost of victimization averted by fear. Though the social costs of fear are not easily calculated, consideration of social costs provides a framework that helps identify the key factors for consideration and determine how to organize them coherently to provide a basis for assessing public policy.

AN AGENDA FOR REDUCING THE SOCIAL COSTS OF FEAR

We have noted that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani showed exemplary leadership skills in the days after the 2001 terrorist attack on New York City. Two years later he remarked, “Courage is not the absence of fear; rather it is the management of fear” (Gambrell). How might policy makers and public officials begin to think about the management of the public’s fear? At the local level, fear-reduction strategies that have been a key aspect of successful community policing

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programs can be tailored to deal with fear of terrorism, as we have noted. At the federal level, just as effective energy policy cannot ignore the public’s insatiable demand for and often wasteful consumption of scarce energy resources, so must an effective terrorism policy recognize the importance of interventions that deal effectively with a parallel problem on the demand side of terrorism: dysfunctional fear. Strategies for managing the public’s fear of terrorism might be developed in such a way that satisfies both liberals and conservatives alike. Neither group can take comfort in the prospect that we may have actually contributed to our insecurity and misallocated resources along the way by placating exaggerated public fears – for example, by overemphasizing airport security at the expense of vulnerability at ports, nuclear and chemical facilities, and other critical and no less vulnerable targets. Several authorities have argued persuasively that such misallocations have been induced by misplaced fears (Fallows; Applebaum). Systems of accountability used by the Office of Homeland Security and associated agencies can be reshaped to support fear management as a legitimate goal of those agencies. One basic approach to the public management of fear is to treat excessive fear as a public health problem. Under such a strategy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services could be directed to develop a coherent and comprehensive set of programs for preventing and responding to the problem (Butler, Panzer, and Goldfrank). John Braithwaite’s suggestion (see Chapter 16) that we might be much better off treating terrorism as a public health problem than to demonize terrorists and thus feed their hunger for martyrdom, as we have, would surely facilitate a program of treating fear as a public health problem too. Sunstein has proposed the strengthening of deliberative democracies to help manage fear (2005). He has proposed, in particular, a federal risk-assessment agency to collect data and conduct research aimed at reducing actual risks and better aligning objective and subjective risk levels (2002). He notes that a significant barrier to the adoption of such reform is that public-minded administrators who dismiss the public’s irrationality are often overruled by populist politicians who respond to parochial agendas and short-term concerns, however irresponsible for the nation as a whole, as well as to public

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concerns of the moment, however irrational and shortsighted (2002, 2005). He adds that education and public information can help to restore rational deliberation to the process. Tharoor (2005) has suggested along a similar line that the media, for too long a source of fear-mongering, is capable of serving no less as an instrument of education and tolerance. Protection of the public is the first responsibility of government, and misplaced fears undermine public safety. The effective public management of fear is central to this responsibility of government. In cases of extreme abuse of the media’s responsibility not to harm the public, the courts may be able to step in to provide protections. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in the landmark 1917 case of Schenck v. United States, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater, and causing a panic.” This could apply as well to needlessly incendiary media accounts of violence or threats of violence. Effective, credible leadership is extremely important. It creates a bond of trust between the government and the governed, a contract in which the people will follow loyally and manage their fear responsibly when they have sufficient reason to believe that the government is leveling with them without divulging information that helps terrorists needlessly – that is, when the government attains a proper balance between liberty and security. On February 23, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt, spoke words that echoed Churchill’s effective leadership across the Atlantic Ocean in the same war effort: “Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us.” When leadership of this sort fails to emerge, or when effective leaders get assassinated – an all-too-frequent occurrence in places most desperately in need of effective leaders – nongovernmental organizations and responsible citizens are left to find ways to fill the void. In such cases ordinary citizens must become extraordinary; they must step up and become leaders. Extraordinary courage in the face of extreme terror has been displayed by citizens in India, Iraq, and Israel in recent years, even in the absence of a Churchill-like figure.

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The day after a series of bombings on commuter trains in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) killed over 200 people in 2008, Mumbai’s tracks were cleared, trains resumed their routes, and the Bombay Stock Exchange’s stock index rose by 3 percent9 (Wonacott and Bellman). Some portion of fear is, of course, unmanageable. Fear is, after all, in our genes, a natural survival instinct. Yet when such biological instincts get out of hand and worsen and the dangers we confront, it is precisely the capacity of humans to reason – to “get a grip” on ourselves under stress – that has contributed immeasurably to the resilience of our species. We have good reason to fear terrorism, surely more so today than prior to September 11, 2001, but we will do well to keep the risks that terrorism poses to our national security in perspective. Cataclysmic risks were more immediate in the United States in World War II and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and people in most other countries have been considerably more exposed to terrorism than have people in the United States. There is no cause for alarm if we take reasonable and effective measures to neutralize persons who have demonstrated a clear intent to commit acts of terrorism, if we protect the primary targets of terrorism, and if we can manage to manage our fear. The 9/11 attack revealed that concerns of the U.S. government and its citizens about terrorism had been inadequate, that the risks exceeded our fear (Clarke). Today fear is the greater problem, and it is dangerous because of the strong tendency for it to feed on itself, to make us behave badly, to allow our instincts to overcome our ability to think. Perhaps our greatest challenge is to master our capacity to “get a grip” when confronted with real danger. RE F E RE N CE S Anne Applebaum, “Finding Things to Fear,” Washington Post (September 24, 2003), p. A29 M. Cherif Bassiouni, “Media Coverage of Terrorism,” Journal of Communication, Volume 32 (1982), pp. 128–143. 9

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered helpful words of inspiration to his people, but Wonacott and Bellman attribute India’s strength in the face of terror to the indomitable spirit of ordinary people, a deep understanding that life must go on.

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Adrienne Stith Butler, Allison M. Panzer, and Lewis R. Goldfrank, editors, Preparing for the Psychological Consequences of Terrorism: A Public Health Strategy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2003). Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004). Mark A. Cohen, “Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Crime and Justice,” Criminal Justice 2000, Volume 4 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2000), pp. 263–315. Yoel Cohen, “The PLO: Guardian Angels of the Media,” Midstream (February 1983), pp. 7–10. Gary W. Cordner, “Fear of Crime and the Police, An Evaluation of a Fear-Reduction Strategy,” Journal of Police Administration, 14 (3) (September 1986) pp. 223–233. Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence (New York: Dell, 1997). Justin Ewers, “Is the New News Good News?” U.S. News & World Report (April 7, 2003). Paul Farhi, “Public Broadcasting Targeted By House,” Washington Post (June 10, 2005), p. A1. James Fallows, “Success Without Victory: A ‘Containment’ Strategy for the Age of Terror,” Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 295, No. 1 (January/February 2005). Melissa L. Finucane, Ali Alhakami, Paul Slovic and Stephen M. Johnson, “The Affect Heuristic in Judgments of Risks and Benefits,” in The Perception of Risk, edited by Paul Slovic (London: Earthscan, 2000), reprinted from the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Volume 13 (2000), pp. 1–17. Lucille K. Forer, Birth Order and Life Roles (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1969). Brian Forst, Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources and Remedies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (Continuum, 2002). “Epidemic of fear: We were scared to death long before 11 September,” Spiked (March 15, 2002) . “Politics of Fear,” Spiked (October 28, 2004) . Jon Gambrell, “Courage is Managing Fear, says Giuliani: Ex-NY Mayor Talks at Miami U,” Cincinnati Enquirer (November 19, 2003). Karen Gardela and Bruce Hoffman, The Rand Chronology of International Terrorism for 1986 (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation Report R-3890-RC, 1990).

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Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Linda Heath, “Impact of Newspaper Crime Reports on Fear of Crime: A Methodological Investigation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 47 (1984), pp. 263–76. Jim Hoagland, “Politics as Theater,” Washington Post (August 18, 2005), p. A21. Daniel Kahnemann, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Choices, Values and Frames (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Gary Kleck, Brion Sever, Spencer Li and Marc Gertz, “The Missing Link in General Deterrence Research,” Criminology, Volume 43, Issue 3 (August 2005), pp. 623–59. Brian M. Jenkins and Janera Johnson, International Terrorism: A Chronology, 1968–1974, report prepared for Department of State and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation Report R-1597-DOS/ARPA, 1975). Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). David C. Martin and John Walcott, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism (Harper-Collins, 1988). L. John Martin, “The Media’s Role in International Terrorism,” Terrorism, Volume 8 (1985), pp. 44–58. Andrew Mayes, “The Physiology of Fear and Anxiety,” in Fear in Animals and Man, edited by W. Sluckin (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979). Philip Meyer, “Saving Journalism: How to Nurse the Good Stuff Until it Pays,” Columbia Journalism Review, Issue 6 (November–December 2004). Dana Milbank and Spencer S. Hsu, “Cheney: Kerry Victory Is Risky: Democrats Decry Talk as Scare Tactic,” Washington Post (September 8, 2004), p. A1. Robert Novak, “Public Air Wars,” Chicago Sun-Times (July 21, 2005). David L. Paletz, Peter A. Fozzard and John Z. Ayanian, “The IRA, the Red Brigades, and the FALN in the New York Times,” Journal of Communication, Volume 32 (1982), pp. 162–171. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005). Norman Podhoretz, “The Subtle Collusion,” Political Communication and Persuasion, Volume 1 (1981), pp. 84–89.

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President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967). William Raspberry, “All the Nuance That’s Fit to Print,” Washington Post (March 21, 2005), p. A19. David Ropeik, “We’re Being Scared to Death,” Los Angeles Times (September 22, 2004). Joseph F. St. Cyr, “At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability, and Disasters,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Volume 2 (2005), No. 2, Article 4 . Richard W. Schaffert, Media Coverage and Political Terrorists: A Quantitative Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1992). Walter Shapiro, “With Scare Tactics Aplenty, Election Rivals Halloween,” Washington Post (October 20, 2004). Marc Siegel, False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). Paul Simao, “Alcohol Tied to 75,000 Deaths a Year in US,” Reuters (September 23, 2004). Wesley G. Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press, 1990). Wesley G. Skogan and Michael G. Maxfield, Coping with Crime: Individual and Neighborhood Reactions (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1981). Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Vintage, 1997). Cass R. Sunstein, Risk and Reason: Safety, Law and the Environment (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002). “Fear Factor,” Los Angeles Times (March 10, 2003). Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Shashi Tharoor, “The Role of the Media in Promoting Tolerance,” in After Terror: Promoting Dialogue, edited by Akbar Ahmed and Brian Forst (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers,” in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 23–31. Mark Warr, “Fear of Crime in the United States: Avenues for Research and Policy,” Criminal Justice 2000, Volume 4 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2000), pp. 451–489. Paul Wilkinson, “Media and Terrorism: A Reassessment,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 51–64.

chapter thirteen

Should Profiling Be Used to Prevent Terrorism? A. Daktari Alexander

INTRODUCTION

The use of racial profiling as a crime control measure is not new, nor is it a sophisticated or unique approach to controlling or preventing crime. Since the beginning of law enforcement in the United States, people, groups, and societies have sought ways to distinguish criminals from others. One of the most significant and stark examples of racial profiling in the express interest of national security was the internment (i.e., imprisonment) of Japanese and Japanese Americans living in the United States during World War II. The day after the December 7, 1941, attack of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by military forces from Japan, the United States entered the war. All Japanese people residing in the United States were seen as potential threats to the security of the country because it was believed that they would aid the enemy Japanese. The threat was felt more acutely on the Pacific coast, prompting legislators in California, Oregon, and Washington states to forcefully advocate that something be done to reduce or remove the threat of future attacks by any Japanese (Nagata; Ng).1

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Both Nagata and Ng discuss not only the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, but also what internees were feeling at the time. For example, according to Nagata, even though civil liberties of Japanese Americans were violated, this did not immediately result in a call for justice from those who were interned. To be considered loyal Americans, most would not openly oppose any policy that would go against a presidential or congressional order in time of war, even though the order clearly violated the Constitution that the war seemed so desperate to protect.

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On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the forcible internment of people of Japanese ancestry residing in the United States. This order gave the authority to the secretary of war to establish designated areas where certain persons could be restricted to prevent sabotage and espionage against the United States, and to prevent interference with the “successful prosecution of the war” (Executive Order 9066, 1942).2 About 120,000 2

In 1942, President Roosevelt instituted Executive Order No. 9066, which authorized the secretary of war to prescribe military areas, and stated the following: “Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104); Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas. I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies. I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services. This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department

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Japanese and Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in internment camps in the western United States. In addition to being imprisoned, many of those interned had their property confiscated, including homes and businesses. Today, the predominant view regarding the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II is that it was racist and wrong. Apologies and reparations have been made to the individuals and families affected by the internment, and there is no evidence that any Japanese or Japanese Americans residing in the United States had anything to do with the attack at Pearl Harbor, or had any plans to further attack the United States. More than a half a century later, the U.S. government declared war in response to terrorist attacks on its soil by Muslim terrorists from the Middle East. Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government believed that future attacks would occur, and that these could be more lethal through the use of biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological weapons. Fear of subsequent terrorist events induced a severe retaliatory response from the United States, both military and domestic, all in the name of a “war on terrorism.” This chapter seeks to present a commentary on the use of ethnic and racial profiling as justified by that “war.” Since the terror attacks of 2001, a great deal of law enforcement energy and resources have been directed toward prevention of subsequent terrorist incidents.3 Overwhelmingly, the focus of law enforcement has been toward Muslims and Arabs with connections or ties to the Middle East, an area that has been described as a breeding ground for terrorists. There is a concern that this type of government scrutiny adversely affects those

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of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder. Signed, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, THE WHITE HOUSE, February 19, 1942.” Costs of the war on terrorism have been documented by the National Priorities Project (NPP): “To date, four supplemental requests have been made by the Administration for funding, and Congress has appropriated funding with minor changes. The first included approximately $54.4 billion for the Iraq War (enacted in April 2003); the second $70.6 billion (enacted November 2003), the third $21.5 billion (passed as part of regular appropriations for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2005); and the fourth $58 billion (enacted April 2005).”

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who are Muslim but not affiliated with any terrorist group. Accordingly, this discussion of profiling will touch on the fairness and legitimacy of ethnic and racial profiling, and it will discuss the effectiveness of such profiling as a crime control and counterterrorism tool. In this commentary on ethnic profiling and terrorism, I will present several hypotheses that attempt to explain or establish a point of reference for the practice of racial profiling. The hypotheses presented may be tested using past and present experiences and knowledge and anticipated future experiences. It is important to recognize, along the way, the legal and ethical side of racial and ethnic profiling. This is of such overarching significance that the U.S. Congress, in 1868, ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, guaranteeing individuals due process of the law and equal protection under the law. More recently, the U.S. government has explicitly stated that neither race nor ethnicity should be used as a sole factor in decisions to stop, search, detain, or arrest individuals, and that doing so constitutes a violation of one’s constitutional rights.4

WHAT IS RACIAL PROFILING?

Researchers in the area of criminal justice and criminology have defined racial profiling as “the use of race as a key factor in police decisions to stop and interrogate citizens” (Weitzer and Tuch, p. 435); “[T]he use of race or ethnicity as a factor in demarcating people for differential treatment or close scrutiny” (Domke et al., p. 606); and “[T]he use of race as an indicator in a profile of criminal suspects” (Walker, Spohn, and DeLeon, 1999, p. 111.) Racial profiling has also 4

Racial profiling is not an officially accepted practice by the United States government. A June 17, 2003, six-page Fact Sheet on Racial Profi ling by the United States Department of Justice contains a quote from Attorney General John Ashcroft that states, “This administration … has been opposed to racial profiling and has done more to indicate its opposition than ever in history. The President said it’s wrong and we’ll end it in America, and I subscribe to that. Using race … as a proxy for potential criminal behavior is unconstitutional, and it undermines law enforcement by undermining the confidence that people can have in law enforcement.” The fact sheet further states, “Racial profiling sends the dehumanizing message to our citizens that they are judged by the color of their skin and harms the criminal justice system by eviscerating the trust that is necessary if law enforcement is to effectively protect our communities.”

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been described as “the use of race as a criterion in police decision making during discretionary traffic and field interrogation stops” (Engel and Calnon; Engel, Calnon, and Bernard). The U.S. government defines racial profiling as “any police-initiated action that relies on race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than the behavior of an individual or information that leads police to a particular individual who has been identified as being or having been engaged in criminal activity” (Pampel, p. 5). The use of race in profiling occurs either (1) when race is the only factor of the individual and there is a direct link between criminality and race, or (2) when a person’s race is the primary factor used to screen the individual for a crime, and there is an indirect (or diffuse) link between criminality and race, so that other factors must be present in order to make the connection between race and crime (Pampel). Amnesty International has defined racial profiling as “the targeting of individuals and groups by law enforcement officials, even partially, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, except where there is trustworthy information, relevant to the locality and timeframe, that links persons belonging to one of the aforementioned groups to an identified criminal incident or scheme” (p. v). In general, these definitions of racial profiling indicate that race or ethnicity is a key factor in the decision of law enforcement to consider an individual as a criminal suspect. Furthermore, police officers who are racists use race differently in the decision to search minority motorists than in the decision to search a white motorist. An example suggested is that a racist police officer may search all available black motorists, “but only young drivers driving late-model cars with tinted windows and counterculture bumper stickers when it comes to White motorists” (Harcourt, 2004, p. 1307). Another view regarding racial profiling is that it does not exist. Instead, the term criminal profiling is more accurate. Criminal profiling “may include such things as a person’s race, manner of dress and grooming, behavioral characteristics, when and where the observation is made, the circumstances under which the observation is made, and relative to information the officer/investigator may already possess” (Fredrickson and Siljander, p. 28). Under this perspective, criminal profiling focuses on the behavior of the individual,

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not primarily the individual’s race, although it might be a mediating factor (Bumgarner). Who is Affected by Racial Profiling and How are They Affected? Although racial profiling may affect white as well as black Americans, blacks and other minorities are most likely to be racially profiled due to their minority status. Because whites in the United States have more power (political, social, and economic) than other racial groups, they are rarely subject to profiling (Pampel). This is a key issue for those concerned about racial profiling. Is there a differential impact on racial and ethnic minorities? If so, what is the nature and extent of the impact? Many have voiced concerns about the fundamental unfairness of racial profiling, and that racial profiling may result in “the widespread investigation and mistreatment of racial minorities and the tension between racial minority communities and law enforcement agencies” (Banks, 2003, p. 573). The profiling of racial and ethnic minorities may, in fact, contribute to the beliefs that (1) individuals from minority groups are criminal or have criminal tendencies, and (2) individuals from minority groups are responsible for committing most crimes. Because race is used to define who is criminal, there is an expectation of criminal intent. Ideally, one of the goals of any type of profiling should be to establish the ability to discern which persons within certain groups are criminals or terrorists. Ultimately, one of the goals of crime policy should focus on how to selectively incarcerate the small numbers of very high-risk criminals that are responsible for most crimes (Alexander and Bernard; Colvin; Moffitt). Another factor that is not brought out explicitly in the discussion of racial profiling is that racial and ethnic profiling captures or expresses the visual and physical differences among members of society. If individuals look different in skin color or other physical or cultural aspects in contrast to the majority in society, then those minority individuals might be subject to scrutiny because an expectation is created that they will also be different in other ways. These expectations and beliefs require very little, if any, empirical support to be accepted as fact. Here are a few examples to illustrate this point: (1) After the attack on Pearl Harbor, all Japanese persons were seen as a threat to the United

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States. (2) Most young black males are seen as potential criminals, especially violent ones. (3) After September 11, 2001, all Arab- or Middle Eastern-looking males were viewed by many as terrorists or potential terrorists. Interestingly, after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 – which was, until the 9/11 attack, described as the “worst domestic terror attack in U.S. history” (Henderson, p. 123) – there was no public outcry to view all young white males as potential deadly terrorists, nor was there widespread belief that young white males would develop into terrorists capable of replicating this type of terrorist act. In addition to the visual differences that make it easier to profile racial and ethnic minorities, population size is also a factor that makes this type of profiling easy to administer. It would be difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to scrutinize every white male between twenty-five and thirty-five years of age. It is more efficient to scrutinize minority populations because they are fewer in number, have less social, economic, and political power to refuse such scrutiny, and they show up disproportionately as convicted offenders. How is Racial Profiling Being Used? Racial profiling is exclusively used as a crime control or anticrime strategy. On one side of racial profiling are individuals or groups that do not fit the profile and do not merit the attention of criminal justice officials. These are the people that we do not hear about in media reports of racial bias in policing. Furthermore, the number of individuals excluded from a profile is not known. On the other side, are individuals who do fit the profile and thus merit additional attention from law enforcement. Over the past two decades, racial profiling has been synonymous with reports of young black males being harassed by police, who were aggressively pursing those involved in the illegal drug trade as a result of the war on drugs (Becker, 2004; Engle and Calnon; Engle, Calnon, and Bernard).5 This has contributed immeasurably to the over-incarceration of blacks over the past several decades. 5

Becker (2004) reports similar rates of drug use among blacks and whites, although the types and amounts may vary for the individual user.

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More recently, the term “driving while black” (DWB) has been used to express the process of treatment and harassment experienced by African American motorists who are stopped by police because they fit a particular profile, but are not involved in any illegal activities. In the case of DWB, police use pretext-stops of vehicles in order to conduct vehicle searches for illegal drugs. How Effective is Racial Profiling in Reducing Crime? According to both Howard S. Becker (1963) and Stan Becker (2004), if you target those believed to be criminal, you will find the criminal. However, they come to the same conclusion for different reasons: Howard Becker, as well as other labeling theorists (e.g., Goffman; Lemert; Merton), believes that if you target those believed to be criminal, you are more likely to create a criminal; whereas Stan Becker assumes no relationship between the treatment of certain groups by law enforcement and the group’s reaction to that treatment. In general, racial profiling disproportionately affects certain ethnic and racial groups. For example, Becker (2004) argues that because certain crimes vary by race, a comparison based on “respective percentages” to test for racial profiling is not an appropriate comparison, though many scholars would argue that crime rates vary by race because of differential law enforcement, not differential involvement (Beckett; Walker, Spohn, and De Lone). Differential law enforcement of minority groups as criminal suspects assumes that other groups do not engage in criminal behavior, or the likelihood that other groups do not engage in such behavior is rather low. Though such assumptions may be verifiable empirically, they are most often based on beliefs, stereotypes, practices, and experiences, which may be slow to recognize emerging trends in behavior. For example, the long-held belief that upper- and middle-class youth did not commit crime because there was little financial need to do so, in contrast to youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, has been shown repeatedly to be empirically invalid (Cloward and Ohlin; Merton). Do arrests based on racial profiling reduce crime? Unfortunately, the research on racial profiling does not answer this question. Most of the empirical research on racial profiling is cross-sectional and lacks

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both an historical context (especially regarding drug laws and their enforcement) and a coherent sociological framework. In addition, the current state of research on racial profiling is able to infer only that racial profiling is occurring, and this is accomplished chiefly as a result of the disproportionality of minority group involvement in the criminal justice system. As Engel, Calnon, and Bernard discuss in their review of the research, unless we know why individuals are stopped and searched by law enforcement, it is difficult to know for certain that racial profiling has occurred. In addition, the authors stated that an “officer’s discretionary decision making differed for White and non-White Citizens” (p. 269). It is not known whether disproportionality is indicative of racial profiling. If we are to find out if racial profiling has occurred, and in order to explain officers’ behavior, we need to know why the officer performed the stop. Should crime policy use a race-based approach? Should terrorism policy use an ethnically based approach? It will be useful, first, to know why law enforcement agents target particular groups. If they use such profiling, it will be essential to measure its effectiveness in reducing the crimes for which people are profiled. If racial profiling has no effect, it will be both ineffective and immoral, especially in light of the disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities already under criminal justice supervision. These problems are no less important in screening for terrorism. The conventional argument is as follows: “The facts relating to terrorism remain clear: Islamic anti-American terrorism almost by definition involves Muslims from the Middle East or Asia. A system of random screening that ignores this fact can easily miss potential terrorists and threaten the safety of flyers” (Pampel, p. 22). However, unlike screening for crime, anti-terrorism screening should evolve through methods that allow for a greater possibility of future attacks that is not limited to past experiences. For example, focusing counterterrorism efforts at airports may open the door to rail, bus, or train vulnerability (such as the terror attacks in London on July 7, 2005). What Can We Conclude about Racial and Ethnic Profiling? Racial and ethnic profiling targets a class or group of people, but may not effectively target crime or terrorism. Racial profiling has

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contributed to the increased entry of blacks and other minorities, especially Hispanics, into the criminal justice system. This type of law enforcement strategy could be described as selective incapacitation, but it has not been shown to effectively reduce crime. Furthermore, incapacitation is an expensive, resource-consuming crime control strategy that may not be justified by its crime-reducing effects. Moreover, the causes of crime may not be reflected in changes in crime control strategies or changes in law. For example, targeting young black males for arrest and confinement does not reduce crime in general, but it may reduce or affect crime committed among this group due to an incapacitation effect. However, by focusing law enforcement efforts on one group does not mean that this is the only group participating in criminal behavior. It simply means that society has determined that particular groups require greater law enforcement focus, and using race as the primary decision point about who is criminal and who is not criminal places some individuals at greater risk of racial profiling. Racial profiling makes those in power feel empowered and safe (to some degree) because it provides temporary control in situations where one has little to no control over a particular outcome (e.g., a terrorist bombing or violent crime rates), but one needs to show that they are doing something to reduce or alleviate the particular outcome of interest. Racial profiling is tolerated primarily because it does not affect those in power.

LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUES RELATED TO RACIAL PROFILING

Banks, Eberhardt and Ross (2006) argue that that there is a societal consensus against racial discrimination, but this consensus against racial discrimination becomes unattainable as a practical reality because we exist in a racially stratified society. For example, after September 11, persons of Middle Eastern descent in the United States, particularly young adult males, were greatly suspected of being terrorists or having information about possible terrorists; thousands were interviewed and hundreds were taken into police custody and charged as terrorists, despite having no history of or affiliation with terrorism.

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There is no agreement about the conditions under which racial profiling can be “legitimately and constitutionally used in policing” to reduce crime (Harcourt 2004, p. 1279); however, Harcourt describes technical distinctions to racial profiling. For example, when considering the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which protects persons from unreasonable searches and seizures by state officials, and is extended to places where individuals have a right to expect privacy, race is used either exclusively or as one of many factors. If race is used as one of many factors, then there is technically no discrimination. Thus, the degree to which race plays a part in the search must be disentangled from other factors to show racial discrimination. When considering the Fourteenth Amendment, which dictates a due process to protect an individual’s rights against infringement by state and local government officials, the Amendment provides that “… no State shall … deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The technical distinctions related to a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment are profiling without individualized suspicion (i.e., race or ethnicity used as the only factor in deciding who may be detained and arrested) or the use of eyewitness identification that includes information about race. If race is used as part of eyewitness identification, then there is technically no discrimination. Whren v. United States (1996) suggests that race can legitimately be considered as a factor in the determination to stop an individual so long as the police independently have reasonable suspicion (Harcourt; Pampel). Moreover, according to Harcourt, police use of racial profiling is constitutionally acceptable if (1) racial profiling reduces the amount of the profiled crime (if it does not then the practice is counterproductive); (2) while maintaining or increasing the efficient allocation of police resources; (3) without producing a “ratchet effect” on the profiled population” (p. 1279). A ratchet effect occurs when racial profiling creates a supervised population disproportionate to the distribution of offending by racial group (Stuntz, 2002). Thus, there can be no, “disproportionate collateral consequences on

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the profiled population” in order for racial profiling to be constitutionally acceptable (Harcourt, 2004, p. 1280), but this standard is seldom considered problematic.

TERRORISM

Prior to September 11, 2001, the risk of a terrorist attack in the United States by foreign or domestic entities was relatively low in contrast to terrorism attacks in other nations (Henderson). In fact, many scholars and experts on terrorism focused their discussions on Europe, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, including Russia, Italy, West Germany, Ireland, Spain, Algeria, Israel, and Iran (e.g., see Crenshaw, 1983;1995). Terrorism and Profiling According to Henderson, the United States government defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience” (p. 4), but Henderson cautions that this definition may lack completeness, because it does not include “how terrorism relates to other forms of violence or to violent action by government itself” (p. 5). In order to define terrorism, we must know not only what violence is committed by antigovernment groups, but also if government retaliation in response to terrorism is also terroristic. However, in general, terrorism refers to the threat or use of violence to intimidate or coerce, usually for political purposes. Terrorism produces a state of fear in society, regardless of how small the actual risk of attack. Continued or prolonged terrorism may erode public confidence in a government’s ability to protect its citizens. Profiling for terrorists is a natural outgrowth of a declaration of war against all terrorists. War is a large-scale campaign intended to destroy an enemy with little regard for immediate consequences. Civil liberties and other legislative protections afforded individuals tend to become less important in times of war. In 2006, over 500 individuals were held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, believed to be enemy combatants who posed

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a terrorist threat to the United States.6 These individuals were denied civil liberties and procedural safeguards that are usually afforded those presumed to have committed crimes. Ethnic profiling was practiced on a much wider, although considerably less intrusive, scale at all points of entry to the United States following the 9/11 attack. The use of racial profiling in terrorism assumes that terrorists come primarily in certain shapes and sizes. This is a limited view; it does not include dynamic or emerging aspects of terror. For example, current profiles may not be valid for future predictions of terrorist attacks, perhaps in response to profiling. As we learned from the 2002 Washington, DC–area sniper experience, profiles based on race may be erroneous and therefore misleading in the investigation and apprehension of criminals.7 In Baghdad, it was reported in 2005 that a female suicide bomber, disguised as a man, was responsible for killing six and wounding thirty people.8 Who are the Terrorists? In defining a terrorist, Horowitz confines his description to ideology and does not mention race, ethnicity, or national origin (86). The 6

7

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As to the number of detainees, on September 12, 2005 the Department of Defense (DOD) announced the transfer of one detainee from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (GTMO): “Prior to this transfer, [the] DOD has transferred or released 245 detainees from GTMO – 177 for release, and 68 transferred to other governments (29 to Pakistan, five to Morocco, seven to France, seven to Russia, four to Saudi Arabia, two to Spain, one to Sweden, one to Kuwait, one to Australia, nine to Great Britain and two to Belgium). There are approximately 505 detainees currently at Guantanamo.” Blacks were ruled out as suspects in the incidents of sniper rifle attacks that terrorized the Washington, DC area during the fall of 2002. To this end, agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law enforcement profi led and believed the suspect to a white male acting alone, allowing John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who are both African American, to escape detection for weeks. As to mistaken identity in racial profiling, Jonathan D. Glater, in a New York Times article (June 22, 2003) stated that racial profiling is problematic when people incorrectly identify members of racial groups, especially when individuals are under pressure to make distinct racial identifications. As an example, Glater states, “What if an airline passenger looks Middle Eastern to you, but is in fact Samoan, Spanish, Czech or a combination of all three?” “The woman was disguised as a man in a white dishdasha – a traditional male robe – and a kaffiyeh head scarf to blend in with the other applicants lined up to join the Iraqi army, which takes only men.” Al-Qaida in Iraq claimed responsibility for the blast, saying in an Internet posting that it was carried out by “a blessed sister.” As reported in The Seattle Times , September 28, 2005.

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focus of who is a terrorist, then, is attitude and behavior. This distinction is important because one’s race or ethnicity does not necessarily indicate that an individual will become a terrorist. Furthermore, terrorists may be associated with particular racial, ethnic, or religious groups, but acts of terrorism are by no means limited to or confined to such groups. Acts of terrorism in the United States have been fairly rare, but they have committed overwhelmingly by white American males; nonetheless, the label of “terrorist” has not been associated with this group (Henderson).

HOW EFFECTIVE IS RACIAL PROFILING IN REDUCING TERRORISM?

Counterterrorism measures are effective only if they prevent a terrorist attack or have the effect of reducing the impact of a terrorist attack when the attack happens. Presently, it is not possible to predict with any certainty when a terrorist attack will occur, despite attempts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to give the public the status of the possibility of a terrorist attack in its color-coded alert system.9 In order to better predict terror attacks, we need to know the number of attacks that are successful in an area, and the number that are unsuccessful. The successful ones are generally rare, and the unsuccessful ones are mostly undocumented. In addition, we need fairly complete and accurate data of all terrorists groups and their capability and readiness to commit an attack. Thus, racial profiling may not be particularly useful given that information about the behavior of specific terrorists or terrorists groups may be more effective at reducing terrorism than racial profiling. It is most likely that other such information can better govern law enforcement practices and resource allocations than profiling, and would be useful as well for informing security protocols at airports and train and subway stations, as well as helping in the 9

An example of this occurred when the setting of the terror alert level was changed from elevated (i.e., Yellow) to high (i.e., Orange), but this was only for mass-transit systems, as stated by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff in a press briefing just after the London bombing attacks on July 7, 2005: “[This alert is] targeted only to the mass transit portion of the transportation sector.”

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establishment of controls and restrictions at points of entry into the United States (i.e., target hardening). It is possible that the use of racial and ethnic profiling fail to prevent terrorist attacks. For instance, about three months after the London terrorist bombings on July 7, 2005, it was discovered that the terrorists had made at least one practice run of the subway routes that were later bombed. In this case, it may have been more useful to use the surveillance video in conjunction with intelligence information. If we implement a strategy of racial profiling and there is a subsequent reduction in terrorist attacks, should we then conclude that racial profiling is effective in wars on terror? Without controlled experimentation, such inferences are dubious; any number of other factors not accounted for might in fact be more important causative factors, including tighter security at airports and train and subway stations, as well as tighter controls and restrictions at points of entry into the country. According to Silver and Miller (2002), actuarial risk assessment tools that use the risk attributes of a population to make decisions about an individual’s risk could aid in the prediction of criminal behavior. Essentially, individuals are scored, and a level of risk is determined using an algorithmic analysis that produces a model of risk. Furthermore, Silver and Miller suggest that most of the prediction tools previously used produce models that show a high preponderance of false positives. However, current risk assessment models do not predict that an individual will engage in a particular behavior, but rather the individual has a likelihood for the particular behavior, given his or her attributes. Thus, actuarial models are used to predict behavior “in advance of future acts of crime or violence” (Silver and Miller, p. 147). At its core, actuarial models are used to demark highrisk individuals from others. However, Silver and Miller state that tools used to predict social and criminal behavior (i.e., actuarial prediction methods) are more focused on “the efficient management of institutional resources rather than to target individuals …” (p. 139). And because actuarial predication methods are group-based, these “methods contribute to the continued marginalization of populations already at the fringes

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of the economic and political mainstream” (p. 139). Thus, actuarial models are not without their collateral costs. Ultimately, the goal of a crime control policy such as racial profiling should focus on how to selectively incarcerate the small numbers of very high-risk criminals who are responsible for the targeted crime. From a cost-effectiveness point of view, subjecting large numbers of people who are unlikely to commit offenses to increased scrutiny may increase prison populations, but with no added benefit to society. To this end, actuarial models of risk could be useful if they are used to target high-risk criminals. Specifically to terrorism prediction, Sirseloudi (2005) proposes short-, medium-, and long-term prevention strategies in detecting terrorist campaigns. These prediction models rely on individual, group and contextual factors and rely more heavily on political and sociological phenomena, such as the levels of inequality, group cohesiveness, and interests in political targets. The type of prediction models suggested by Sirseloudi are more nuanced than raced-based prediction models.

RACIAL PROFILING AS A CRIME CONTROL POLICY

Although Kingdon (1995) presents a picture of how the policy process generally evolves, he readily admits that cause-and-effect relationships are extremely precarious when dealing with policy. Factors that drive crime policy include the public, the media, politicians, political elites, policy makers, social scientists, and the economy, and these factors are difficult, if not impossible, to control for. Therefore, overemphasizing the influence of policy within criminology may be meaningless if we cannot determine the impact of the influence, because without this determination there is essentially nothing to say. Until we can determine what is driving crime policy in more than isolated instances, and to what certainty, the study of any crime control policy, such as racial profiling, will continue to be difficult. For example, when we consider all the factors that may lead to decisions about crime policy it is difficult to ignore the players involved (e.g., see Kingdon). It is also impossible to duplicate research of this type because conditions and players

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may change. This is a major weakness of efforts that are designed to quantify research in crime policy. Research of the type suggested by Scheingold (1998), though theoretically appealing, may not be fully testable, nor replicable, therefore it cannot be validated. Sheingold suggests the use of political criminology to address the policy issues and implications of criminological research. Scheingold indicates that although interest in crime and research of crime has permeated a great number of disciplines, researchers generally fail to incorporate work from fields other than their own. In order to make criminology and crime policy more complete, Scheingold would marry these two related yet disconnected fields. Perhaps he believes that the shortcomings of both fields will be alleviated if they are combined. For example, criminologists spend a great deal of time testing theories, constructing elaborate research designs, presenting hypotheses, and reporting their findings, but are restrained in making policy recommendations, whereas political sociologist tend to make many policy recommendations despite relatively weak research and theory construction (e.g., see Beckett, 1997). Another concern about crime control policy is that it is overwhelmingly punitive. Greenberg and West (2001) suggest that punishment is one of the many tools available to shape crime policy. Tyler and Boeckman (1997) believe that punitive policies such as Three Strikes do not decrease crime, but have the opposite effect. Moreover, punitive responses to crime can only grow at the expense of other forms of crime control. Lyons and Scheingold (2000) similarly discuss the punitive nature of crime control but realize that policies delivering crime control are extremely complex, and the focus on punishment is at the expense of other crime policy strategies. Crime policy and criminological research complement one another in that research shows what is going on with crime and criminals, and then crime policy should be adjusted according. This relationship requires that when a policy is implemented, researchers will look at how it affects crime and the general state of affairs. This is especially true for the use of racial profiling. Clearly, any crime policy should consider what the effect might be beyond the population of criminal offenders, similar to Rochefort and Cobb’s (1994) essay about problem definition and how conflicts such as terrorism expand or

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produce what Stuntz and Harcourt describe as collateral or ratchet effects. Therefore, one way that crime policy can be beneficial is if it provides state and local agencies and the general public with detailed information on the potentially significant societal effects that the proposed policy is likely to have, ways in which the significant ill effects may be minimized, and alternatives to the policy. With so much emphasis on the issue of crime control, the use of racial profiling to combat terrorism is also an ethical issue. For the most part, racial profiling seems to be accepted because the ends justify the means (i.e., utilitarianism), and the benefit to society is perceived as more important than the rights of the individual. However, utilitarianism makes sense only when one knows the outcome of his or her actions (Pollock, 2008), which is not possible. The use of racial profiling to fight terrorism is a particularly problematic issue because if it is used in such a manner, it provides another form of discretion, authority, power, and force (Pollock) that might not be justified under other conditions. Moreover, its use must be confined to a grave and certain threat, the lack of viable alternatives, and there must be a high probability of success (Pollock). Thus, racial profiling to fight terrorism should not be used as a tool of convenience.

WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE ABOUT RACIAL PROFILING AND TERRORISM?

There are a number of things that we should keep in mind about racial profiling and terrorism: First, the criteria the U.S. government uses to profile terrorists are secret, therefore, it is not known whether race is used in the profile. However, because the criteria for suspicion of terrorism are in fact secret, it is most likely that race and ethnicity may be prominent features of the profile. This is especially likely because after the September 11, 2001, attacks, hundreds of Arab and Middle Eastern men were apprehended, detained, and questioned by law enforcement based solely on their race or ethnicity. Second, because the public’s reaction to terrorism is highly emotional, we can expect that as the severity of attacks or heightened fear of attacks increase, so does the public acceptance of counterterrorism measures that restrict civil liberties, especially those most suspected

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of being responsible for terrorist attacks. Prime examples of this are Executive Order 9066, issued in 1942, and the USA PATRIOT Act, enacted in 2001. Though Executive Order 9066 allowed for the civil liberties of any person thought to be a threat to the United States at the time to be restricted, law enforcement specifically targeted Japanese residents. The USA PATRIOT Act also gave broad and unprecedented government authority to law enforcement to pursue anyone at their discretion who may have any connection whatsoever with any terrorist or terrorist group. Third, racial and ethnic minorities are most likely – to the extreme – to be targeted for racial profiling for crime in general, and for terrorism in particular. Fourth, a terrorist attack against U.S. citizens that occurs within the United States will receive a much greater military and policy response than terrorist attacks against citizens that occur outside the United States. Fifth, even if there is no consensus about the use of racial profiling to combat terrorism, we need to know if racial profiling is effective in reducing terrorism, as well as the effectiveness of other strategies, and this can best be achieved when racial profiling is openly discussed and adequately measured. Racial and ethnic profiling has become a hot political issue. Many, particularly in the law enforcement community, argue that racial profiling does not occur, and refute any and all evidence that shows that race does affect, in some unexplained way, how decisions are made in regard to which citizens are pulled over while driving or stopped and searched on the streets. Like much of the discrimination that occurs in the criminal justice system, it is difficult to measure directly. It is nonetheless essential that we do much more to estimate the social and ethical costs of screening policies that impose extra burdens on ethnic and racial minorities, and to balance them with those of protecting U.S. citizens against terrorism.

RE F E RE N CE S Amnesty International, Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States (New York: Amnesty International USA Publications, 2004).

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Alexander, A. Daktari and Thomas J. Bernard, “A Critique of Mark Colvin’s, Crime and Coercion: An Integrated Theory of Chronic Criminality,” Crime, Law & Social Change, Volume 38, Number 4 (2002), pp. 389–398. Banks, R. Richard, “Beyond Profiling: Race, Policing, and the Drug War,” Stanford Law Review, Volume 56, Number 3 (2003), pp. 571–603. Banks, R. Richard, Jennifer L. Eberhardt, and Lee Ross, “Discrimination and Implicit Bias in a Racially Unequal Society,” California Law Review, Volume 94, Number 4 (2006), pp. 1169–1190. Becker, Howard S., The Outsiders: Studies in Sociological Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963). Becker, Stan, “Assessing the Use of Profiling in Searches by Law Enforcement Personnel,” Journal of Criminal Justice, Volume 23, Number 3 (2004), pp. 183–193. Beckett, Katherine, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Bumgarner, Jeffrey B., Criminal Justice in America: A Reference Handbook. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004). Colvin, Mark, Crime and Coercion: An Integrated Theory of Chronic Criminality. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001). Cloward, Richard A. and Lloyd E. Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity: A Theory of Delinquent Gangs. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960). Crenshaw, Martha, Terrorism in Conflict (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1995). Terrorism, Legitimacy, and Power: The Consequences of Political Violence. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983). Domke, David, Philip Garland, Andre Billeaudeaux, and John Hutchenson, “Insights Into U.S. Racial Hierarchy: Racial Profiling, News Sources, and September 11,” Journal of Communication, Volume 53, Number 4 (2003), pp. 606–623. Engel, Robin Sheppard and Jennifer M. Calnon, “Examining the Influence of Drivers’ Characteristics During Traffic Stops With Police: Results From A National Survey,” Justice Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 1 (2004), pp. 49–90. Engel, Robin Sheppard Jennifer M. Calnon, and Thomas J. Bernard, “Theory and Racial Profiling: Shortcomings and Directions in Future Research,” Justice Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 2 (2002), pp. 249–273. Fredrickson, Darin D. and Raymond P. Siljander, Racial Profiling: Eliminating the Confusion Between Racial and Criminal Profiling and Clarifying What Constitutes Unfair Discrimination and Persecution (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, LTD, 2002). Goffman, Erving, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963).

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Greenberg, David F. and Valerie West, “State Prison Populations and Their Growth, 1971–1991,” Criminology, Volume 39, Number 3 (2001), pp. 615–654. Harcourt, Bernard E., “Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique of the Economics, Civil Liberties, and Constitutional Literature, and of Criminal Profiling More Generally,” University of Chicago Law Review, Volume 71, Number 4 (2004), pp. 1275–1381. Henderson, Harry, Terrorism (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2001). Kingdon, John W., Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies, 2nd Edition (New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 1995). Lemert, Edwin M., Social Pathology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1951). Lyons, William and Stuart Scheingold, Politics of Crime and Punishment. In The nature of crime: Continuity and change (Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, 2000). Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). Moffit, Terrie E., “Adolescent-Limited and Life-Course-Persistent Antisocial Behavior: A Developmental Taxonomy,” Psychological Review, Volume 100, Number 4 (1993) pp. 674–701. Nagata, Donna K., Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-Generational Impact of the Japanese American Internment (New York: Plenum Press, 1993). Ng, Wendy, Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002). Pampel, Fred C., Racial Profiling (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004). Pollock, Joycelyn M., Ethical Dilemmas and Decisions in Criminal Justice, 6th Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2008). Rochefort, David A. and Roger W. Cobb. Problem Definition: An Emerging Perspective. In The Politics of Problem Definition, pp. 1–31 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1994). Scheingold, Stuart A., Constructing the New Political Criminology: Power, Authority, and the Post-Liberal State,” Law and Social Inquiry, Volume 23 (1998) 857–895. Silver, Eric and Lisa Miller, “A Cautionary Note on the Use of Actuarial Risk Assessment Tools for Social Control,” Crime Delinquency, Volume 48, Number 1 (2002) pp. 138–161. Sirseloudi, Matenia P., “How to Predict the Unpredictable: On the Early Detection of Terrorist Campaigns,” Defense & Security Analysis, Volume 21, Number 4 (2005) pp. 369–385. Stuntz, William J., “Local Policing After the Terror,” Yale Law Journal, Volume 111, Number 8 (2002) pp. 2137–2179. Tyler, Tom R. and Robert J. Boeckman, “Three Strikes and You’re Out, But Why?” Law and Society Review, Volume 31, Number 1 (1997) pp. 237–266.

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Walker, Samuel, Cassia C. Spohn, and Miriam DeLone, The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America, 4th Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008). Weitzer, Ronald and Steven A. Tuch, “Perceptions of Racial Profiling: Race, Class, and Personal Experiences,” Criminology, Volume 40, Number 2 (2002), pp. 435–456. Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996).

chapter fourteen

Federal-Local Coordination in Homeland Security Edward R. Maguire and William R. King

Any legislative change which would render … local and state law enforcement subservient to federal jurisdiction, would, in my opinion, be disastrous. – J. Edgar Hoover 1954 [A]gencies at different levels of government will, as a generality, have different organizational cultures that are not ideally suited to the development of effective countermeasures against the crime and related problems each agency targets. – William Geller and Norval Morris 1992

INTRODUCTION

Lack of coordination and cooperation between law enforcement officials at all levels of government has received prominent attention since the terrorist attacks on United States soil on September 11, 2001. The contentious relationship between the FBI and local police is depicted regularly in television and film; it is one of the stock Hollywood clichés in police and crime dramas. Local police have complained for many years about being patronized, alienated, upstaged, or simply ignored by FBI agents (Geller and Morris 1992). Whereas the relationship between the FBI and state and local police is the most obvious and visible issue in federal-local coordination for homeland security, the more general concern is how the federal government’s entire alphabet soup of agencies can work cooperatively with local governments to secure the homeland. Concerns about terrorism have brought these issues to the forefront, with news reports, professional associations, think tanks, and government commissions all coming to

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similar conclusions: The linkages between federal and local agencies need significant improvement if we are to prevent terrorist incidents on American soil and enhance homeland security. For anyone doubting the need for federal and local authorities to work together in preventing and responding to terrorism on American soil, consider two sets of statistics. First, according to the Census Bureau, there are more than 25,000 separate “places”1 in the United States, including cities, towns, townships, villages, boroughs, and other forms of local government (U.S. Census Bureau 2005). Every one of these places is a potential location where an aspiring terrorist may live, work, visit, pass through, plot and plan, or carry out an attack. Although the federal government certainly plays a role in preventing terrorism in all these places, it is not difficult to imagine that local authorities may find themselves in a much more advantageous position to discover – perhaps even inadvertently – evidence or intelligence that the planning of a terrorist incident may be afoot. Second, the number of federal law enforcement officials pales in comparison to the number of state and local police. In 2003 the FBI had 11,633 special agents (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2003). Of these, only 2,196 of them worked directly on terrorism through Joint Terrorism Task Forces (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2004a). Compare these numbers with the 731,903 full-time sworn officers working in 17,876 state and local law enforcement agencies in 2004 (Reaves 2007), and the approximately 2 million security guards (Police Executive Research Forum 2004) in the United States, and it becomes quickly apparent that federal officials cannot prevent, deter, investigate, and respond to terrorism by themselves. All of these law enforcement officers are connected to the homeland security network, many only tenuously. Thus, the sheer number of officials with some role in counterterrorism is enormous. Differences in level of government (local, county, state, or federal), jurisdiction, 1

The U.S. Census Bureau (n.d.) defines a “place” as: “A concentration of population either legally bounded as an incorporated place, or identified as a Census Designated Place (CDP) including comunidades and zonas urbanas in Puerto Rico. Incorporated places have legal descriptions of borough (except in Alaska and New York), city, town (except in New England, New York, and Wisconsin), or village.”

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training, skills, experience, occupation, and organizational culture make organizing this vast network of officials very difficult. This chapter explores the relationship between local governments and the federal government in homeland security policy and practice.2 We begin by drawing on terminology and insights from interorganizational theory and social network theory, focusing on the nature of counterterrorism networks, the importance of boundary spanners who operate within these networks, and the challenges these networks present for homeland security (Alter 1990; Cook and Whitmeyer 1992; Oliver and Ebers 1998; Salancik 1995; Shrum 1990). Next we explore the role of the federal government in homeland security. Then we review the role of local governments. We close by exploring a number of issues and challenges in federal-local coordination for homeland security.

INTERORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKS

Organizations are complex social entities with unique cultures, structures, histories, traditions, goals, and practices. Scholars have spent decades trying to understand organizations: how they acquire their unique qualities, how they change or resist change, and how they can improve their performance. The FBI, for instance, has been the object of intense scrutiny for many years by analysts seeking to understand how and why it operates as it does (Theoharis 2004; Wilson 1978). Police agencies, especially those in large cities like New York (Lardner and Repetto 2001), Los Angeles (Herbert 1996; Woods 1993), and Chicago (Lindbergh 1998; Skogan and Hartnett 1997) have also been studied extensively. More generally, the American police as an institution have been studied with increasing frequency over the past four decades. More than 1,250 Ph.D. dissertations with the word “police” in the title have been written since 1967 (Skogan and Frydl 2004). If organizations – especially law enforcement organizations – are so complex that they are able to generate all of this 2

We do not consider the role of state governments. This is neither an oversight on our part, nor an indication that state governments do not play a key role in the homeland security network. Our focus in this chapter is on relationships between federal and local government agencies.

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attention from researchers, imagine the exponential increase in complexity that would result from asking all these separate, autonomous organizations to work together to achieve common goals. Picture a giant network with thousands of separate nodes (each node representing an agency), with pathways or ties drawn from every node in the network to every other node. For the sake of illustration, if there were just 1,000 separate nodes in the network, each one of them having an equal responsibility for preserving homeland security, there would be 499,500 separate ties between nodes in the network.3 Every one of those ties represents a potential connection via which two organizations can cooperate, coordinate, collaborate, and communicate. Each tie also represents a location where efforts to work together could break down. As it turns out, the picture is far more complex than illustrated in this simple example. First, the American homeland security apparatus contains multiple overlapping networks that vary in occupation, location, mission, and authority. In other words, there are networks of networks. Second, there are far more than 1,000 separate nodes in the networks of agencies responsible for homeland security. Third, the nodes are not all equal in power, authority, or importance. These kinds of inequalities are common structural features of social networks. In fact, network theorists have developed a number of methods to measure centrality, or the extent of “power and dominance in interorganizational service delivery systems” (Alter 1990: 485). Fourth, the pathways or ties between the nodes are not equivalent. In the language of social network theory, some are weak ties and some are strong ties (Granovetter 1983). Although social networks can quickly become very complex, interorganizational networks do not require every individual within each agency to be responsible for achieving the day-to-day linkages necessary for the agencies to work together. Instead, the responsibility rests on the shoulders of a much smaller number of boundary spanners, people whose jobs are to span the boundaries between two or more 3

According to mathematical rules for computing “combinations,” the formula for determining the number of dyads or 2-way ties in a system of nodes (n) is: n! / [2! (n – 2)!]. So, with 1,000 nodes, the formula reduces to 1000! / [2 (998!)] = 499,500. This approach treats the direct pathway between two agencies as a single tie.

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organizations. Sociologist Wesley Schrum conceptualizes interorganizational relations as a product of interactions between individual representatives of organizations acting as boundary spanners. In this view, the boundary relations of an organization are simply the set of external ties its members maintain; and one way of describing an interorganizational system is to examine the set of these relations. (Shrum 1990: 497, italics preserved from original)

Boundary spanners play a crucial role in establishing and sustaining interorganizational relationships. All organizations have boundaries of some sort. However, organizations vary widely in the extent to which these boundaries are permeable. Some organizations, including human service bureaucracies (like the police), are involved heavily in frequent exchanges with elements of the environments in which they are situated – clients, customers, suppliers, regulators, politicians, the media, and other organizations. Others, like national security agencies, have tightly sealed boundaries. In either case, whether an organization’s boundaries are permeable or sealed, the job of coordinating with other entities in the organization’s environment falls on its boundary spanners. Just as understanding the spread of an epidemic means finding the locations and recent travel patterns of its key carriers, understanding federal-local coordination in homeland security means paying careful attention to these boundary spanners, and the nature of the exchange behaviors they engage in with other organizations in the network. Some organizations will have permeable outer boundaries, allowing frequent exchanges between selected members and entities in the external environment, but will have a tightly sealed “technical core” (Thompson 1967). The technical core of an organization is the nucleus where the majority of work is accomplished. Picture a large, modern police agency in an American city. The chief of police and other executives are involved in frequent exchanges of information with the media, local politicians, and various citizens and business groups. The agency’s public information office works regularly with the media to manage the way the police agency and its members

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are portrayed in the media. Community relations officers busily organize “feel-good” community events with friendly officers, clean and polished police cars, fingerprint kits for families to record their children’s fingerprints, and balloons and plastic replicas of the agency’s badge for the kids. All of the police employees fulfilling these various roles are boundary spanners whose role is, in the terminology of organizational scholars, to interact with and enact their environment (Weick 1979). To enact the environment means to manage it, shape it, manipulate it, or seek to achieve some control over it. Although these boundary spanners play a valuable role in securing valuable resources for the police organization from various elements in its environment – resources like funding, personnel, goodwill, community support, and a perception that the police agency is a legitimate and responsive agency of local government – the one thing they do not influence is the way work is accomplished in the technical core. Police work, whether in patrol, investigations, or special operations, continues on largely unabated and uninfluenced by the behavior of these boundary spanners. The boundary spanner is like an agency’s visible representative, its “presentation of self,” to some portion of the outside world (Goffman 1959; Manning 1977). Concepts from interorganizational theory and social network theory are crucial for understanding federal-local coordination in homeland security. These concepts and theories provide useful insights about how a giant network of agencies and individuals can manage the job of cooperation, collaboration, coordination, and communication (“the 4 C’s”). The organizations responsible for achieving homeland security are linked in a vast and complex web of networks. Some of these networks are primarily local or regional, such as the networks of agencies responsible for processing criminal offenders or for responding to disasters, whether natural or man-made. Others may span levels of government, such as partnerships between the FBI and local police, or between the Department of Homeland Security and local disasterresponse agencies. This mix of networks – horizontal and vertical; local, national, and international; public and private – is where the job of homeland security gets done.

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THE ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Attorney General John Ashcroft announced in November 2001 that preventing terrorist attacks would henceforth be the core mission of federal prosecutors (Breinholt 2003: 1). In a 2001 speech, President George W. Bush reinforced the role of U.S. Attorneys in homeland security when he told them they were “on the front line of war” (The White House 2001). The federal courts also play a crucial role by hearing the terrorism cases brought before them by federal prosecutors. The importance of a strong federal response to terrorism was reinforced by the 9/11 Commission Report: “countering terrorism is now the top national priority for the United States government” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2004: 361). The report specified that the threat is not simply terrorism, an amorphous term that conceals a variety of different behaviors of varying severity. The primary threat is Islamist terrorism committed by al Qaeda or others who are committed to a radical and violent interpretation of Islamic ideology. The 9/11 Commission Report calls for a coordinated political and military strategy to address this threat. The strategy relies on three broad approaches: to “attack terrorists and their organizations; prevent the continued growth of Islamist terrorism; and protect against and prepare for terrorist attacks” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2004: 363). Although local governments in the United States can play a role in each of these three approaches, clearly the federal government is (and should be) the nucleus that directs and coordinates the various activities. The federal government must rely on the use of a variety of strategies, many of which are well beyond the purview of local governments: “diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2004: 363–364). The federal government has access to resources, expertise, authority, people, and places that are simply unavailable to local governments. The job of accomplishing this diverse list of tasks falls to an alphabet soup of federal agencies. Many of them fall within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an “umbrella” department established in October of 2001 to coordinate the work of the various agencies whose

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functions relate to homeland security in the United States (Bush 2002). Although the organizational structure of the Department of Homeland Security is exceedingly complex, some of its major components include the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the U.S. Secret Service.4 The Joint Terrorism Task Forces The federal agency with primary responsibility for law enforcement and intelligence gathering in homeland security is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The major apparatus through which the FBI achieves coordination with local agencies is its Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). First established in New York in 1980, there are now more than 100 JTTFs. Sixty-five of them were created after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. According to the standard language contained in the memoranda of understanding between the FBI and local agencies involved in each JTTF: The mission of the JTTF will be to utilize the collective resources of the participating agencies for the prevention, preemption, deterrence and investigation of terrorism and activities related to terrorism, both actual and potential, occurring in or affecting the U.S. carried out by terrorist groups and/or individuals, as well as apprehending individuals carrying out such violations.

These regional JTTFs all report to the National Joint Terrorism Task Force office in the Strategic Information and Operations Center at FBI Headquarters. The JTTFs have been called “the foundation of the Bureau’s information sharing efforts” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States n.d.). The National JTTF contains representatives from thirty-eight U.S. agencies, and is considered the “operational nerve center” or the “point of fusion” for collecting terrorist intelligence and preventing terrorist incidents (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2004b). 4

Information on the Department of Homeland Security is derived from: http:// www.dhs/gov. Accessed March 4, 2007.

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Although all JTTFs are a little different from one another, they share some common elements.5 Each one is headed by an FBI Supervisory Special Agent with experience in counterterrorism operations and investigations. The task force also contains other FBI special agents, as well as federal, state, and local law enforcement officers from other agencies. Each task force appoints a special agent to serve as a coordinator. The coordinator handles administrative functions such as arranging memoranda of understanding (MOUs) for all participating agencies; securing equipment, supplies, and space; and managing budgets. Most of the task forces discourage part-time participation by members, preferring the commitment of full-time task force members. This requirement limits participation by smaller law enforcement agencies who may not be able to spare an officer for full-time participation in a JTTF. The nature of the work is different from what most local police officials are accustomed to: Unlike fugitive or drug task forces, JTTFs do not have numerous arrests, search warrants, or seizures. Rather, the bulk of the work often relates to long-term surveillance, electronic court-ordered monitoring, source development, or interviews, none of which may garner significant statistics in the traditional law enforcement sense. (Casey 2004: 5)

Coordinating with State and Local Governments Both the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have established offices dedicated to coordinating with state and local authorities. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the primary agency responsible for coordinating with local governments is the Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. According to a fact sheet prepared by the office: The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness (SLGCP) is the federal government’s lead agency responsible for preparing the nation against terrorism by assisting states, local and tribunal jurisdictions, and regional authorities as they prevent, deter, and respond to terrorist acts. SLGCP provides a broad array of assistance 5

Most of the material in this paragraph is drawn from Casey 2004.

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to America’s first responders through funding, coordinated training, exercises, equipment acquisition, and technical assistance. (Department of Homeland Security n.d.)

The office has three primary components: the Office for Domestic Preparedness, which conducts joint exercises and provides grants, training, and technical assistance to state and local governments through a variety of programs meant to enhance emergency preparedness; the Office of Community Preparedness, which works to encourage citizens to prepare for terrorism and other critical incidents; and the Office of State and Local Government Coordination, which serves as a single point of contact for state and local governments wanting information about DHS. Seven months after the 9/11 attack, the FBI established the Office of Law Enforcement Coordination (OLEC). Director Robert S. Mueller, III appointed Louis Quijas, a police chief from High Point, North Carolina, as the assistant director of OLEC. The role of the office is to enhance the coordination, cooperation, and communication between the FBI and its law enforcement partners at all levels of government (Federal Bureau of Investigation n.d.; Federal Bureau of Investigation 2002). By 2006, the FBI appeared to have made progress in its efforts to restore its tarnished image with state and local law enforcement agencies. Emblematic of this progress is a weekly, unclassified intelligence bulletin sent to police agencies throughout the nation. A review conducted by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States found that the FBI is “doing a much better job of sharing threat-related information” with state and local law enforcement officials, though there were complaints that the FBI “still needs to share much more operational case-related information” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States 2004: 8). Despite these reform efforts, the commission found that “important information from these national investigations does not reach the officers responsible for patrolling the cities, towns, highways, villages, and neighborhoods of our country” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States 2004: 9). The challenge is how to distribute information from the nerve center to these various nodes, while still maintaining the integrity of the FBI’s counterterrorism operations.

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Other Federal Roles There is also a network of federal agencies responsible for cultivating and analyzing intelligence gathered in other nations and protecting the United States against foreign enemies. These agencies typically do not come into direct contact with local communities. Some critics have argued that current laws prohibiting direct linkages between local police and the U.S. military forces place American cities at risk (Klinger and Grossman 2002; Schmidt and Klinger 2006). Similarly, some cities have complained about not having access to raw human and signals intelligence gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other federal intelligence-gathering agencies. Police chiefs complain that their chief source of terrorist threat warnings is CNN (Murphy and Plotkin 2003). In accordance with the statements of the attorney general and president noted earlier, U.S. Attorneys also play a crucial role in the fight against terrorism. They coordinate with other local officials by leading anti-terrorism task forces. They prosecute suspected terrorists under federal law, acting as gatekeepers to the federal criminal justice system. A number of agencies refer terrorism cases to U.S. Attorneys for prosecution. A recent study found that federal prosecutors declined to file charges in 82 percent of the terrorism cases referred to them by the FBI and 64 percent of all the terrorism cases referred to them. During the two years after 9/11, federal investigators referred 6,472 individuals classified as terrorists for prosecution. Not all of these were classified as international terrorists. In the five years after 9/11, 1,391 individuals classified by the Justice Department as international terrorists were referred for prosecution; only about a quarter of these referrals were accepted (Trac Reports 2006). Although the federal prosecution of terrorists is a vital task, federal prosecutors handle a fairly small number of terrorism cases (Trac Reports 2006). The federal government plays a variety of other crucial roles in homeland security: training first responders and other personnel; funding the development of new technologies and new capacities; coordinating the testing and calibration of various prevention and response activities; providing laboratories and scientific expertise to agencies at all levels of government; and coordinating with governments from other nations to secure intelligence and carry out joint

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operations. The vast number of homeland security activities carried out by the federal government is much too large to cover briefly here. The federal government is clearly the appropriate agency to coordinate homeland security functions for the nation, but local governments have a part to play as well. We turn now to a consideration of their role.

THE ROLE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT All politics is local. – Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, 1994 All terrorism is local. – Gilmore Commission, 2000

Since September 11, 2001, American police agencies have instituted a number of changes designed to enhance their capacity to prevent, respond to, and investigate terrorist incidents in the United States. These changes have included a suite of anti-terrorist and counterterrorist activities.6 Police agencies are key members in the various local and regional networks of agencies that must work together to secure the homeland. This section examines the role of local governments in homeland security. It includes subsections on the fundamental role of local government, prevention, response, and investigation. The Local Role When it comes to homeland security, local police play the most fundamental and largest role. Their roles are often overshadowed by the FBI and other federal agencies falling under the homeland security umbrella. The federal government has invested significant resources in fighting terrorism, to be sure, but responsibility for establishing the front line of defense in America’s cities and towns falls most heavily on state and local police. The 11,633 FBI agents simply cannot do it alone. Even J. Edgar Hoover, the founder of the FBI, recognized the 6

According to Riley and Hoffman (2005), anti-terrorism is “the prevention of terrorist acts primarily, but not exclusively, through physical security measures” whereas counter-terrorism is “the collection and analysis of intelligence, developing contingencies and allocation of specific sources, both to anticipate terrorist acts and to respond to them once they have occurred.”

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importance of the role of local governments when he wrote: “Local responsibility, recognized by our forefathers, remains the key to sound law enforcement.” (Hoover 1954: 45) Prevention On April 26, 2001, in Tamarac, Florida, Broward County sheriff’s deputies ticketed Mohammed Atta for driving without a driver’s license. He skipped his court date on May 28, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. On July 5, a Delray Beach police officer stopped him for speeding and issued a warning. The officer was unaware of the arrest warrant because it had not been entered into the state’s warrant database. The officer was also unaware that Atta had an expired visa and was on a CIA “watch list.” At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Atta piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center (CNN.com 2002b; Stanek 2003; Zeller 2004). Authorities believe Atta was the ringleader for the plot to hijack and crash four planes. Atta was not the only hijacker to have an encounter with local police in the months leading up to 9/11. On May 1, 2001, according to Congressional testimony by FBI Director Robert Mueller, Nawaf al-Hazmi “reported an attempted street robbery … to Fairfax, Virginia Police – he later declined to press charges” (Mueller 2002). On September 11, Hazmi was one of the hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. On August 1, 2001, Hani Hanjour was stopped for speeding by police in Arlington, Virginia. He is believed to have been the pilot of American Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon (CNN.com 2002a, b; Stanek 2003). On September 9, 2001, Trooper 1st Class Joseph Catalano stopped Ziad S. Jarrah for speeding on Interstate 95 in Pikesville, Maryland. Jarrah was on a CIA “watch list,” but Trooper Catalano had no way of knowing that (CNN.com 2002a). Two days later, Jarrah was one of the hijackers on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers and crew members overpowered the hijackers (CNN.com 2002a, b; Stanek 2003). All of these incidents, however minor, represent lost opportunities where better communication and cooperation between federal and local authorities might have paid huge dividends. Consider for

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a moment the case of a sheriff in North Carolina who spotted a group of men buying a large quantity of cigarettes. A subsequent investigation by the JTTF “uncovered a cigarette smuggling enterprise involving two dozen people, some of whom had connections to Hizballah operatives in Lebanon. The investigation ultimately resulted in a RICO and terrorist financing indictment” and subsequent conviction (Breinholt 2003: 28). The following quote from a London newspaper aptly summarizes the local police role in preventing terrorism: Local police have unique advantages over national assets … to help prevent acts of terrorism because they are part of the community. They “walk the beat,” communicate regularly with local residents, and are more likely to notice even subtle changes in the neighborhoods they patrol daily. Common sense tells us – as does experience – that local law-enforcement personnel are uniquely situated to notice (or otherwise learn of) and investigate unusual or suspicious behavior. Based on the numbers alone, we can assume that local law enforcement personnel are much more likely than national agents to cross paths with terrorists. (Eddy 2005)

Since 9/11, tremendous energy has been invested in improving this kind of coordination and cooperation between federal and local authorities. The FBI recently started a pilot program for sharing federal counterterrorism data with state and local police. The impetus for the program, according to former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom, is simple: “If we have our cops deaf, dumb, and blind as to what the federal government knows in databases in Washington, how are we going to protect our society?” (Hirschkorn and Feyerick 2004) The challenge will be ensuring that the data are clean, accurate, and useful. American police departments have struggled on a much smaller scale to maintain intelligence databases on gangs and gang members. According to Charles Katz, one police gang unit he studied routinely failed to purge the gang intelligence database of old records, which led to a number of problems: nongang members ending up in the database, records listing gang members who were incarcerated or dead, and inflated estimates of the size of the gang problem (Katz 2003: 510). There was no conspiracy or deliberate

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effort by the police to maintain inflated or inaccurate lists of gang members. The problems were much more banal: poor communication, inadequate understanding of departmental policy, inefficiencies, and “serious abnormalities in internal information processing.”7 If individual police agencies struggle to maintain updated lists of gang members, imagine the vastly more complex challenge of populating, maintaining, and cleaning terrorist intelligence data, sharing it with thousands of agencies, and controlling it sufficiently to prevent leaks. Indeed, several government audits have highlighted problems with the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center watch list (see Department of Justice 2005; U.S. General Accounting Office 2006). Though there are many examples where the downward flow of intelligence fails to flow smoothly from federal agencies to local agencies and down to cops on the street, presumably there are also problems with the upward flow of intelligence from cops on the street back to the federal government. As one FBI Special Agent in Charge said, “I need every officer, DMV officer, campus police and others on the front line to gather and share their information” (Murphy and Plotkin 2003: 43). There are two practical problems with securing the upward flow of intelligence. First, the information must be in a form that federal agencies can use. All of the various nodes in the network must standardize their intelligence and reporting formats. Ad hoc intelligence collection won’t work. Second, there must be some kind of triggering mechanism that federal agencies can use to communicate to local police about what is suspicious. Imagine, for example, that the FBI is looking for someone buying old CO2 canisters. A typical street cop might pull someone over and see that he has twenty old CO2 canisters in the back of his truck, but never think anything of it. The suspect explains that he is taking the canisters to the scrap yard. This valuable information is not recognized as important 7

Although Katz (2003: 510) characterizes these information processing problems as “abnormalities,” we wonder if instead they are normal. One possibility may be that trying to maintain official records on ambiguous phenomena like gang and terrorist group affiliation is naturally going to produce some problems with data quality. Just as Perrow (1984) characterizes some catastrophic accidents as a normal by-product of certain organizational characteristics, we wonder whether some difficulties in maintaining accurate data are a normal by-product of measuring inherently ambiguous phenomena.

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by the officer, thus the FBI loses a vital opportunity to benefit from the upward information flow that street cops could have initiated. Information flow is not the only issue to be resolved in enhancing coordination and cooperation between federal and local agencies. Local police now must develop many kinds of new competencies, some of which might have seemed pretty odd prior to 9/11. They are learning how to gather intelligence on terrorist threats; how to detect chemical, biological, or radiological threats in time to prevent mass casualties; how to conduct risk assessments to identify and protect vulnerable assets that might become terrorist targets; how to train their officers to spot suspicious activities consistent with terrorist preparation for an attack; and they are securing new technologies for processing data, evaluating risk, and detecting vulnerabilities. Imagine the reaction of police officers prior to 9/11 if they were told that the NYPD was purchasing “gamma neutron detectors” (by 2006 the NYPD had 120 of them) or other sophisticated technologies outside the mainstream for police (Kelly 2004: 12). Police agencies around the nation are now grappling with a new reality – that preventing terrorism is a crucial part of their role. Response and Recovery The initial response to recent terrorist attacks on American soil has been executed primarily by local police, fire, EMS, medical facility personnel, and other agencies and organizations. We do not expect this trend to change in the future (unless terrorists begin targeting military bases), hence local agencies will continue to bear the brunt of the initial response to terror attacks. The 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City involved a collective response by dozens of agencies and organizations, including many whose role is often overlooked, like blood banks and mental health agencies (Gilcher 2001; Manzi, Powers, and Zetterlund 2002; Tucker et al. 1998). Even though the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon occurred on federal government property, the initial response was by the fire and police departments from Arlington County, Virginia (Murphy and Plotkin 2003: 28). Most of the first responders to the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center were local; among these first responders, 60 police officers and 343 firefighters were killed (National Commission on Terrorist

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Attacks upon the United States 2004). In mass-casualty events, the burden for responding also extends to numerous local medical providers, including mental health professionals, ambulances, hospitals, medical examiners, and even mortuary services. Because local first responders are closer to the scene of an attack than federal authorities and have the resources to respond quickly, they will always play a primary role in response. However, this does not minimize the role of the federal government. One of its major roles is to fund, train, and equip local first responders, as well as to monitor and augment their capacities. One crucial role is to conduct drills and simulated attacks to test the response capabilities of communities around the nation. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security organizes the “TOPOFF” (Top Officials) series of simulations. In April, 2005, DHS executed TOPOFF 3 by staging simulated terrorist attacks in Connecticut and New Jersey. In October, 2007, DHS staged TOPOFF 4, the fourth exercise in the series, by simulating the detonation of “dirty bombs” (explosives that release radiological material when detonated) in Guam, Arizona, and Oregon (Department of Homeland Security, 2008). The exercises are meant to test the nation’s preparedness. A crucial element of those tests is examining the way federal, state, and local authorities work together and with the various nongovernmental organizations playing a crucial role in homeland security (Katz, Staiti, and McKenzie 2006). The federal government has also played a crucial role in developing protocols for critical incident response. On February 28, 2003, President Bush issued Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5, directing the Department of Homeland Security to establish a National Response Plan (NRP) and a National Incident Management System (NIMS). A fundamental premise of the NRP is that “incidents are typically handled at the lowest jurisdictional level possible,” a sort of federal stamp of recognition for the role of local authorities during critical incidents (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2004: 15).8 According to the directive, NIMS will “provide a consistent nationwide approach for Federal, State, and local governments to work effectively 8

In March 2008, the Department of Homeland Security replaced the NRP with the “National Response Framework.”

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and efficiently together to prepare for, respond to, and recover from domestic incidents, regardless of cause, size, and complexity” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2004: 69–70). Though it continues to evolve, NIMS was first unveiled on March 1, 2004. One of the key elements of NIMS is the nationwide adoption of the Incident Command System (ICS). ICS is a management system for coordinating and controlling personnel, equipment, supplies, and activities during emergency incidents requiring a response from one or more agencies. It relies on the age-old structural notion of “unity of command” by establishing on-site an incident commander in charge of a central command post typically established in the field by first responders near where the incident is unfolding (U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2004: 10). ICS also includes a number of structural modules that can be added as needed. The incident command structure can be adapted to fit critical incidents of different types and scales. On the surface, ICS appears to be a standard bureaucratic or “mechanistic” structure for coordinating the activities, equipment, and personnel of multiple agencies. Recent research by organizational scholars has found, however, that ICS allows for more flexibility and adaptability than standard mechanistic structures (Bigley and Roberts 2001). Mass-casualty incidents vary in type and scale, from a house fire or a small flood to a bombing or airplane crash. Incident management protocols need to be flexible or adaptive to account for the nature and scope of the incident. If the protocol is too rigid, it will inhibit this flexibility or adaptability. If it is not rigid enough, it may lead to chaos. ICS is designed to fall in the middle, with enough structure to coordinate and communicate and allow for a kind of “constrained improvisation” (Bigley and Roberts 2001: 1282). Research on natural and man-made disasters has shown that the ability to establish a “hastily formed network” is crucial for responding effectively (Denning 2006). Although discussions of ICS are almost universally positive, one recent evaluation suggests that ICS is “ill suited to the complexity of … a good deal of disaster response efforts” (Buck, Trainor, and Aguirre 2006: 21). On August 29, 2005, nearly four years after 9/11 – a period of unprecedented change in the nation’s disaster-response apparatus – Hurricane Katrina struck southeastern Louisiana. The storm was one

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of the worst natural disasters in American history, flooding more than 80 percent of New Orleans and causing the deaths of more than 1,800 people. The disaster raised serious doubt about the capacity of the federal government to respond effectively to mass-casualty incidents. According to one disaster response expert, “local, state, and federal leaders appeared disconnected at best and insensitive and incompetent at worst” (Waugh 2006: 11). Some argue that the Department of Homeland Security’ s myopic focus on terrorism led it to ignore attention to the much more common risks posed by natural disasters. Others faulted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Department of Homeland Security’s National Response Strategy, and the White House for thinking more politically than administratively, thus failing to coordinate effectively with local officials (Waugh 2006: 11). Although the federal government plays a vital role in preparing communities to respond effectively to terrorist incidents, the onus is still primarily on local governments. The greatest role the federal government can play is in helping local governments improve their individual and collective capacities to respond to critical incidents. Other key roles include coordinating multiple levels of government and carrying out simulations and tests to identify weaknesses. Investigation The primary mechanism through which local police investigate terrorism is through their participation in the FBI’s regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces, described earlier. Many local law enforcement agencies have also formed their own regional networks of agencies. For example, two officers from the Redondo Beach Police Department (California) were assigned by their agency to serve as liaison officers with a regional anti-terrorism task force called the South Bay Group. These officers eventually became fully credentialed, cross-designated federal officers with Top Secret clearances. The detectives work in the JTTF office and are treated like FBI Agents in virtually all aspects of case assignment and management. Although the local officers have Top Secret clearance, they do not always have the same level of access to information that Agents do. (Murphy and Plotkin 2003: 16)

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Each participating agency in the region appoints a Terrorism Liaison Officer (TLO): “The goal is to have every agency identify one person who will receive information regarding terrorism and transnational crime, effectively interpret and assess that information and appropriately forward or handle that information” (Murphy and Plotkin 2003: 17). Whether participating in regional networks of local agencies or JTTFs, it is clear that for all but the largest local law enforcement agencies in the nation (like New York and Chicago), their role in investigating terrorism typically involves working with other agencies, either through the JTTF or through other task forces. These interagency partnerships often come to resemble organizations in their own right, with established hierarchies, rules, policies, and procedures. David Thacher has observed that such collaborations resemble organizations in development, or what he terms “inchoate hierarchies” (Thacher 2004). Although they have some of the features of traditional organizational structures, they often lack others, such as fixed facilities of their own, an independent identity, a longstanding sense of history or tradition, or an established organizational culture. The number of interagency and intergovernmental task forces in law enforcement has been increasing over the past two decades, and the escalation of that trend after 9/11 could represent a fundamental shift in the structure of American law enforcement (Maguire and King 2004). Although law enforcement agencies in local government and federal government have much in common – including occupational responsibilities for detecting and investigating crimes and arresting offenders – there are crucial differences that influence their ability to work together in investigations. First is that local law enforcement agencies are a part of local government, and must answer to local constituencies, including the citizenry, the media, and local government officials. Federal (or even state) agencies occasionally come to communities, stir the pot and generate hostility, and then leave without suffering the same consequences as local agencies. Local police must be able to function smoothly and effectively in the community once the FBI or other federal agencies leave town. This is why, when the U.S. Department of Justice called upon local police agencies throughout the United States after 9/11 to interview Middle Eastern men,

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some agencies objected. Mark Kroeker, the police chief in Portland, Oregon, refused to do it, arguing that “some of the questions cannot be asked by Portland police officers without violating Oregon state law, pure and simple” (Oregon Objects 2001). Portland later became the first city to pull out of a Joint Terrorism Task Force when its city council objected to the idea that the mayor and the police chief were ineligible to receive the same security clearance as the police officers assigned to the JTTF (McCall 2005).

THINKING ABOUT NETWORKS It takes networks to fight networks. – Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1996: 82

The challenges of effective coordination between federal and local agencies in homeland security are daunting. Since 9/11, agencies with different missions, functions, budgets, cultures, structures, reward systems, and jurisdictional boundaries are being asked to work together seamlessly to prevent, respond to, and investigate terrorist incidents. The potential sources of error, confusion, inefficiency, miscommunication, and conflict are too numerous to count. At the same time, the idea that the terrorist incidents of 9/11 happened on American soil and killed ordinary Americans served to unite the nation against a common enemy – al Qaeda specifically, but Islamic extremism more generally. Although it is difficult to forge the kinds of interagency alliances necessary for homeland security, we believe the effort is fueled, in part, by a common sense of purpose shared by most Americans, especially in the law enforcement community.9 It is important to view federal-local coordination in homeland security both up close and from a distance. From the latter perspective, and reminiscent of the structural-functionalists from sociology in the 1940s, we envision homeland security as a massive set of functions that society needs to perform. Starting with the realities of our federalist 9

Unfortunately, we are not aware of any research evidence on the extent to which September 11 enhanced feelings of nationalism among law enforcement officers. There is evidence, however, to suggest that politicians and the media relied more heavily on nationalist themes in their communications after September 11 (see Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux, and Garland 2004).

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system of government, we can ask two basic questions: What kinds of structures are most appropriate for performing those functions? To what extent do the structures now in place deviate from those ideal structures? Viewing these questions through the lens of social network theory and organizational theory provides some insights about the benefits and challenges of our existing homeland security apparatus. Critics of the American criminal justice system have pointed out for years that it is a nonsystem: chaotic, fragmented, and inefficient (Skoler 1977). Others view the diversity of approaches and the decentralized character of American criminal justice as a virtue, as the principal hallmark of a federalist system that ensures the rights of state and local governments. This longstanding debate over the decentralized structure of American criminal justice has resurfaced with a vengeance following the 9/11 attack, raising new concerns about the extent to which America’s patchwork quilt of agencies is sufficient to protect us. The key appears to be achieving a balance between the strengths of federal and local authorities. Let us examine how this balance has been achieved for the three major categories of homeland security tasks noted earlier: prevention, response and recovery, and investigation. Prevention When it comes to preventing terrorism, the federal government’s role is to serve as the nerve center of a massive network of agencies. The challenge is to ensure an adequate, but not excessive, flow of information – both upward and downward – between the center and the periphery. Sharing information among thousands of agencies and millions of workers is challenging in its own right, but accomplishing this kind of information exchange in an industry where lives depend on secrecy, confidentiality, and access control may take the greatest minds of our generation. In addition to the technical and logistical challenges with gathering, processing, analyzing, and sharing information are other more mundane challenges associated with the roles, missions, and traditions of each level of government. Consider Dearborn, Michigan, which has one of the largest Arab populations in the United States. A study of the Dearborn Police Department and its role in homeland security

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identified two challenges “that cities incur when they engage in proactive surveillance to identify potential terrorists: damage to their reputation (since police surveillance implies that its objects are not trustworthy) and damage to police legitimacy (since new surveillance may undermine trust between police and the community)” (Thacher 2005: 635). The study found that the benefits of intelligence gathering on terrorism often accrue to jurisdictions other than the localities where these activities take place. Police chiefs may understandably find little motivation to have their agencies engage in practices that have the potential to damage relationships with their own communities, especially when the benefits of such an approach are ambiguous. As a result of these concerns, some cities end up focusing far more attention on more concrete (and less controversial) prevention activities like target hardening and response and recovery preparation. Response and Recovery State and local governments bear most of the burden for responding to acts of terrorism. The role of the federal government in this effort is primarily supportive, involving capacity building, training, equipping, coordinating, and providing additional resources and support needed to strengthen the local response operations in the event of a catastrophe. Though local governments have primary responsibility for responding to terrorist incidents, the costs of lack of preparedness, in terms of both human and economic costs, are simply too great for the federal government to adopt a laissez-faire policy. The ideal response to both natural and man-made disasters is a partnership between local and federal officials. Unfortunately, achieving that partnership has often proved difficult. Direct federal involvement in disaster response sometimes produces conflict with local officials. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for instance, the Federal Emergency Management Agency cut emergency communication lines in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. The local sheriff restored the lines and posted armed deputies to ensure that FEMA would not damage them again (Grissett 2005). Despite these problems, local governments typically request federal support during disaster operations. The U.S. military, for instance, routinely responds to local requests for

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assistance, providing what it terms “Military Support to Civil Authority” during both natural and man-made disasters (Winthrop 1997). Despite substantial efforts to be trained, equipped, and otherwise prepared for disaster response, the reality is that no community will ever truly be ready in the sense that it can execute a neat, controlled, carefully packaged set of responses in an orderly fashion. Disasters are ambiguous and unpredictable, and they defy our best efforts to launch carefully planned and programmed responses. Hierarchies are notoriously poor mechanisms for responding to disasters. They are too rigid, and they stifle the kinds of impromptu, adaptive, improvisational responses that are crucial in disaster relief. Instead, the quality of the response often depends less on hierarchical commandand-control principles than on the ability to establish what has come to be known as a hastily formed network (HFN). “An HFN has five elements: it is (1) a network of people established rapidly (2) from different communities, (3) working together in a shared conversation space (4) in which they plan, commit to, and execute actions, to (5) fulfill a large, urgent mission” (Denning 2006: 16–17). Though it seems almost instinctual to establish or rely on hierarchies to solve our problems, current thinking about disaster response is focused more intensely on interagency and intergovernmental networks than on bureaucracies. HFNs hold great promise for improving response and recovery efforts in the future. Investigation The federal government has primary responsibility for investigating acts of terrorism. Through the JTTFs, the federal government is able to rely on local police officers from around the nation who serve as boundary spanners, representatives of local law enforcement agencies whose job it is to secure the appropriate flow of information and investigative resources between the two levels of government.10 It is here where both network theory and organizational theory would suggest 10

It is important to point out that programs like the JTTF blur the boundaries between federal and local agencies. Research shows that the boundaries are neither clear nor static, with the federal criminal jurisdiction expanding dramatically over the past century (Friel 2000; Richman 2000).

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the need for caution. When a local police agency assigns an officer to a JTTF, it is giving up that employee, to some extent, to the federal government. The officer still receives a paycheck from the local agency, but receives his or her marching orders from the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the JTTF. We view the local officer assigned to a JTTF as a linchpin in the network of agencies responsible for homeland security. He or she is a boundary spanner, a bridge between the local police agency and the JTTF. We envision this boundary-spanning role producing four kinds of problems or challenges. First, the cultures of the FBI and local police agencies are very different, especially in the context of terrorism. The FBI pays far more attention to security clearances and compartmentalization of information than do local police agencies. A police officer assigned to a JTTF will necessarily become acculturated by his peers to respect the secrecy of the information to which he or she is exposed. Furthermore, disclosing classified information will subject the officer to a number of penalties, including federal criminal charges (Murphy and Plotkin 2003). For both cultural and legal reasons, therefore, the local officer assigned to a JTTF is likely to be cautious about sharing information with members of his or her own agency. Second, in many instances, the police officer’s own commanders, including his or her chief of police or the local government executive, will not have a sufficient security clearance to allow information sharing by the officer. This was one of the primary concerns raised by police chiefs at an executive session convened in November 2002 by the Police Executive Research Forum and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services in Washington DC. This is one of the concerns that drove the city council of Portland, Oregon to withdraw its city police officers from the regional JTTF. We predict that other communities may follow in Portland’s footsteps, because assigning employees a higher security clearance than those to whom they report is a recipe for any number of problems. Third, in spite of concerns about the FBI by local police officers, it is likely that police officers assigned to the JTTF will perceive their role as privileged. Protecting the homeland against terrorists is more glorious work than catching burglars or car thieves or responding to

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motor vehicle accidents. The history of policing has shown over and over again that assigning police officers to special units isolates those units and the officers that work in them, often generating hostility, if not more benign social distance, between special unit officers and general police officers. This is yet another potential source of communication problems between officers assigned to JTTFs and other officers. Finally, police officers assigned to a JTTF are investigators or detectives. They typically do not hold a high rank within their own organizations. By virtue of not having held such a rank, they may hold a narrow perspective on the information needs of the agency as a whole. It would be unfair to expect them to think like a captain or a commander, imagining all of the various ways that what they have learned through their work at the JTTF could be used by patrol officers on the street, by trainers at the police academy, by the members of the bomb squad, or by any of the other myriad niches within the police organization. Taken together, all of these factors suggest that police officers assigned to JTTFs face challenges in serving as effective boundary spanners between their two organizations. Although they are unlikely to be co-opted within the culture of the FBI writ large, there is a strong possibility that they may identify with and become ingrained in the culture of the JTTF. They may face pressures not to share information with others in their own agencies, including those above them in the command structure. Given their rank and their career trajectory within the local police department, they probably have formidable expertise in investigative methods, as well as street smarts. They are unlikely, however, to be well versed in the larger set of strategic and administrative issues of concern to police commanders. Therefore, their role as boundary spanners is likely to be incomplete. Creating a more complete bridge between JTTFs and local police agencies will mean creating a pathway through which information of strategic or administrative importance can be transmitted on a regular basis. This structure, in an appropriate form, would enable police leaders to make more informed decisions about homeland security issues. Police chiefs and others have raised several possibilities for achieving these levels of communication and cooperation. One is

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simply to ensure that there is a strong relationship between the local police chief and the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the JTTF or the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI field office to whom he or she reports. This relationship could be valuable in many ways, but it is a limited format for achieving the kinds of ongoing, regular communication needed for genuine homeland security. These arrangements need to be more formal and structured if we are to avoid the kinds of breakdowns that occur routinely in such informal relationships, and that occurred in the Hurricane Katrina fiasco. Another reason for something more structured than an informal relationship is that police executives and FBI SACs and ASACs both have notoriously short tenures in office. Another possibility raised by police chiefs is to establish an executive council in which police chiefs meet regularly with the regional SAC or the ASAC. Again, we view this as a valuable but limited solution. The solution is loosely coupled with the problem. Three kinds of communication dyads would occur: between the chief and the ASAC, the JTTF officer and the ASAC, and the chief and the JTTF officer. This kind of loose coupling is, as noted before, a recipe for communication breakdown. The solution is to provide a format in which police chiefs (or their delegates) and their JTTF officers attend routinely scheduled meetings with other chiefs and officers as well as the ASAC. This arrangement could provide the greatest opportunity for all the parties involved to communicate openly and effectively. We would expect the result to be an increased capacity for police organizations to be responsive to the needs identified by JTTFs. A 2005 study by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that, in general, the JTTFs have successfully implemented the FBI’s counterterrorism strategy (Office of the Inspector General 2005). The OIG report identified several ways the JTTFs could improve, including: (1) ensuring that all members receive training in terrorism and counterterrorism, (2) providing an orientation to new members, (3) preparing documents clarifying the roles and responsibilities of members, (4) doing a better job of sharing terrorism-related information with agencies that do not have officers assigned to the JTTF, (5) establishing performance measures, (6) enhancing overall staffing levels, including analytical and administrative support, and (7) reducing the extent of turnover among JTTF leadership. Overall, from a

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network perspective, the structure of the FBI’s terrorism investigation apparatus appears sound. Regional JTTFs integrate the resources of many agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, and each JTTF reports to a national JTTF located at headquarters. The overall network is centralized, as it needs to be, but it relies heavily on resources mobilized from around the nation. The key will be to ensure that the boundary-spanning activity between agencies is optimized. Future research should examine this question.

CONCLUSION

Radical Islamic terrorists have adopted a resilient network structure consisting of a series of widely dispersed, semi-autonomous cells. Many commentators have pointed out that hierarchies and traditional command-and-control military doctrine are ineffective approaches for defeating enemies that have adopted these kinds of network structures. Therefore a common policy recommendation both before and after 9/11 has been for the U.S. government to invest in the development of counterterrorism networks capable of defeating networked enemies in what Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001) refer to as a “netwar” (e.g., Gormley 2002; Kapucu 2009; Zanini and Edwards 2001). For example, according to political scientist William Gormley (2002: 9–10), “Networks are more nimble and flexible than hierarchies; they are better able to adapt to changing circumstances … whether we win the war against terrorism will depend on whether we manage to master the network as an institutional form.” The United States has invested heavily in the development of many different kinds of counterterrorism networks of different sizes and scopes, at multiple levels of government, and across national and ideological borders. Some of these networks are more nimble and flexible than others. The Department of Homeland Security’s sprawling organizational chart is really a hybrid structure combining networks and hierarchies. Little is known about the extent to which it is capable of overcoming the inherent difficulties to which such a structure is prone. Since 9/11, researchers and analysts have invested significant energy in applying the theories and methods of social network analysis

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to terrorist networks (e.g., Krebs 2001; Sageman 2004; Tsvetovat and Carley 2005). Comparatively little energy has been invested in applying these same theories and methods to the social and organizational networks responsible for preventing, responding to, and investigating terrorism in the United States. This is unfortunate, because social and organizational network analyses could reveal potential structural problems in these various networks before tragedies (like Hurricane Katrina) strike. A recent analysis of intergovernmental disaster-response systems, for instance, concluded that these systems have increased in complexity over time (Kapucu 2009). This analysis, though helpful, barely scratches the surface of what might be learned from investing in network analysis of the U.S. homeland security apparatus. Networks have different properties than markets and hierarchies, and we do not yet adequately understand how they emerge, in what ways they exhibit weakness or breakdown, and how they succeed. If understanding networks of individuals is difficult, understanding enormous networks of agencies employing millions of individuals is daunting. Yet if it is true that it takes a network to defeat a network, investing in achieving that understanding is crucial. Elaborating a network perspective on federal-local cooperation in homeland security should bear much fruit.

REFERENCES Alter, Catherine. 1990. An Exploratory Study of Conflict and Coordination in Interorganizational Service Delivery Systems. The Academy of Management Journal 33:478–502. Arquilla, John, and David Ronfeldt. 1996. The Advent of Netwar. Santa Monica, CA: Rand. 2001. “Afterword (September 2001): The Sharpening Fight For the Future.” In John Arquilla, and David Ronfeldt., eds. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy: 363–371. Santa Monica: Rand. Bigley, Gregory A., and Karlene H. Roberts. 2001. The Incident Command System: High Reliability Organizing for Complex and Volatile Task Environments. Academy of Management Journal 44:1281–1300. Breinholt, Jeff. 2003. Introduction. United States Attorney’s Bulletin 51:1–41. Buck, Dick A., Joseph E. Trainor, and Benigno E. Aguirre. 2006. A Critical Evaluation of the Incident Command System and NIMS. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 3:Article 1.

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Bush, George W. 2002. The Department of Homeland Security. Washington, DC: The Department of Homeland Security. Casey, James. 2004. Managing Joint Terrorism Task Force Resources. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin November:1–6. CNN.com. 2002a. “Maryland Police Release Hijacker Traffic Stop Video.” U.S. News, January 8, 2002. Retrieved November 6, 2006 from, http:// archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/08/inv.hijacker.video/index.html 2002b. “Another Hijacker was Stopped for Traffic Violation.” U.S. News, January 9, 2002. Retrieved October 30, 2006 from, http://archives. cnn.com/2002/US/01/09/inv.hijacker.traffic.stops/index.html Cook, K.S., and J.M. Whitmeyer. 1992. Two Approaches to Social Structure: Exchange theory and network analysis. Annual Review of Sociology 18:109–127. Denning, Peter J. 2006. Hastily Formed Networks. Communications of the ACM 49:15–20. Department of Homeland Security. n.d. Fact Sheet: Office of State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness. Retrieved October 10, 2006 from, http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/odp/docs/slgcpfactsheet.pdf Department of Homeland Security 2008. TOPOFF: Exercising National Preparedness. Retrieved August 4, 2009 from, http://www.dhs.gov/ files/training/gc_1179350946764.shtm Eddy, R.P. 2005, July 8. In the End All Terrorism is Local. The Times Online. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ article/0,1072–1684947,00.html Federal Bureau of Investigation. n.d. Office of Law Enforcement Coordination. Retrieved November 6, 2006 from, http://www.fbi.gov/hq/olec/ olec.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2002. Press Release, April 11, 2002. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/ pressrel02/mueller041102.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2003. Facts and Figures 2003: FBI Special Agents and Employees: What It Takes to Work for the FBI. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.fbi.gov/libref/factsfigure/employ.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2004a. Protecting America Against Terrorist Attacks: A Closer Look at the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.fbi.gov/page2/dec04/ jttf120114.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation. 2004b. Protecting America from Terrorist Attack: Meet the National Joint Terrorism Task Force. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.fbi.gov/page2/july04/njttf070204.htm Friel, Charles M. 2000. “A Century of Changing Boundaries.” Criminal Justice 2000: Volume 2 – Boundary Changes in Criminal Justice Organizations. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.

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Geller, William A., and Norval Morris. 1992. “Relations between Federal and Local Police.” In Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, eds. Modern Policing: 231–348. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilcher, Ronald O. 2001. Two Oklahoma City Disasters: The Oklahoma City bombing and the tornadoes – a blood bank perspective. Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 14:140–3. Gilmore Commission. 2000. Toward a National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. Second Annual Report to the President and the Congress of the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.rand.org/nsrd/terrpanel/terror2.pdf Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, Doubleday. Gormley, William T. 2002. “Reflections on Terrorism and Public Management.” In Alasdair Roberts, ed. Governance and Public Security: 1–16. Syracuse, NY: Campbell Public Affairs Institute, Syracuse University. Granovetter, Mark. 1983. The Strength of Weak Ties: A network theory revisited. Sociological Theory 1:201–233. Grissett, Sheila. 2005. “FEMA Pulled Jeff’s Plug: Antenna unhooked days after Katrina.” Times-Picayune (New Orleans), October 12, 2005. Herbert, Steve. 1996. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirschkorn, Phil, and Deborah Feyerick. 2004. “Feds to Start Sharing Terrorism Data: New York and Vermont cops will get access to watch lists.” CNN.com, December 15, 2000. Retrieved October 31, 2006 from, http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/25/fbi.sharing.data/index.html Hoover, John Edgar. 1954. The Basis of Sound Law Enforcement. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 291:39–45. Hutcheson, John, David Domke, Andre Billeaudeaux, and Philip Garland. 2004. U.S. National Identity, Political Elites, and a Patriotic Press Following September 11. Political Communication 21:27–50. Kapucu, Naim. 2009. Interorganizational Coordination in Complex Environments of Disasters: The evolution of intergovernmental disaster response systems. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 6:Article 47. Katz, Aaron, Andrea B. Staiti, and Kelly L. McKenzie. 2006. Preparing for the Unknown, Responding to the Known: Communities and public health preparedness. Health Affairs 25:946–957. Katz, Charles M. 2003. Issues in the Production and Dissemination of Gang Statistics: An ethnographic study of a large midwestern gang unit. Crime and Delinquency 49:485–516.

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chapter fifteen

Liberty and Security in an Era of Terrorism John Kleinig

INTRODUCTION

Not only did the events of September 11, 2001 (henceforth 9/11) have a profound effect on our national and international psyches, but they also prompted a radical reconsideration and even revision of seemingly well-established moral responses. The racial profiling by police that had been recently condemned by public opinion and official inquiry was often revived with a different attitude and outcome when the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were identified. Governmental surveillance that would have been considered incompatible with a free society was suddenly and overwhelmingly enshrined in what, without a trace of irony, was called the USA PATRIOT Act. Even the revulsion against torture that seemingly required no further justification has been reviewed and reconstructed in official memoranda and public debate. This was not, of course, the first time that some of these issues had been broached. National security has a long history of debate associated with it.1 The Korematsu (1944) decision of World War II, sanctioning the internment of large numbers of Japanese Americans, was only one of the more notorious occasions on which such debate occurred. Other incidents during the Vietnam War (e.g., the publication of the Pentagon Papers and violation of Daniel Ellsberg’s privacy rights) 1

Consider, for example, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, available at , the suspension of habeas corpus and free speech rights during the Civil War, and the Espionage Act passed during World War I.

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excited similar concerns.2 Secret CIA manuals prepared for Latin American military use crossed the public radar screen in the late 1980s and early 1990s.3 Nevertheless, the current debate, focused on the challenges of terrorism – and even more particularly terrorism at home,4 rather than engagement with another national entity – has given that discussion a Machiavellian cast that it has not previously had. The many issues that call for discussion are both general and particular. My purpose here, however, is to focus primarily on some of the general ones and more specifically on conceptual issues relating to the “tension” between liberty and security, generally understood to be national security. I will consider what is at stake when we appeal to liberty and security, the rhetorical significance of “an era of terrorism,” and the metaphors we use in dealing with the tension between liberty and security.

LIBERTY

First, consider liberty, which is often used interchangeably with freedom but is sometimes distinguished from it. A strong case may be made for each alternative, but for heuristic purposes I will distinguish them, reserving “freedom” for a level of personal development, and using “liberty” to refer to a social state of affairs. Freedom It is useful to start with freedom, which I characterize as an individual achievement of maturation and learning – specifically, as a state of personal development in which one has acquired the capacity to reflect on and revise one’s attitudes, reasons, motives, and desires, and to act upon them. With such freedom comes a measure of responsibility for what we do, both morally and otherwise. 2

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New York Times Co. v. United States , 403 U.S. 713 (1971); United States v. Ehrlichman , 376 F.Supp. 29 (D.D.C. 1974); United States v. Ehrlichman , 546 F.2d 910 (D.C. Cir 1976); cert. denied , 429 U.S. 1120 (1977). The KUBARK manuals are available at . What is insidious about terrorism, it is said, is not simply that the enemy is not identifiable in the way that an enemy state is, but that the threat of terrorism does not exist solely beyond one’s borders but may also threaten from within. The specter of “sleeper cells” has generated much of the moral mileage driving the USA PATRIOT Act and its progeny.

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Such personal freedom is related to, though not identical with, personal autonomy or individuality. Autonomy refers to a heightened level of individual freedom. In his chapter on “Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being,” John Stuart Mill (1859, Chapter 3) says that a person “must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.”5 He is speaking of autonomy. In the larger passage from which this is taken, Mill makes it clear that autonomy is not simply a matter of “rational” development; it also has emotional and motivational dimensions. It concerns the capacity to choose well. It involves both authenticity (whereby one’s reasons, feelings, attitudes, and judgments become genuinely one’s own) and competence (a level of development of rational capacities and other discriminative sensibilities that protect one against systematic ignorance, self-deception, and other debilitating pathologies). Further, it involves the development of individuality, something achieved in concert with others rather than in social isolation. Here we shall leave aside an important and long-standing debate whether this account should be supplemented by certain substantive beliefs that must be held if a person is truly to be said to be free. Elements of this debate are also involved in the debate over whether liberty (or, freedom) should be construed as positive or negative.6 Liberty As I am using it here, liberty is concerned with external, social constraints on the person.7 We may speak of it as having both individual and collective dimensions – that is, as a way of characterizing either an 5 6

7

Mill . This debate goes back to the nineteenth century, where it revolved around the question whether liberty and freedom required not merely the absence of social constraints, but also access to the wherewithal that would enable a person to make use of such negative liberty. For without such wherewithal, one’s (negative) liberty might not be said to be worth much. In the twentieth century, the debate was given a Cold War cast in Isaiah Berlin’s influential essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” He saw in positive liberty, and the “self-mastery” he believed it implied, the seeds of a paternalistic perfectionism. There may be nonsocial constraints on action that do not constitute limits on liberty. Gravity and my physiological structure both have some bearing on how high I may be able to jump, but they are not constraints on my liberty.

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individual or a group. It is often argued that liberty, as an absence of constraint or domination by others, is primarily individual. However, I believe this to be somewhat misleading. Individual liberty is most likely to exist in an environment of liberty, in which collective rules operate to secure individual liberty and, with it, the conditions for individual flourishing.8 For present purposes, it is important to recognize that the domain of liberty is not undifferentiated. Although liberty may exist to varying degrees (my liberty with regard to the speed at which I travel is greater on the New Jersey Turnpike than on Sullivan Street in Manhattan), and though it tends to be valued both in itself and for what it enables us to do, we have accorded a distinctive status to some kinds of liberty. We designate such as liberties. They demarcate spheres of activity that we consider it important not to constrain at all, or that may be constrained only under special circumstances. Generally, these are spheres of activity that are central to a conception of ourselves as Millian individuals. Many of them are enshrined in what we refer to as our civil liberties – our ability to communicate and associate with others, our ability to think and believe as we wish, including our worshiping or not worshiping as we determine.9 Such liberties – and probably others, including some political liberties such as voting – are often seen as central not only to our standing as persons (as possessing dignity and owed the respect of others), but also to a liberal or free society. A society that unreasonably constrains liberty in these spheres will not be a liberal (or “free”) one, whatever else we might want to say about it. It is not that there may be no degrees of liberty with respect to communication or speech, but the considerations that allow constraints on these liberties are (and need to be) of a different order from those

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It is the reference to securing the conditions for individual flourishing that helps to link liberty in its collective and individual aspects with freedom, in both its basic sense and its heightened autonomous expression. They are causally intertwined – with free persons developing more successfully and being better sustained in a society that is characterized by liberty. Were it not for our concern with personal freedom, we would not have the interest we do in liberty. Cf. Amendment I of the U.S. Constitution. For Mill’s own catalog, see On Liberty, Ch 1.

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that allow constraints on liberty more generally. Thus, the kinds of considerations that permit us to reduce the maximum speed limit on highways from sixty-five miles per hour to fifty-five are not – or at least should not be – the same as the kinds of considerations that will allow us to limit certain kinds of speech. This distinction will have a significant place in our later discussion. Privacy I mention as one further dimension of liberty our interest in privacy. Thought of as a social condition, as in the right to privacy, privacy may be seen as a liberty interest. That is, acknowledging a person’s privacy is tantamount to granting that person a liberty with respect to certain kinds of information, usually personal. Such liberty is relevant to certain governmental responses to terrorism, particularly those concerned with surveillance. Privacy is a complex and multilayered concept, and here I do no more than note certain aspects of that complexity (Benn and Gaus). Basically, its sphere is that of information or knowledge concerning one’s person. That which constitutes one’s “person” is not fixed and to some degree is culturally relative, both between and within cultures. Centrally, it concerns one’s agency – one’s standing as an autonomous chooser or moral agent (who, by virtue of that status deserves the respect of others10). It is because of this that the voyeur or person who eavesdrops violates privacy, even if the other person is not aware of it and no other harm is threatened or done: She or he is treated by someone else as a mere object, or is deceived as to the nature of what she or he is doing – namely, controlling the flow of personal information to others. To the extent that someone becomes aware of breaches to his or her privacy, then a further harm may be done insofar as his or her freedom to act in a certain way may be impaired. If I become aware that someone is listening in on a private conversation I am having, this will redefine the terms of my conversation in certain ways, and I will have to make adjustments for the intruder’s presence. I can no longer “be myself.” 10

In the classical liberal sense of respect for persons, i.e., respect for one’s status as a person, not necessarily respect for the particular person one is.

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Although this core notion of privacy is sustained by deontological considerations – as a duty to be respectful of others – it also has considerable consequentialist support. Very often, information concerning my person can make me vulnerable to others. It can bring me into disrepute or be used against me in certain ways. I can be made an object of humiliation or scorn; I can be manipulated and exploited. The consequentialist dangers of exposing “personal information” have led to an extension of the notion of a privacy violation from the compromise of one’s dignity and agency and disregard for the respect to which one is due, to broader exposures of oneself to threat as a result of information concerning oneself being available to others. Thus, to the extent that others have information concerning my address, phone number, social security, or PIN numbers, I may find myself victimized – or at least more easily victimized – in certain ways. Others who have this information without our consent may use it to stalk, harass, or blackmail us, or damage our financial interests or otherwise harm us. Sometimes the information in question may not be particularly private, but is then collated in some way that will enable others to exploit our profile in a harmful manner. Identity theft is an increasingly common phenomenon here. Misuse is made easier by the fact that there are private companies (such as ChoicePoint and LexisNexis) that gather and collate such personal information. It is some such fears that inform the opposition to governmental digital surveillance and other information-gathering operations that have emerged since 9/11. Information (or, too often, misinformation) makes one vulnerable to governmental overreaching. We may have no absolute right to privacy, just as we have no absolute right to liberty from others’ interference, but those who would invade our privacy need to have appropriately strong reasons for doing so. Privacy is not merely an aspect of our liberty, but a liberty in itself. Properly understood, individual and collective liberty will exist in some kind of creative tension. Civil society of a liberal democratic kind is characterizable as a social order in which some measure of individual liberty is ceded to sustain institutions (including a structure of civil liberties) designed to ensure maximum individual liberty within a larger understanding of possibilities for and the conditions of human flourishing. It will not be presumed that there is only one way

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in which humans may flourish, though much that might be accommodated within such an understanding is open to contestation.

SECURITY

Although the occupants of a Lockeian state of nature possess basic rights to life, liberty, and property, such a state offers little security.11 The possession of rights is not sufficient for their enjoyment. In the social contract tradition, to effect their security, the occupants of a state of nature would choose to enter into “civil society” – that is, one characterized by institutions designed to secure for its members conditions for the exercise of their rights (Locke).12 Security is no peripheral social condition, but critical to the prosecution of a life that is able to realize its potential. Or, to put it in terms more focused on our present concerns, we can expect there to be some reasonable accommodation between security and liberty in both its individual and collective dimensions. Some level of security will be needed not only to ensure the social conditions of liberty, but also to foster individual human flourishing. Insecurity will impinge not only on liberty, both collective and individual, but also on freedom. In addition, a lack of security can breed fear (“a sense of insecurity”), and with fear may also come a further contraction of freedom.13 As is often the case when we think of liberty (or freedom) – implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) having in mind a liberty from X so that we are at liberty to Y – so too when thinking about security, we generally have in mind our being secure against X so that we can be secure to Y. Both liberty/freedom and security are context dependent. Also like liberty, security may be seen as individual or collective, and we might expect the two to be causally linked in some way. At least in liberal societies, collective security will generally enhance the security 11

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This essay was initially drafted in the middle years of the George W. Bush Administration. The literature on security has since that time been enriched by several sources, including Waldron (2006) and Caudle. In his Second Treatise Of Civil Government, Ch. 9, Locke identifies these as legislative, judicial, and executive. Our propensity for such fear is one of the things that give terrorism its strategic rationale. On the problematic interplay of subjective and objective factors, see Zedner (2003).

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of the individual. Public safety is correlated with individual safety. Such collective security can of course take various forms, of which national security will be only one. There will, for example, also be the collective security provided by local or state police departments. National security14 will comprehend the institutions of the larger society – the state or country – and the military and National Guard will secure them against outside and even some inside threats. The idea of national security has never been entirely clear-cut. It is rarely defined in legislation or elsewhere, and when defined it tends to be defined extremely broadly. Traditionally and most simply – or at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union – it referred first and foremost to the security of borders, to the conditions for ensuring against conquest. Its primary agent has been a standing army, ready to defend those borders. As some writers have put it – often as a prelude to its criticism, especially by those working in peacemaking studies15 – it has had a militaristic ring about it. But even in that traditional sense, national security has referred to something more than merely uncontested or secure borders. There has been the associated idea of an absence of threat. There is an implicit subjective dimension – an absence of fear or, as we might want to put it, an absence of a sense of insecurity.16 And the threat in question has not simply been to borders; it has usually been or included the threat to a way of life – to institutional and cultural traditions and values.17 Borders do not mark out only the boundaries of a 14

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State security might seem a bit more accurate, because we are usually referring to political jurisdictions rather than nations or nationalities. Sometimes, of course, a nation-state will be involved. However, as I will suggest, it is probably no accident that we speak of national rather than simply state security, because it is not simply jurisdictional integrity that is at stake, but also institutional and cultural. The more recent notion of homeland security seems to focus mainly on internal or localized threats to national security. Such writers see development and the reduction of invidious inequalities, not the possession of strong borders, as the key to national security. To be honest, I am not sure why authors have to think – or so often tend to think – in terms of either/or. But the debate already points to areas of contestation. “Security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked” (Wolfers, p. 150). Zedner (2003, at p. 157) draws attention to a tradition in which a sense of security is not seen a desirable but as a form of complacency. Cf. Morgenthau: “National security must be defined as integrity of the national territory and its institutions” (1960, p. 562).

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sovereign state, but also the sphere within which a historical cultural narrative unfolds – a richly textured institutional and cultural history, characterized by distinctive memories and myths. National security secures not only geographical borders, but also a complex set of traditions and ways of living.18 What has happened with the concept in recent years is that the importance of territorial border issues has tended to recede, and the idea and element of threat has expanded to encompass actual and potential hazards to domestic tranquility and stability other than those posed by simple conquest.19 Threats to national interests20 may take many forms and, if sufficiently dire, may be considered threats to national security. Pandemic or contagious disease (human and agricultural), environmental conditions (such as pollution and global warming), and extraterritorial economic circumstances and decisions (such as trade barriers and currency decisions) are now frequently spoken of as impinging on national security interests. And the threats need not necessarily be external. Internal dissension and poverty may also be seen as threats to national security. Not only, therefore, will outside dangers posed to a national collectivity be seen as threats to national security, but also internal challenges – perhaps those arising out of a failure to create or secure conditions for a segment of the local population. Even beyond these considerations, national security has recently been broadened to include the establishment of or support for a 18

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That can be true not only of free societies but also of oppressive ones. One of the volatile issues confronting Iraqis has been the preservation of the “character” of Iraqi society – no small feat in a country that encompasses at least three major traditions. That can be true not only of free societies but also of oppressive ones. One of the volatile issues confronting Iraqis has been the preservation of the “character” of Iraqi society – no small feat in a country that encompasses at least three major traditions. The most influential developments seem to be associated with what is called the Copenhagen School (at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute), primarily – though not exclusively – in the work of Barry Buzan. See Buzan et al. Its members employ the language of “securitization” to indicate ways in which various social phenomena (political, economic, societal, and environmental) are marketed as relevant to national security. Securitization requires only the successful portrayal of these phenomena as threats. I consider interests to be those matters in which one has a stake, particularly the ingredients of well-being.

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variety of international initiatives – most critically, support for broadly democratic or rights-based polities.21 It was the success of this expansion that enabled a switch from “weapons of mass destruction” threatening American freedom to “forces of undemocratic tyranny” threatening American freedom, or, even more broadly, to honoring the “nonnegotiable demands of human dignity.” The thought here has been that national security requires, if not anything as universal as global security, then some commonality or sharing of concern for societal integrity. Thus, a number of writers have tried to focus on what is called “common security” or “cooperative security.”22 National security has become, if not secondary to a broader form of interstate or international security, then coequal with it.23 Central to an assessment of the moral force of appeals to national security will be not only what is embodied in our understanding of it, but also what, given that understanding, is then taken to constitute a (serious) threat to it. It is almost always in the interest of those in power to give national security the widest possible interpretation, and then to overestimate the actual threat posed by what they consider will endanger it. The Communist witch hunts of the 1950s 21

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The assumption here is that such polities are less likely to threaten each other. For discussions of this old chestnut, see White; also Ahlmark. See also the speech of President George W. Bush to the United Nations General Assembly: “In this young century, our world needs a new definition of security. Our security is not merely found in spheres of influence, or some balance of power. The security of our world is found in the advancing rights of mankind” (September 21, 2004) . And some of these have argued that national security concerns should give way to broader cooperative security arrangements. Alternatively, other writers have pushed for the replacement of a concern for national security with one for human security. One other movement and counter-movement should be noted. Whereas Lockeian thinking places the focus of security on individuals – needing their rights secured against predatory others, leading to the formation of a protective/securing state – a number of contemporary writers have shifted their attention almost completely from the security of the individual to that of the state. The state and its interests are not seen as the sum of those of the individuals who make it up; and neither is its security reducible to the security of its citizens. It has its own identity and interests, and what secures it is not determined by what secures the interests of these or those individuals who inhabit it. In the opposite direction, there have been those who believe that the state is only secondary to the individuals who make it up, and who have therefore asserted the claims of what they call human security, in which state relevance consists simply in the fact that, in a global human order, it is the actor “with the greatest relative power” (Aravena).

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were “justified” in terms of national security and, as noted, we have recently seen the issue of “weapons of mass destruction” exploited to similar effect. Not only so, it is often in the interests of those in power to clothe partisan concerns in the language of national security.24 License may be an enemy of liberty, but because it is often made to bear more moral weight than it can reasonably bear, national security may be its own enemy. It is important, then, in considering arguments grounded in appeals to national security, to look at both its scope and substance. What I consider to be a particular problem in the discussion of national security is a slide from “national security interests” to “national security.” Although national security is concerned with the protection of various state interests – in, for example, secure borders, the preservation of cultural traditions, the perpetuation of key civil institutions – it does not follow that whenever some national interest is threatened, compromised, or damaged, then “national security” will be at risk. It will depend on both the nature and magnitude of the threat or risk. Even threatening national security will not necessarily put it at risk. There may be those who believe that the “Great Satan” needs to be put down – that at least is their stated ambition – but if their resources do not match up to their desires, it can hardly be argued that they place national security at risk. The risk must be dire, imminent, and real.25 I do not wish to argue that we should stick with a traditional understanding of national security. The world we live in is not the world of one hundred years ago, and our national interests are not as localized as they were one hundred years ago. Even though talk of a global village takes it too far, there is nevertheless a sense in which we 24

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In the run-up to the 2004 elections, it was frequently claimed that electing John Kerry would endanger national security. As Forst notes with the quotes of Dick Cheney and John Kerry used to introduce Chapter 12 (used earlier in a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology meeting in Toronto, November 2005), both the Republican and Democratic presidential ticket contenders exploited public insecurity shamelessly in their campaigns. What is merely “regime security” often seeks to represent itself as “national security.” To comment in this way of course courts some sort of political backlash. For to ignore or downplay such threats may be to encourage their expression in increasingly effective ways. But, likewise, to respond to them overactively may also strategically advantage those who make them.

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(understood as a “peculiar people”) are now more easily impacted by events (and not just hostile armies) beyond our geographical boundaries. Conflict overseas may bring pressures to accept refugees or may threaten energy supplies or global environmental disaster. However, the links need to be spelled out and, if necessary, defended and quantified. Otherwise we will find ourselves on a political slippery slope in which neither the slipperiness nor the slope nor the end point will be clear. The Vietnam War was almost certainly sustained by means of a flawed argument (the domino theory) about the international spread of Communism. Its mistakes are repeatable.

AN ERA OF TERRORISM?

The dialectic of liberty and security is intensified by talk of what is spoken of as “an era of terrorism.” Is this political hyperbole – as I suspect is the language of “wars” on crime and drugs? There is some reason to think so. Though the phrase has gained currency since 9/11, there is nothing particularly new about terrorism. Israel and Northern Ireland have experienced it for many years. And there are many precedents before that. The idea that we now live in an era of terrorism may well reflect a somewhat U.S.-centered perspective on what is happening in the world. Of course, there are other contemporary terrorist movements (as in Chechnya and Spain) that might make us think of terrorism more globally, but this would probably be to overlook what is just as legitimately viewed as state terrorism during the time of Stalin. There is some reason to suspect that the phrase is being exploited by those who invoke the claims of national security in order to justify policies and conduct that should be seen as improperly invasive. At the same time, it is probably in the interests of terrorists to create a culture of fear concerning both its imminence and immanence, as terrorism is a strategy that creates and exploits widespread fear. Yet I do not wish to minimize the temporal and global significance of terrorism. What is of greater concern to me is that I suspect that “we” have responded to 9/11 in ways that may have fomented and encouraged terrorism, rather than seeking to understand and meet it in more measured and effective ways. Terrorism is a complicated

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phenomenon, whose roots as well as tactics require understanding, and even if almost all terrorism comes to moral grief over its tendency to treat “innocents” or “non-combatants” merely as means rather than as Kantian ends, it also requires a response that does not draw those who engage in a “war on terrorism” to adopt tactics that might themselves be characterized as terroristic.26

BALANCES, TRADE-OFFS, AND JUDGMENTS

Balances In considering the relations between liberty and security – how they are to be “played off” against each other – the metaphors we use are not irrelevant. It is very common to use the metaphor of a scale, in which liberty and national security are placed in opposing pans, one to be “balanced” against the other in zero-sum fashion.27 The underlying, or at least implied, idea is that there is an appropriate level or balance to be achieved, an equilibrium – one, moreover, that does not threaten the integrity of the other. Appropriate liberty is that which balances appropriate security. The need for such balancing is seen as an essential and pervasive feature of our social existence. Given Lockeian or, even more gloomily, Hobbesian presumptions about the subjects of liberty, some constraints on liberty will always be required in order that our security can be assured. The problem, it is said, will be to get the right balance, namely, one in which constraints on liberty are appropriate to an appropriate level of security.28

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Fortunately, with the advent of the Obama administration, U.S. policy has been undergoing major reassessment, and though it may be too early to see how much it will change, there is some reason to believe that the militaristic approaches favored by the previous administration will be moderated by understandings that are more heavily informed by policing approaches. Intelligence gathering and interrogation techniques previously favored by the CIA are giving way to those used by the FBI through its involvement in the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative. For just a few of the many examples, see Rosen; Committee on Federal Courts; Gross. There are, however, a few dissenters, including Waldron (2003), Fleming (2004); Scanlon (2004); and Zedner (2005). The picture involves an oversimplification in that it fails to accommodate other “values” – such as efficiency, economy – that might also need to be “balanced” against liberty or security.

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Securing the right balance is not something that can be determined in the abstract or once and for all, but will change, depending on the gravity of a threat and the level of risk (to security). Where the risks are small, appropriate constraints on liberty will be few, but where the risks are large and imminent, we might expect liberty to be substantially, appropriately, and justifiably diminished. An appropriate balance is also a function of the importance we attach to liberty and security. Some constraints on liberty might be seen as more important than others, though this will be complicated by the fact that people may disagree as to their importance. Further, the level of security that we consider necessary will also offer opportunities for contestation. Some of us are more risk-averse than others. So, even if the balancing metaphor works, it will have to confront some complexity in its application to social life. The balancing metaphor has a surface plausibility, or at least it strikes us as familiar and easy to work with. Both liberty and national security can be thought of as matters of degree – of more and less – and, on the face of it, it seems reasonable to think that where security threats are great, liberty might reasonably be contracted, and that where security threats are minimal, liberty might – indeed, ought to – be expanded. The only significant issue might appear to be one of getting the balance right – of judging the gravity and probability of risk to security accurately enough to make appropriate adjustments to liberty.29 Many have said that the balance changed dramatically, if not irrevocably, on 9/11: What we thought to be an appropriate balance of liberty and security was shown not to be so. An appropriate balance needed to be restored. Grave threats that we thought were theoretical 29

I am of course assuming that we can compute degrees of liberty in a relatively unproblematic way. That is not an unproblematic assumption. Even leaving to one side the challenge posed by the liberty/liberties distinction, it is not clear how to compare the constraint on liberty constituted by a change of speed limit of 65 mph to 55 mph with a change of drinking age from 18 to 21. Are these equivalent constraints or different, and if so, which is the greater? Included in these questions are thorny distributional matters both on the side of who bears the costs and who benefits, questions we take up later. (Note that one constraint affects a narrower group of people than the other – this presumably will require some justification, no doubt along the lines that drinkers between the ages of 18 and 21 are disproportionately responsible for risky behavior.)

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and remote before 9/11 were shown to be real and imminent. To ensure the level of security that we valued (i.e., considered appropriate), we would need to give up a measure of liberty. We did not of course have to react in the way that we did. We might have argued that the balance was adequate as it was and that we simply needed to recognize that even an appropriate balance would not rule out every contingency. It was a cost that would need to be borne from time to time (like the occasional conviction of an innocent person despite the procedural safeguards we have instituted). It is no easy matter to judge what an appropriate level of liberty is and what an appropriate level of security is. Every judgment regarding an appropriate “balance” will have implications for the other, and it will be important to consider what constraints on one will appropriately strengthen the other – and who will make such determinations. However we might have reacted, the invocation of a balancing argument makes certain important assumptions. One of course concerns the balancing metaphor – to which I shall return. However, other important presumptions may also need examination. Central among those is the presumption that what was lacking on 9/11 was a proper balance of liberty and security rather than the functionality of existing mechanisms. If, as it seems reasonable to argue, particularly in light of The 9/11 Commission Report, the existing mechanisms for security were dysfunctional in various ways, then what was lacking may not have been an appropriate balance of liberty and security but well-functioning security mechanisms – mechanisms that needed to be brought up to standard.30 No shift in the balance might have been called for, but simply a more efficient administration of what already existed. Improved policies and practices might indeed enhance both security and liberty. Returning, though, to the balancing metaphor: Are liberty and security balanceable in the way that is suggested? The metaphor presumes 30

This is a critical consideration because, even were it decided that the balance had been wrongly struck, any rectificatory change would be of little value were the new mechanisms not to function properly. Why should we assume that dysfunctional intelligence agencies with new powers would function any better than the same ones with the old powers?

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that national security and liberty are commensurable values, appropriately balanced against one another. No doubt, to the extent that our ethic is a straightforwardly consequentialist one – that is, to the extent that our moral values are subordinate to some end, such as the greatest happiness or good for the greatest number31 – then this will seem to be a reasonable presumption. The right balance of security and liberty will be the ratio that maximizes happiness, good, and so on. So, for example, in the interests of security and overall social good, I may no longer enter certain venues without a picture ID or without subjecting my backpack to X-ray scrutiny. There does not seem to be anything particularly problematic about that if there is some reason to think that failure to have a valid ID or a backpack X-rayed would actually heighten a security risk. But even on straightforwardly consequentialist premises, there are problems. Remember that what we have are not two values of equal “substance.” Constraints on liberty are likely to be more certain than risks to security. Actual constraints on liberty must be weighed against risks to security. How do you weigh an actual contraction of liberty to engage in Activity A against an increase of “security” from 70 percent to 95 percent (or even from low to high)? It’s not easy. It is made even more problematic by the fact that it is notoriously difficult to estimate levels of risk with any kind of accuracy. Moreover, in the political sphere – and this is where policy is made – it is highly prone to partisan taint. We need not look further than calculations of dangerousness in the criminal justice arena, in which sex and violent offenders have found themselves victims of what are barely more than ideological judgments. Risk data are very spongy, and those who make policy may be inclined to draw conclusions from the data according to their prior leanings. However, the view that liberty and security can be balanced in some consequentialist manner is highly tendentious, both morally and constitutionally. Morally, as already noted, there are certain liberties – or, as we often refer to them, rights – that cannot be easily accommodated to the balancing metaphor. They function as constraints 31

Here of course we will have to assume that notions of happiness and good are unitary. Otherwise we get into the Millian problem of quality v. quantity (in Utilitarianism) or of the commensurability of different kinds of goods.

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on consequentialist or maximizing doctrines. Robert Nozick spoke of such rights as side-constraints (Nozick, at p. 28 et seq.), as considerations that should not be entered into a utilitarian calculus; and Ronald Dworkin (1984), in his view of rights as trumps, suggests that when utility conflicts with rights, utility must normally give way. To the extent then that liberty encompasses what we may consider to be our “civil liberties” or “rights,” the simple balancing metaphor is problematic, indeed, inappropriate. It is not, as Nozick’s and Dworkin’s terminology perhaps misleadingly suggests, that values and “goods” such as national security can never take precedence; but, should they do so, it will not be as the result of a simple balancing process. Civil liberties do not inhabit the realm of liberty in a purely additive way. Even though freedom of speech and freedom of association may be expanded or contracted, they are not expanded or contracted as part of a continuum with the expansion or contraction of speed limits or drinking ages – as part of a more general liberty of action or movement. The freedoms of speech and association have a special place within the sphere of liberty. Briefly, they are seen as necessary conditions – indeed, elements – of human flourishing and not merely its catalysts. Their abrogation or constriction requires a special kind of argument, not simply some consideration about greater security or efficiency or social welfare. We give constitutional recognition to the special status of liberties via the Bill of Rights, in which agents of government are inhibited from engaging in maximizing reasoning. Even if it is more efficient to tap phones or enter premises at will when a murder is being investigated, we do not permit such invasions unless certain stringent conditions have first been satisfied. Arguments from efficiency (utility) are not sufficient. A different kind of argument is required if we are to engage legitimately in such activities. We might of course want to argue that these aspects of liberty (our liberties) are simply weightier than other parts, and that when they are constrained, the security interests just have to be higher. Now, it is certainly true – as was awkwardly recognized by their initial proponents (Dworkin, 1977; Nozick, 1974) – that the side-constraining and trumping effects of certain considerations, such as rights, are not absolute. Although some have asserted otherwise, justice need

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not be done if the heavens will fall. But this does not leave the balancing metaphor intact. When, as in emergency situations, rights must be compromised lest disaster (and not simply some maximizing end) occur, what results is not a balance in which appropriate levels of liberty and security are secured, but a situation in which there is a derogation from or infringement of (some) liberty; it is not merely diminished. The balancing metaphor – at least in the present context – will not do. It is too simplistic, reminiscent of the view that rights cannot come into conflict, or that the virtues constitute a unity. The balancing metaphor, to the extent that it is seen as a weighing of commensurables, is problematic in yet another way. Appeals to the metaphor suggest that what we lose in liberty we gain (or regain) in safety and security. We. It tends not to work that way. Most of us are probably not affected by the USA PATRIOT Act or other measures introduced following 9/11. Ostensibly, our security has been increased or restored, but most of us will not have borne any significant costs in return. But there have been significant costs for some – and they have fallen disproportionately on a small segment of the population – those with Middle Eastern appearances, those with visa irregularities, those who, for some reason or other, have had governmental attention turned on them. Those satisfying certain profiles or who have appeared on various “watch lists” have borne the brunt of the costs of “our” greater security. What we may have in each pan of the scales, then, is on the one side, increased security for the large majority, and on the other, decreased liberty for a much smaller minority. Now, it might be argued that that is precisely how it should be, because it is from among those groups that our security has been jeopardized. This might look a bit more plausible – at least as a matter of policy – were it arguable that a high proportion of those made to bear the cost are also linked to terrorism in some active or conspiratorial way. But this is not arguable at all. Only a minute proportion of those on whom the burden of heightened security has been thrust have and have had any constructive connection to – let alone sympathy with – the cause of terrorism. They are no more morally tainted than those

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who have suffered no appreciable diminution of liberty (or, more significantly, abrogation of their liberties).32 In means-end reasoning of the kind that suffuses “the war on terrorism,” it is important to ensure that certain conditions are satisfied if the end is to be appealed to in justifying the means. One of those conditions is that the means actually achieve the end sought (or, less stringently, make it highly probable that the end will be accomplished – see Kleinig). It is all very well to argue that, in the name of security, our liberties need to be curtailed. But we first need some assurance that such contractions will (likely) increase our security. More than say-so is required. If, as has been suggested, our security on 9/11 was inadequate not because more stringent controls were not available, but because controls that were already in place were ineptly employed, then we have no reason to think that additional controls will be correlated with greater efficiency/security. As Jeremy Waldron expresses the point, it is not enough to argue that “reducing a given liberty is necessary for combating terrorism effectively. It may be a necessary condition, and yet – because sufficient conditions are unavailable – the terrorist threat may continue unabated.” The point is important, because there are significant costs to the curtailment or contraction of liberties, especially for certain members of the community – aliens, members of particular religious or ethnic groups, political dissidents, and so forth. If what is done to them is to have any justification, it needs to be correlated with significant security benefits that would not otherwise have been realized.33 The worry of course – and this is why such consequentialist arguments need to be looked at carefully and realistically – is that (even mild) crackdowns of various kinds may contribute to social alienation and worsen the security situation.34 32

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Presumably, we do not gain in security from the investigation of those who pose no threat to it. If the investigation is sufficiently ill-conceived, it may in fact diminish security by creating sympathy for the terrorist cause where there was previously none. Waldron (2003) suspects that such contractions have more symbolic than real value, because they show that the authorities “care about” or are “doing something about” a situation – such as presidents visiting areas devastated by hurricanes. What is the moral worth/weight to be accorded such symbolic acts? Thus, despite Attorney General John Ashcroft’s comments (March 20, 2002) on the “voluntary” interview program initiated by the U.S. government on November 9,

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A further condition for valid means-end reasoning is that unintended side effects be taken into account. Just as profiling – even if seen as an effective law enforcement tool – may have as an unwanted (but important) effect the aggravation of historically troubled relations between different ethnic groups, so too may the constriction of liberties have unintended and undesirable side effects. As Waldron puts it: When liberty is understood (as it usually is) in a negative sense, it is something that cannot be reduced without increasing something else, namely the powers and means and mechanisms that obstruct or punish the ability of individuals to do what they want. Reducing liberty may prevent an action taking place which would otherwise pose a risk of harm. But it necessarily also increases the power of the state, and there is a corresponding risk that this enhanced power may also be used to cause harm.35

The point is an obvious one, but viewed through the lens of liberalism, is also one of some importance. Liberal thought, even in its democratic version, is predicated on a distrust of concentrated power, especially power that is less than transparent.36 Even republican liberals strongly committed to the importance of governmental mechanisms (see, e.g., Pettit), believe that those mechanisms need to be carefully circumscribed through “checks and balances.” We might of course want to argue that any governmental powers exercised on “our” behalf will be exercised benevolently. But that would be overly sanguine, given the history not only of the previous but also of almost any government administration. Government officials generally have strong incentives

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2001, that “the process of reaching out to foreign nationals and their communities fostered new trust between law enforcement and these communities” , a great deal of ill will was created. In this program, some 5000-plus young men who had recently entered the United States on visas from “countries with suspected terrorist links” were individually “invited” to talk with government agents about their reasons for visiting, past movements, knowledge concerning 9/11, and feelings about it. Few felt able to refuse. A follow-up group of a further 3000+ was indicated in the March 20 announcement. Waldron (2003), p. 204. This of course has been one of the major complaints about the governmental response to 9/11 – the lack of access to what is going on in Guantánamo Bay, the secret handling of aliens, and certain provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.

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to err on the side of security; elected public officials, in particular, are rarely voted out of office for either protecting the public too vigorously or placing the safety of the majority above the liberties of a minority. First, we should not forget that the boundaries of terrorism have been cast very broadly to maximize governmental flexibility: Political dissent may sometimes be enough to trigger governmental attention. That is troubling enough. But in addition, we have seen a number of provisions that were introduced explicitly and specifically for the “war on terrorism” now transferred to the wider “war on crime.”37 Such measures would have been considered overly intrusive had they been intended for ordinary law enforcement purposes. Trade-Offs If we want a more promising metaphor to characterize the situation, I think we might do better with that of a trade-off. From time to time Waldron and others slide from the balancing metaphor to that of the trade-off as though they had similar implications (Waldron, 2003, pp. 196–198, 203; cf. also Thomas, p. 1208) I think not. When we trade one value off against another, we acknowledge not simply an adjustment to the balance – the restoration of an equilibrium that has been upset – but have in view a cost or sacrifice to one when the other is given priority. There is an infringement or derogation of liberties or rights when liberty is traded off for security. A trade-off is not a trade. In a trade – at least in theory (a “fair” trade) – one value is exchanged for another and no party to the trade loses. Each party sees the exchange as being advantageous. A had x and B had y, B wanted x and A wanted y, and the trade, because consensual, satisfied both. A trade-off, on the other hand, involves a tension or conflict, whereby A, in order to get y, must sacrifice x. Even if deemed an acceptable trade-off, it is nevertheless at some cost. A would have preferred to secure y without sacrificing x. In a trade-off the key issue will be to determine whether the sacrifices can be justified or sustained, and to determine how the costs incurred should be responded to. 37

Most of these expansions have so far focused on financial crimes.

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If many values that we might pursue are side-constrained by our liberties or rights, national security has at least the potential for a trade-off. The courts have long recognized that even constitutionally guaranteed rights may be infringed in the name of national security or some other broad social interest (such as public safety or territorial integrity). However, such interests are not to be casually invoked. Any claim must be subject to strict scrutiny, in which the interests invoked in favor of constraining the liberty must be specified and explicitly defended.38 Thus, vague references to “national security” will not do. As noted earlier, the national security interests that are that are threatened will need to be specified, the ways in which they are threatened will need to be articulated, and the threat will need to be quantified in some way. Security, of course, may be seen in the same way as liberty – as a right – though what is likely to be in view will not be national security so much as personal security. (The two kinds of security may be related, of course, because national security may facilitate or provide an environment for personal or individual security.) To the extent that securing our right to personal security comes into conflict with our liberties, the tension will not be between some good and our liberties, but between two rights – or, to put it in a way that encompasses national security, between a good (national security) that secures a right (personal security) and some other rights (our liberties). How are such tensions to be resolved? Although we may use the metaphor of a trade-off, it is a different kind of trade-off from that involved when a liberty is traded off against some communal or social good.39 38

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Strict scrutiny requires that “some compelling state interest” be shown. It stands in contrast with what is called a “rational relations” test in which liberty is constrained (say, a dress code for employees or a lowering of the speed limit); all that usually needs to be shown is that there is a plausible connection between the restriction on liberty and the purposes of the restricting body. In the broad gap between these two, a third level of scrutiny – “heightened” – has developed to secure interests that are deemed “important” but not “fundamental” (say, the interests of gay men). The choice of metaphor can also reflect much deeper debates within moral theory between those who view ethics as a rational system grounded in some single principle or set of compatible principles, and those who claim that we are confronted by a plurality of values – either (as MacIntyre has suggested in “After Virtue .”) because we have inherited fragments from competing moral schemata, or because (try as we might) our human condition is such that we are confronted by a moral plurality that calls for judgment rather than calculation. Debates over deontological and

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To a degree, of course, we assume that though the interests of both national security and individual liberty will be in some tension, they will also be mutually supportive. Like courage and discretion, generosity and caution, or even justice and happiness, we expect that in the ordinary transactions of life we will be presented with choices that do not violate the demands of either. Discretion will temper courage and courage will save discretion from cowardice; caution will contribute to wise expressions of generosity, and generosity will overcome the inertia of caution; justice will check the aggregative tendencies of happiness, and happiness will save justice from rigidity. Thus, we anticipate that security will enhance our freedom and that freedom will guide security. Were such not to be the case, our lives would be wretchedly torn. But circumstances sometimes arise in which we are faced with what seems to be a moral necessity to give one precedence over the other – not merely a precedence that arises because one has some inherent priority over the other, but a precedence that serves to compromise or undermine the other, leaving a residue of moral loss or even taint. Judgment At the end of the day, however, there are reasons for thinking that both metaphors (of balance and trade-off) fail to do justice to the complexity involved in clashes between security and liberty – even though the metaphor of a trade-off comes rather closer to the mark.40 What is required is judgment. Judgment is not a matter of algorithmically drawing conclusions from premises, but of incrementally bringing

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consequentialist theory, or between universalists and particularists, often reflect such deeper debates. This, however, is not the place to do more than acknowledge them. Scanlon (following Rawls) makes use of the language of “adjustment.” To summarize this discussion: Rawls holds that basic liberties such as freedom of expression (once defined) cannot be balanced against other interests. But they need to be “adjusted.” The powers and prerogatives (and limits on powers and prerogatives) that define these liberties need to be specified. What is specified in this process is, among other things, the grounds on which expression may legitimately be regulated. In determining these limits we need to take various potentially conflicting interests into account. However, in this process of balancing and adjustment, our interest in assuring conditions for the development and full exercise of the two moral powers has the primary role: If allowing some other interest to justify restrictions on expression in a certain way would pose a threat to the full exercise of these powers, then that justification for restriction cannot be allowed (p. 1484).

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reasons to bear on one another – point and counterpoint – until we can reach a conclusion that is defensible. This will involve the assembling of relevant considerations, prioritizing them, and then making determinations about whether or to what degree, in the particular case (if that is what we are concerned about) or in respect of a particular policy (if that is the level at which we are seeking to reach a decision), one is to be sacrificed to the other. The process is one of the interplay of reasons enabling one – perhaps – to warrant trading off a measure of one in favor of the other. The trade-off, if any, is determined though a judgmental process. Stanley Benn puts it well, and deserves the last word: The metaphor of “balancing” or “weighing,” with its image of weights held in the balance or in the hands, is not altogether perspicuous when applied to arguments or claims. For one thing, weighing and balancing suggest the achievement of a state of equilibrium – equal weights – while judgment requires the determination of an outcome because some reasons “outweigh” others. More important than this, however, is the consideration that judging claims and reasons generally proceeds seriatim. There is commonly a presumption of right, which counterclaims are then designed to override. These in turn may be undercut or overridden, as may be those adduced against them in their turn. Admittedly, deciding whether a claim has indeed been undercut or whether a counterclaim overrides may itself demand judgment, and secondary disputes employing precisely similar tactics can develop at each point in the argument. It will always help in settling such disputes to understand precisely what kind of argument is going on. To describe it as one in which “considerations are being weighed” or “balanced” is not helpful, because the metaphor does not really illumine the process.41

RE F E RE N CE S Per Ahlmark, “How Democracy Prevents Civic Catastrophes” . Francisco Rojas Aravena, “Human Security: Emerging Concept of Security in the Twenty-First Century,” Disarmament Forum, Volume 2 (2002) . 41

A Theory of Freedom, 296–297. Cf. Science Research Council v. Nassé H.L.(E.), [1980] A.C. 1028, at 1067, [1979] 3 W.L.R. 762 at 771 (Lord Wilberforce).

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S.I. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). S.I. Benn and G.F Gaus, “Public and Private – Concepts in Action,” in S.I. Benn and G.F. Gaus (eds), Public and Private in Social Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), pp. 3–27. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Barry Buzan, O . Wyer, J.D. Wilde, and O. Waever, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997). Sharon L. Caudle, “National Security Strategies: Security from What, for Whom, and by What Means,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Volume 6, No. 1 (2009) . Committee on Federal Courts, “The Indefinite Detention of ‘Enemy Combatants’: Balancing Due Process and National Security in the Context of the War on Terror,” The Record, Volume 59 (2004), pp. 41–75. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Duckworth, 1977). “Rights as Trumps,” in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (Oxford: OUP, 1984), pp. 153–167. James E. Fleming, “Securing Deliberative Democracy,” Fordham Law Review, Volume 72 (2004), pp. 1435–1476. Emanuel Gross, “The Struggle of a Democracy Against Terrorism – Protection of Human Rights: The Right to Privacy versus the National Interest – The Proper Balance,” Cornell International Law Journal, Volume 37 (2004), pp. 27–94. John Kleinig, “Noble Cause Corruption or Process Deviance: Ruminations on Means and Ends in Policing,” in Stanley Einstein and Menachem Amir, (eds), Uncertainty, Vol. 4: Police Corruption – Paradigms, Models and Concepts (Huntsville, TX: OICJ Press, 2004), pp. 129–146. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). John Locke, Second Treatise Of Civil Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Originally published in 1690. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edition (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2006). John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982). Originally published in 1859. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among the Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 3rd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004) . Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

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Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Jeffrey Rosen, “The Naked Crowd: Balancing Privacy and Security in an Age of Terror,” Arizona Law Review, Volume 46 (Winter, 2004), pp. 607–619. T.M. Scanlon, “The Constitutional Essentials of Political Liberalism: Adjusting Rights and Balancing Values,” Fordham Law Review, Volume 72 (2004), pp. 1477–1486. Philip A. Thomas, “Emergency and Anti-Terrorist Power: 9/11: USA and UK,” Fordham International Law Journal, Volume 26 (April 2003), pp. 1193–1224. Jeremy Waldron, “Security and Liberty: the Image of Balance,” Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 11, Number 2 (2003), p. 208. “Safety and Security,” Nebraska Law Review, Volume 85 (2006), pp. 454–507. Matthew White, “Democracies Do Not Make War on One Another … Or Do They?” . Arnold Wolfers, “National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol,” in Arnold Wolfers (ed.) Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 147–166. Lucia Zedner, “The Concept of Security: An Agenda for Comparative Analysis,” Legal Studies, 23 (2003), pp. 155–158. “Securing Liberty in the Face of Terror: Reflections from Criminal Justice,” Journal of Law and Society, Volume 32 (December 2005), pp. 507–533.

chapter sixteen

Regulating Terrorism John Braithwaite

This essay argues that both the war and criminal justice models are too crude, particularly in their theory of deterrence, for responding to the problem of global terrorism. An alternative regulatory model is advanced that overlays the public health concepts of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention with other older ideas of containment of injustice and enlargement of justice. An interconnected web of controls might enable an over-determined prevention of terrorism that, in spite of its redundancy, could be more cost-effective than the war model, because the principle of responsiveness means parsimony in resort to expensive coercion. It is possible to have an evidence-based approach to regulating rare events like 9/11 terrorism by applying the principles of evidence-based regulation to micro-elements that are constitutive of macro-disasters. Viewed through this lens, support for pre-emptive wars on terrorism is not evidence-based, but grounded in other public philosophies, notably retribution.

RECONSIDERING DETERRENCE

An early version of this paper was presented at some conferences and published on the Internet in March 2002. The opening paragraph began: “Both the war model for confronting a transnational problem and the criminal justice model share a central commitment to the deterrence doctrine.” There is surely an important role for deterrence in confronting terrorism, especially if we deploy the more sophisticated models of deterrence of international relations (IR) theory, as opposed to those of criminology or law and economics. IR 383

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deterrence is more dynamic than the models that now dominate criminology. This is the legacy of criminology and the economics of law from Bentham: Deterrence means statically projecting the product of a probability and a severity of punishment that makes compliance rational. With regard to terrorism, a dynamic enforcement pyramid approach to deterrence is favored that is more akin to IR thinking about deterrence and compellence. But first consider a psychological model of deterrence that is critical of both the criminal justice and IR models. This is Brehm and Brehm’s (1981) theory of Psychological Reactance. It is a theory grounded empirically in a large number of psychological experiments. These show that when deterrent threats are escalated, you get a deterrence curve with a positive slope as predicted by deterrence theory. But you also get a reactance or defiance curve with a negative slope. Escalating threat simultaneously delivers more deterrence and more defiance (on defiance theory, see Sherman [1993]; on deterrence and defiance with terrorism, see Frey [2004a]). Whether deterrence works depends on the positive slope of the deterrence curve being steeper than the negative slope of the defiance curve. The net effect of escalating threat is formally the sum of these two curves. What is especially interesting about the psychological reactance literature is that it also reveals some important insights about the conditions where the deterrence curve will be steeper than the defiance curve. Experimental research suggests that deterrence is stronger than defiance when the freedom we seek to regulate is not very important to the target of deterrence (Brehm and Brehm 1981; Braithwaite 2002: 102–110). Hence if we think of a freedom that is not so critical to us, like the freedom to park our car wherever we like, defiance is minimal. We do not explode when we confront a sign that says, “No parking 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.” Because the defiance curve is minimal in slope here, deterrence of parking violations with fines works almost exactly as rational choice theory in economics predicts. If on the other hand, we seek to regulate a freedom as important as freedom of religion by throwing Christians to the lions, we may then find, as the Romans did, that because defiance is so great with such a freedom, Christianity actually grows as a result.

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It seems possible that Osama bin Laden and Hamas have an intuitive understanding of this theory. Their game is perhaps not so different from that of martyrs like St. Peter. It is to provoke deterrence that is rendered counterproductive by defiance. For bin Laden, it is to provoke a pan-Islamic, not just pan-Arab, consciousness of oppression of their freedom. It is to portray the war on terrorism as another Christian crusade. If the United States no longer believes in deterring terrorism, clearly Israel does. In general, it does not assassinate Hamas leaders to prevent terrorism as soon as it acquires intelligence about them; instead it murders them, and whoever is with them, as soon as possible after an act of Hamas terrorism occurs. There is a place for deterrence in a strategy to defeat terrorism. It is just that for Israel, and the White House in supporting Israel, it may be the wrong place. In their strategy, deterrence is positioned to engender defiance that continues cycles of tit-for-tat terror.

RECONSIDERING JUSTICE

A second important empirical result from the psychological literature comes from Tom Tyler’s (1990) work. Tyler finds that criminal enforcement and other forms of social control work when they are administered in a way that their targets perceive as procedurally fair. This research shows a surprising capacity of people to buckle under to social control that delivers bad outcomes to them so long as those outcomes are dispensed through processes they accept as fair. Marrying these results to defiance theory, we might say that deterrence effects will exceed defiance effects when sanctions are seen as an outcome of fair procedures, a critical part of which is genuinely listening to the point of view of the other. This implies listening rather than just blustering at the United Nations. Furthermore, it might mean being unwilling to go to war without a UN resolution that specifically legitimates the war. I will come back to the importance of the procedural justice results and this important question of legitimacy with wars on terrorism. The dynamic theory of social control illustrated here is justified in Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (Braithwaite 2002). Figure 16.1

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ASSUMPTION Incompetent or irrational actor

INCAPACITATION

Rational actor

DETERRENCE

Virtuous actor

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Figure 16.1. Toward an integration of restorative, deterrent, and incapacitative justice.

represents a responsive regulatory pyramid. It means you have a presumption in favor of starting at the base of the pyramid by trying dialogue, reconciliation, and creative problem solving (restorative justice) first. Then when that fails and fails again, you may be willing to escalate through a hierarchy of forms of deterrent justice. Then when deterrence fails, you become willing to resort to incapacitative justice – incapacitating terrorists by putting them in jail or killing them, for example. As you move up through escalated deterrence options to more incapacitative options, if a cooperative response is elicited, you must de-escalate your response. Here the explanatory and normative content of responsive regulation has a lot in common with Graduated Reduction in Tension (GRIT) theory in IR. The presumptions of responsive regulatory theory are precisely the opposite of those expounded by Newt Gingrich during his 2002 speaking tour in Australia to sell the war on terrorism. Mr. Gingrich argued that the burden of proof is upon those who are against the war option for expanding the war on terrorism to new targets to come up with alternatives. Responsive regulatory theory imposes that burden on those who wish to escalate. Following this line, my own view would not be to rule out the military option, but to be more circumspect about it than the Bush

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administration was. So with the war on terrorism, when the Taliban announced that they were willing to negotiate with the United States about handing Osama bin Laden and his leadership over to a third nation to be tried in a court of law, the responsive regulatory presumption is that it is morally right to take up such an offer (see Pilger 2002: 103–104). Even if one had the belief, as I did, that the offer was likely not sincere, one should still negotiate. The reason is that it is procedurally just to listen to the perspective of the other before escalating. Even when one feels 90 percent certain that negotiations will fail, the arrogance of refusing to listen undermines the legitimacy of the war option, and will make it harder to win the peace. Grounded in procedural justice theory, the hypothesis here is that the Muslim world would be less resentful and defiant today about the war on terror if the United States had negotiated in good faith before bombing Afghanistan. Responsive regulatory theory assumes that all individual and collective actors have socially responsible selves, rational selves, and irrational or incompetent selves (Figure 16.1). Moreover, it assumes that sophisticated diplomacy can often persuade actors to put their best self forward. This is one of the reasons I will argue that General George C. Marshall is a good candidate for the greatest American of the American century (Pogue 1966, 1973, 1987). He had the ability to persuade a socially irresponsible actor, such as Stalin, to put his socially responsible self forward, to be trustworthy with him; Stalin in turn said that Marshall was the one person in the West whom he did trust. Second, responsive regulatory theory assumes that when actors are being irrational or incompetent in their judgments, it is possible for good diplomacy to persuade them to be susceptible to rational incentives like deterrent threats. The psychological evidence on the capacity of human beings to abandon one kind of self, in favor of another that seemed utterly entrenched, never ceases to amaze (Turner et al. 1987).

CONTAINMENT AND ENLARGEMENT

Enough of negative cases according to the theory. Heroes of the twentieth century by the lights of restorative and responsive regulatory

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theory are Nelson Mandela and General George C. Marshall. Mandela overcame the peaceniks in the African National Congress (ANC) to take them into an unfortunately necessary armed struggle against Apartheid. It included attacks on civilian targets such as the power grid, but he also counseled against attacks directed at killing civilians. His escalation was very gradual and oriented to bringing the hearts and minds of the rest of the world with his just cause. When he prevailed politically, he proffered restorative justice to his enemies through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His jailers sat beside him at his inauguration as president. General George C. Marshall equally understood the need to overcome the resistance of U.S. isolationists during the late 1930s to project deterrence to Hitler (Stoler 1989; Cray 1990). He led a reluctant United States and president to the view that it would have to build an army that could defeat Germany in a ground war in northwestern Europe, and project a capacity to do that – not just a capacity to defend itself through airpower (FDR’s late 1930s vision). It was Marshall who resisted Churchill’s “closing the circle” policy of 1942 – a bombing war plus scattered ground engagements at the periphery of Europe. Marshall saw the need for more decisive escalation to take some pressure off the Red Army by thrusting at the heart of Europe. Then after the war, it was Marshall as secretary of state who persuaded a punitive American people to learn from the mistakes of Versailles and heal Europe through the Marshall Plan – the finest moment of the American century (Ferrell 1966; Pogue 1987). Marshall was always more decisive in his support for escalation when that was what was needed, and likewise always more dramatic in his de-escalation than those around him. Through this theoretical lens we can see more clearly the virtues of the containment theory of the Truman Doctrine that incubated during the decade or so when Marshall was the most dominant influence on U.S. strategy. In the crafting of the Truman Doctrine of containment, one must give substantial intellectual credit to George Kennan (1947), who drafted the first version of it after Marshall appointed him head of a new Policy Planning Staff in the State Department. Containment was mostly sustained by all U.S. presidents until George W. Bush. It meant refusing to bring on a full-scale war with the Soviet

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Union or China, even when the United States had nuclear weapons and the Communists did not, but rather containing them from occupying new territory such as South Korea or Taiwan. It meant containing the spread of nuclear weapons through the Nuclear NonProliferation regime initiated on Marshall’s watch. In retrospect, the accomplishments of nuclear non-proliferation are fairly remarkable, as were the accomplishments of deterring invasion of South Korea and Taiwan without a massive conflagration. Again, it was Marshall as defense secretary during the Korean War who got the job of containment done. He calmed the megalomania of his commander, Douglas MacArthur, who would have brought on a war with the People’s Republic of China, a scenario that Marshall regarded as a Russian trap. It was this policy position even more than his constructive relationship with Stalin that later caused Senator Joseph McCarthy to vilify him. The Truman Doctrine was premised on a prudent patience. Part of that prudence in Korea was institutionalizing the principle of seeking the authority of the United Nations for military containment. Containment would at times take bold resolve to deter expansion. However, so long as totalitarianism was contained, in the long run it would prove to have more internal contradictions than liberal market democracies. In the long run, contained totalitarianism is more likely to self-destruct than contained democracy. The genius of Marshall was not only that he had a clear vision of the strategic role of deterrence in a policy of containment, but that he also had a vision of what the Clinton administration later came to describe as enlargement – enlargement of the space on the globe secured by democratic institutions. But Marshall extended a level of U.S. generosity toward the former fascist states that Clinton never persuaded the United States to extend to former Communist societies. Since Marshall, U.S. foreign policy seems never to have gotten the balance so right between investment in containment and investment in enlargement. John Foster Dulles, Marshall’s successor as U.S. Secretary of State, embarked on many ill-conceived adventures in containment that in fact crushed the enlargement of democracy, especially in Latin America (e.g., the U.S.-orchestrated Guatemalan coup of 1954). For all the foreign aid the West poured into the Middle East – most of it U.S. weapons for Israel – Britain, France,

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and the United States failed massively to promote the enlargement of democracy in the Arab world, and did much to bolster tyrannical puppets resented by the ordinary people of the region.

THE TORN WEB OF U.S. CONTROLS ON TERRORISM

This analysis of containment and enlargement failure is also true of the U.S. strategic response to terrorism. The containment failures included U.S. opposition to an anti-terrorism treaty during the 1990s that might have criminalized the funding of terrorist organizations (see also Clarke [2004: 98] on domestic sensitivity to upsetting Arab investors in the United States), the abysmal intelligence failures, and failures of target hardening against hijacking that allowed the September 11 attacks to succeed. Frontline managers of airline security – flight captains – were not even put on alert after intelligence of planned hijacks associated with al Qaeda were deemed serious enough to warrant distracting the president from his long summer holiday with a briefing. It was known that unlike the U.S. security establishment from the time of Dulles and CIA Director George H.W. Bush, al Qaeda was a learning organization, one that learned from its mistakes. The fact that it had failed to topple the World Trade Center once, and that a previous attempt by Islamists to topple the Eiffel Tower with a hijacked aircraft had failed, should not have constituted assurance for assuming it would continue to fail at such known objectives. When various elements of the intelligence establishment reported deep suspicions over the flight training of certain characters who were actually known by other elements of U.S. intelligence to be associated with al Qaeda, there was reason to believe that al Qaeda had not given up on its ambition of crashing aircraft into major public buildings in the United States (see U.S. Congress 2004: xi, xiii, 85). Then there was the explicit warning from the Taliban foreign minister two months before September 11. George W. Bush was presented as a consummate delegator to a world amazed at the thought of the new CEO of any major organization taking a full month’s holiday six months into starting the job. While he was at the Crawford ranch, something went wrong with this system of delegation that future public inquiry will hopefully fully lay

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bare. If he was too busy to talk to the foreign minister of the country that was the greatest threat to his nation’s security, then why was someone not reporting to him who was part of this conversation? Richard Clarke’s (2004) White House insider account now makes it clear that whereas Clinton had been “hands on” with al Qaeda and had plans to assassinate or “snatch” bin Laden, Bush paid limited attention to the terrifying briefings he was given, and which detailed imminent plans for al Qaeda to attack America. The enlargement failures related to the timidity in pushing for the enlargement of democratic sovereignty for the Palestinians; for enlarging opportunities for the bereft Muslims of the refugee camps of Pakistan and many other places that became breeding grounds for al Qaeda recruitment; for enlarging democracy in former Arab ally states like Iran under the Shah, Iraq before 1990, Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, and Saudi Arabia today. Bin Laden understood that in a world where the majority of refugees in the twenty-first century had become Muslims, providing practical support for a more just future for them – such as the schools he supported in Pakistan and the orphanages he funded for Muslim victims of the Bosnian war (Jacquard 2002: 70) – was a good investment. In Urdu, Taliban means band of scholars, a reference to the way they were recruited – as poor children for whom Islamist madrassas were the only way they could afford an education. Saudi democracy might have integrated into its power structure many of the idealistic young Muslim men returning from victory against the Soviet Union in the Afghanistan war. Instead it treated them as dangerous elements, a threat to the total control of the royal family. Saudi institutions gave them no legitimate path to political voice, only the path of terrorism. Most bouts of terrorism in the twentieth century, after all, had ended with the integration of some terrorist leaders into democratic power structures – whether it was Northern Ireland terrorism, Israeli terrorism, South African terrorism, East Timorese terrorism, the terrorism of the Italian Red Brigades, or of the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany (see Frey 2004a). Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid (2003) has attempted to demonstrate that the evidence shows that Islamist organizations are more successful when they reject violence in favor of electoral politics. Al Qaeda’s appeal will collapse only when Muslims who believe in the ideal of

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an Islamic state turn on al Qaeda for using un-Islamic means for achieving the end they share (see Gunaratna 2002: 239). Of course the more injustice and humiliation the West hurls at Islamists, the less likely such a marginalization of al Qaeda will become. British Prime Minister Blair showed the wisdom of the democratic integration option when he released IRA terrorists from prison in 1998 so they could speak and vote when their political party decided whether to end armed struggle and support power sharing in Northern Ireland. The returning veterans from Afghanistan were treated as dangerous elements in Saudi Arabia partly because they had already been made dangerous thanks to the cynical way the United States, France, Egypt, Pakistan, and others fostered Islamic extremism as a proxy against the pre-1989 Soviet Union. John Cooley’s (2000) detailed account in Unholy Wars of the relationship between the U.S. intelligence establishment and Islamists as “a strange love affair that went disastrously wrong” is compelling. For instance, several of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had received CIA training and had used a chemical formula for the huge bomb taught in CIA manuals, versions of which were found in the possession of some of the conspirators (Cooley 2000: 223, 243). During the Afghan war against the Soviets between 1979 and 1989, the CIA and the Pakistani military institutionalized training in terrorism and financed the propaganda of Islamic proponents of suicidal martyrdom. After the Soviets were defeated, these CIA-trained Islamists fanned out to create homicidal havoc in a dozen Muslim nations from the Sudan to Indonesia, and in the Philippines, France, the United States, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir, across Africa and Central Asia, and more (Cooley 2000; Jacquard 2002). U.S. encouragement of terrorism in one era that comes back to bite the United States in another is not a new phenomenon. The Nixon administration’s CIA urged its Australian counterpart to refuse to hand over to Attorney General Lionel Murphy its files on Australian terrorist training camps of the fascist Ustacia for Croatians wishing to destabilize the Communist yet tolerantly multicultural Yugoslavian regime of Tito. The stand-off was resolved in a famous incident in 1973 when Murphy was forced to institute a raid on his own security

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organization to seize the files. The United States has also allowed terrorist training camps to flourish in its own territory. The CIA organized a 1985 terrorist bombing in Beirut that was rather like the Oklahoma City bombing, though not as widely reported. CIA involvement was revealed years later by the same team at the Washington Post that broke Watergate. A truck bomb parked outside a mosque detonated as people left: Eighty were killed and two hundred and fifty were wounded, mostly women and children. A Muslim cleric believed by the CIA to be a dangerous character was the main target, but he was untouched (Chomsky 2001: 44). From the time of the Dulles brothers, a large number of terrorist incidents were sponsored by the CIA in Latin America. White House staffer, Colonel Oliver North, organized funding for the Nicaraguan terrorist group, the Contras, by selling arms to elements of the “Axis of Evil” in Iran. The aid swapped to the Contras for arms to Iran was laundered by the CIA through the Arab bank widely used to fund terrorist organizations, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). This same bank was used to launder money by other sometime U.S. allies of the 1980s, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega, by drug lords laundering money from illegal arms trading, and for covert nuclear programs. The United States has protected as well as funded terrorists who have sought to bomb and assassinate the political leaders of other nations, such as Fidel Castro. Indeed, the Reagan administration set a new benchmark by directly bombing the home of Libyan leader Ghaddafi two decades ago, though it only succeeded in killing his baby. Political assassination has been repeatedly proven to be a threat to peace in the modern world. Michael Ignatieff (2004: 21) argues for the balancing perspective: “The fact that liberal democratic leaders may order the surreptitious killing of terrorists … need not mean that ‘anything goes’.” His view that the effects can be limited by allowing such measures only in temporary emergencies is hardly persuasive with regard to assassination. There would likely be peace in Palestine today if after the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, the new Israeli Prime Minister Peres had not ordered the assassination of Yahya Ayyash, known as “the bombmaker.” His assassination was reciprocated with a devastating round of Hamas suicide bombings in February and March 1996 that killed more than fifty Israelis (Quandt

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2001). This allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to present himself as the “security” candidate and defeat Peres, who had until his ill-conceived assassination been way ahead in the polls. It was Netanyahu’s provocations that then unraveled the peace process. The biggest tear in the U.S. web of controls against terrorism was therefore more than its undermining of the efforts of other states in the late twentieth century to negotiate an anti-terrorism treaty. It was that it actively promoted terrorism in this era; it actively used the same banks that should have been targeted by international cooperation to attack the financing of terrorism; and it actively undermined the rule of international law through foreign political assassinations. At the same time the United States undermined the fundamentals of global containment of terrorism, it neglected enlargement. In the late twentieth century, the wealthiest nation in the world devoted the smallest proportion of its GDP to foreign aid. The nation that in Marshall’s era had wooed the UN to New York could no longer afford its membership dues. A Marshall plan for Afghanistan from the 1980s may have helped preserve their long-suffering people from totalitarianism, Talibanism, tribal warlordism, terrorism, American bombs, resurgent drug running, and the ungovernability that is their contemporary plight. But America had changed: George W. Bush was elected on a platform of opposition to the kind of nation-building in the world’s Afghanistans that won George Marshall his Nobel Peace Prize. When security is threatened, it is natural to prioritize containment over enlargement. But this is a mistake because enlargement makes containment easier. Fortunately, the United States has not privileged containment over enlargement in all aspects of the war on terrorism. A nice case in point is the work of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which promulgates national policies to combat the money laundering that is the lifeblood of terrorist organizations. In its early years the FATF gradually expanded a so-called “white list” of states coming into compliance with its anti-money-laundering policies. The shift to sanctioning an unfortunately labeled “black list” of noncomplying states was accelerated by September 11. But this “black listing” could be more effective because it built on the foundations of years of expanding “white listing.” Enlargement of the regime was a platform for the containment of money laundering in rogue states.

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Some lawyers and criminologists are inclined to think that the criminal justice model is superior for combating terrorism to the war model. There is something in this. Criminologists believe it is better to nab organizational criminals alive than dead. Then when we arrest them, we let them know that the system will go easier on them, perhaps keep them out of jail altogether, if they provide evidence useful for catching bigger fish in the organization than themselves (Wilkinson [2000: 98] argues this worked particularly well with the Red Brigades in Italy). With Islamist terrorist organizations the more important evidence about bigger fish might relate to financiers of the networks. Al Qaeda cell leaders or the people they answer to may be fungible operatives who are as undeterrable as bin Laden himself in their willingness to die for their cause. It is likely, however, that many of the wealthy Saudi businessmen who seem to be among the funders of al Qaeda would be susceptible to deterrence, even if only by naming and shaming them, because of their dependence on trading with the West for their wealth. With warlordism more generally in the contemporary world, World Bank regression analyses suggest that the existence of diasporas of wealthy funders in the West explains why war persists in some parts of the world more than others (Collier 2000). So, wealthy U.S. funders of the IRA and the protestant paramilitary organizations were one reason for the persistence of terrorism in Northern Ireland. Suicide bombers are often not only motivated by the embrace of their God in death as martyrs, but also by generous payments to the struggling families they leave behind. Herein lies further appeal of a criminal justice model that captures low-level offenders and then moves up organizations to deter financing of terrorism. This is a less clumsy model of pre-emption than the war model. Little to date has been achieved in using immunities to persuade smaller fish to give up bigger fish. Little wonder when even a Taliban foreign minister who sought to give up bin Laden before September 11 is rewarded by being touted as the most senior person they have “captured,” and still being held in U.S. custody at the time of writing. The Bush Doctrine of military pre-emption is clumsy; more subtle models of pre-emption informed by corporate crime enforcement were quite beyond the Bush administration, which is why charges were not laid against any of the major funders of al Qaeda.

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THE PUBLIC HEALTH MODEL

One would not want to push hard for the superiority of a criminal justice model over a war model. A failing of the FBI before September 11, 2001, was that they had limited interest in intelligence that would not help secure prosecutions – their regulatory strategy with terrorism was far too preoccupied with one preferred tool – prosecution (see U.S. Congress 2004: 37,122). Instead of the nature of the problem driving the choice of tools, the tool of choice determined which problems and targets would be a priority (Sparrow, 2000; Brodeur, this volume). It may be that there is more appeal in the ideal of the public health model of integrating primary prevention (e.g., clean water for all), secondary prevention (vaccinating targeted at-risk groups), and tertiary prevention (treatment of those already ill). This approach to problems of violence has been developed by James Gilligan (2001: 14–17). It might be attractive to examine the U.S. strategic goals of containment and enlargement manifest in the diplomacy of George Marshall. An attraction of this examination is that it helps us look more broadly than just at how we respond to terrorists once they have become terrorists (tertiary containment). Containment is bound to have more attraction than enlargement if we consider only how to respond to existing terrorists. This will cause us to over-invest in containment and under-invest in enlargement. As we have seen, enlargement of democracy, of the sphere of social justice, or of freedom from poverty or liberation from refugee camps may be the most important forms of primary prevention of terrorism. A positive example of post–September 11 primary prevention by enlargement is the funding the World Bank is providing to madrassas in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province on condition that they provide a quality educational curriculum to refugees and other poor children, as opposed to the doctrinaire education that fueled al Qaeda recruitment from the madrassas. Poor schools that receive funding by people of another religion are more likely to teach children religious tolerance. The imbalance between investment in primary prevention and tertiary prevention by containment was well illustrated by the Bush administration increases in the defense budget to fight its war on

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terrorism, which made U.S. defense spending roughly equivalent to the rest of the world’s nations combined; the 2002 increase alone was greater than the total expenditure of all the world’s nations on foreign aid. Enlargement (democratic “nation building”) seems expensive only when we forget to compare the costs of foreign aid to build democracies to the costs of over-investment in coercive control. Enlargement seems expensive when we forget how the Marshall Plan was a sound long-term investment for the U.S. economy because it fueled a long boom of U.S. exports to Europe and Japan. Secondary prevention also suffers under-investment under the war model. For example, there is a dearth of investment in preventive diplomacy and enhancing capability for forms of secondary prevention such as research and development on target hardening on preventable problems like aircraft hijacking, cyberterrorism, or hoof-and-mouth disease attacks on the nation’s farmers. Any one of a number of such forms of secondary prevention might have prevented September 11. This is the theme of redundant or over-determined controls to which we will return in the concluding pages of this essay. As we move from tertiary to secondary to primary prevention, we move in a direction that makes enlargement more important in the balance between enlargement and containment. However, even with tertiary prevention, enlargement can be more important than containment. Most Americans believe that the bombing of Serbia was responsible for the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. Most Serbian opponents of Milosevic believe the bombing made their job harder. Milosevic was not overthrown during or after the bombing, but later by the progressive enlargement of a Serbian democracy movement. Led by NGOs, students, and other young people, they became more and more fearless in their campaigning in universities, schools, workplaces, and ultimately on the streets, eventually winning the hearts and minds of surging masses of Serbs. The triumph was not of NATO bombs, but was akin to the triumph of people power in the Philippines against Marcos in the 1980s, the people of Eastern and Central Europe against Communist states in 1989, and in the 2004–5 wave of democratic revolutions in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. International NGOs played useful roles in supporting the Serbian NGOs; dollars from the West (particularly from George

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Soros) flowing to those NGOs were also important. But it was indigenous Serbian politics that ultimately pried open the contradictions of Milosevic’s totalitarianism, causing the military to switch allegiance from the tyrant to the people, as containment theory predicts. Western governments have supported warlords when they fought the enemies of the West, even when those warlords crushed indigenous democracy movements and even when they supported themselves by trafficking drugs into the West. In the case of Saddam Hussein, the United States supported him militarily even when he used weapons of mass destruction against democracy movements. In New and Old Wars, Mary Kaldor (1999) suggests that in late modern conditions, the path to democratic transition for war-torn states is to identify “islands of civility” that always exist in such states and build out from them. Under the public health model, expanding civility in this way is akin to spreading good hygiene. Let us hope that is what the United States and UN ultimately achieves in Afghanistan, rather than assisting a new set of warlords to expand their sway and reestablish wider drug empires. In Israel, the long-term benefits of building peace and democracy in Palestine by the peace movements on both sides joining hands are profound, yet the prospects for such an outcome remain dim. The sad fact of the history of Palestine is that whenever there has been that bottom-up momentum for peace, top-down leadership has been missing; whenever there has been top-down leadership (perhaps as with the “roadmap”), bottom-up commitment to peace was missing. At times, when both seemed to be coming together, events like the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin have derailed either the top-down or the bottom-up leadership for peace. So the prescription of this essay is to be reluctant to embrace wars on terrorism, but diligent at weaving a web of controls against terrorism, and firm in our resolve to escalate an enforcement pyramid until terrorism stops after it has broken out. This means tertiary containment delivering a ceasefire that exists as a platform for the other forms of containment and enlargement in the other five boxes in Figure 16.2. Instead of pre-emptive wars on terrorism, the prescription is for war as a last resort and a balance of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention of terrorism, with each of these levels encompassing a balance of containment of violence and enlargement of democratic

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Enlargement

Containment

Marshall plan, global

A global peace movement

democratic institution

that builds the consciences

building, reform of the

of citizens who reject

IMF/development banks, a violence. Primary prevention

West committed to social

Reject bellicose strategies

justice and dignity for the

like assassination that

Muslim world.

engender defiance and assist terrorist recruitment.

Secondary prevention

Preventive diplomacy.

Financial action task

Preventing the living of

force.

lives in refugee camps.

Nuclear non-proliferation.

Access to education for all

Biological weapons treaties.

children in Pakistan that

Target hardening (e.g.,

teaches religious tolerance. airlines, anthrax vaccines). U.K. releases IRA terrorists Intelligence cooperation on from prison to vote on

terrorism that leads to

power sharing in N. Ireland. arrests. Tertiary prevention

Mujahedeen returning from International Criminal fighting Soviets (e.g., bin

Court.

Laden) given a seat at the table of a Saudi democracy.

Figure 16.2. Tying together the strands of a web of controls to prevent terrorism.

institutions of non-violence. With an effective web of controls against terrorism, each strand in the web might be easily broken, but when the strands of the web are tied together to produce an effective and mutually reinforcing redundancy of control, the risks to our persons

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from terrorism can continue to be kept far below the risks of common crime. Although Dershowitz (2002: 2) believes religiously inspired international terrorism is the “greatest danger facing the world today,” many times more people are murdered every year in the United States than have been killed in international terrorist incidents throughout the globe in the last forty years (most of whom are, of course, not Americans).1 Even with the progress that has been made with nuclear safety regulation, a bigger Chernobyl remains a greater practical risk to the world than nuclear terrorism. With a tightly woven web of controls against terrorism, it can become a much lower risk. With international security threats of all kinds, if a nation like the United States makes the six-fold investment in an appropriate web of controls, it might find that halving its military spending would be responsible.

TOWARD AN EVIDENCE-BASED POLICY ON EXTREMISM

An alternative perspective on terrorism has been suggested by Peter Wilkinson of the British Health and Safety Executive: the “safety case” approach to offshore oil rig safety. The safety case idea is that instead of command-and-control inspection of oil rigs for compliance with rules, the company is asked to prepare a safety case on how it will manage the specific set of safety risks that confront a single rig – given the particular oceanographic and oil/gas production contingencies it confronts. Once approved by the state regulator, it is an offense for the company not to comply with the requirements of its own safety case. With occupational health and safety, we have evidence that commandand-control inspections of factories and mines to secure compliance with rules does improve safety, so is it responsible to abandon this in favor of a safety case regime in the absence of evidence that it will work better? Wilkinson pointed out that the disasters we try to prevent on offshore oil rigs are rare events, such as a “hundred year wave.” It 1

Frey (2004b: 5) shows deaths from international terrorism ranging between a peak of 3,250 in 2001 and 34 in 1968; in most of these years more than 20,000 people were murdered in the United States; Hoffman (2002: 7) points out fewer than 1000 Americans were killed by terrorists either in the United States or overseas in the thirty-three years prior to 9/11.

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follows that we can never have a credible evidence base for making such a policy shift. However, in a world where some airlines, some rail operators, some coal mines, and some nuclear power plants around the world adopt a safety case approach and others do not, it is possible to do systematic empirical research on the efficacy of the innovation, with matched controls where the outcomes are not major disasters, but smaller events that are known to be elements of disasters – like separation failures with aircraft, derailments, coal-mine-collapse injuries, and automated shut-downs of nuclear power plants.2 In other words, part of what regulatory research is about is assessing whether policies will work with big problems by being systematically evidence-based about how effective the policies are with smaller problems that are elements of the bigger problems. The most dangerous characters in the world are those who respond to the “what works” conundrum with big problems by substituting an ideological commitment to a totalizing theory like rational choice as a guide to what to do. Of course, most practitioners of IR are not theoretically myopic in this way. They are students of history who analyze what has happened in past in crises that have some features in common with the unique crisis that today confronts us. Then they “think in time” about how circumstances are different today from what they were then, about how features of the current crisis might cause quite a different outcome than occurred with the like crisis from the past (Neustadt and May 1986). Understanding the ebb and flow of history helps us to be wise; it does not enable us to be rigorous scientists of IR. As a patient, we would rather go to a doctor with the skills of a good clinician – who can discern what is different about our set of symptoms from the classic set in the textbook – than go to a good medical researcher. At the same time, we might not want the textbook to be written by doctors who spend all their time seeing patients. For this task we want experts who immerse themselves in the mountains of literature on the theory of disease and evidence on how to control it. We want the textbook to be evidence-based, whereas we want our doctor to be diagnostically detectivelike to come up with a treatment for our 2

I am indebted to Andrew Hopkins for bringing this point to my attention.

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particular symptoms and medical history. Like oil rigs that blow up, we die only once. But the difference is that there are millions of deaths each year for evidence-based medicine to study scientifically. Even so, we can have the benefits of a dual-track diagnostic and evidencebased regulatory policy by building our evidence base on more microincidents that are credibly constitutive of macro-disasters. Though we need the detective work of the intelligence community to diagnose specific threats of nuclear terrorism, we can also study systematically whether nuclear plants with safety case regimes have lower incidence of unaccounted loss of nuclear materials than command-and controlregimes. Figure 16.2 finds an important place for both in a prudent web of regulatory controls. The art of intelligence should be guided by an evidence base on what kind of micro-intelligence analytics are more likely to connect the diagnostic dots, and which kinds recurrently fail to illuminate the bigger picture. We want creative intelligence analysts who look at the same phenomenon through many different analytic lenses, who can see it as different things at once. But we also want analysts who know from the literature on evidence-based intelligence that certain analytic lenses promoted by intelligence charlatans recurrently distort the truth in knowable ways. Or as French President Chirac put it, explaining his disbelief in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, we need empirically educated political leaders who are wary of the history of how intelligence services “intoxicate each other” (Blix 2004: 128, 263). A difficulty with this approach is in establishing which ingredients are best targeted for small-scale work. Root cause analysis of terrorism does not have the scientific respectability and ideological neutrality that it does in health and safety (New South Wales Department of Health 2004). Conservatives like to argue that poverty is not a root cause of terrorism because most poor people do not become terrorists (Dershowitz 2002: chapter 1), whereas safety scientists are not prone to reject water as a cause of death by drowning because most people who are immersed in water do not drown. In a more fundamental challenge, Dershowitz (2002: 28) contends that “to understand and eliminate the root causes of terrorism … is exactly the wrong approach”:

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The reason terrorism works – and will persist unless there are significant changes in the responses to it – is precisely because its perpetrators believe that by murdering innocent civilians they will succeed in attracting the attention of the world to their perceived grievances and demand that the world “understand them” and “eliminate their root causes.” (Dershowitz 2002: 28)

This might make sense if what we were considering as root causes to be eliminated equated to demands to release political prisoners. But a World Bank initiative to reduce poverty that is motivated by a number of factors including a desire to reduce terrorism hardly seems to imply the Dershowitz moral hazard. The web of controls idea is that we make up for the inferiority of a micro-evidence base for macro-problems by greater redundancy in the web of controls. Let me summarize the set of empirical claims about the conditions for micro-regulatory success that we might seek to deploy for the problem of global terrorism (citing the micro-regulatory research where a more detailed case is made for each claim). 1. Success in reducing risk more likely comes from an integrated web of regulatory controls that is redundantly responsive to the multiple explanatory theories grasped as relevant to the control problem. It is less likely with a singular control strategy based on a single theory (Braithwaite 1993; Braithwaite and Drahos 2000: especially chapter 23). 2. Intelligence experts undisciplined by evidence sufficiently decisive to refute their most erroneous analyses tend to “intoxicate each other.” Just as we need doctors who do contextually wise detective work grounded in a reading of texts written by scholars with the best grasp of the theory and systematic evidence to test it, so we need terrorism intelligence that is literate in its responsiveness to regulatory theory and evidence at the same time as it is artful in its detective work (Braithwaite 1993). 3. Responsive regulation that is dynamic tends to control risks more effectively than static command-and-control regulation (such as the Benthamite deterrence of setting static expected punishments that exceed average expected benefits) (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992; Braithwaite 2002: especially chapters 1, 2 and 4; Braithwaite, 2003a).

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4. In international affairs, top-down preventive diplomacy works in limited but important ways in forestalling armed conflict (Touval and Zartman 1985, 1989). In resolution of more microforms of violence (e.g., school and workplace bullying/sexual harassment), top-down preventive diplomacy works much better when it is complemented by bottom-up restorative justice (Braithwaite 2002: chapter 3). Therefore, we might improve our effectiveness in responding to global terrorism by complementing Camp David–style elite preventive diplomacy over Palestine with bottom-up restorative justice in refugee camps that links ever-widening islands of civility there to everwidening islands of civility in Israel (Kaldor 1999; Braithwaite 2002: chapter 6). 5. In addition to the embrace of diplomacy that prevents armed conflict, states should eschew diplomacy that provokes it – as I allege the United States and the Soviet Union each did in the Middle East and Afghanistan in an attempt to embroil the other in armed conflict with third parties, including terrorists. These terrorists then came back to bite the shortsighted states that enabled their original terrorist provocations – bin Laden being an example. This means turning away from the politics of recurrently humiliating the Muslim world as playthings of major powers, in favor of a politics of dignity and respect for the social justice claims of the Muslim world. 6. Webs of controls are best when they conceive justice as holistic (Braithwaite 2002: 150–158). Social justice for blacks in South Africa creates the conditions for the restorative justice of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Tutu 1999). Procedural justice prevents violence (Tyler 1990; Braithwaite 2002); and restorative justice creates superior conditions of procedural justice (Barnes 1999). This means theorizing enlargement of democracy as enlargement of justice as non-domination (Pettit 1997). This normative theory can be refined by iterative adjustment to the explanatory theory that domination induces defiance (often accompanied by violence) (Braithwaite and Parker 1999; Braithwaite and Pettit 2000; Braithwaite 2003b).

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CONCLUSION

In the end, the theory of how to design webs of regulatory containment is less persuasive than the evidence of the failures of Bush I in the Gulf War and Bush II in the war on terrorism. These were failures of under-reaction, followed by coercive over-reaction, followed by a failure to de-escalate by decisively substituting investment in enlargement for investment in containment. These doctrines are less persuasive than the contrast of the American regulatory praxis of George Marshall: contestation of under-reaction to Hitler before World War II, prudent advocacy of escalated containment that prevented successful invasions of South Korea and Taiwan a decade later, and the visionary de-escalation of a Marshall Plan that enlarged democracy and justice as a response to the injustice of fascism. Marshall was not without flaws, such as his complicity in following the Nazis into the bombing of civilian populations on a shocking scale, even if less shocking than under Churchill’s preferences. He suffered some large diplomatic failures, such as failing to broker a peace between Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek; likewise, he failed to dissuade Truman from establishing a state of Israel in a way that would suit Stalin – through destabilizing Western influence in the Arab world. It is impossible to love the introspective general as much as Mandela’s more contagious compassion. Yet humanity owes Marshall no less homage. That homage is due because of his grasp of enlargement as well as containment, of the detailed networking of primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention that is the stuff of global security.

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Blix, H (2004) Disarming Iraq, Pantheon Books, New York. Braithwaite, J (1993) “Beyond Positivism: Learning from Contextual Integrated Strategies.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency vol 30, pp 383–399. (2002) Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, Oxford University Press, New York. (2003a) “Meta Risk Management and Responsive Regulation for Tax System Integrity.” Law and Policy vol 25, pp 1–16. (2003b) “Domination, Quiescence and Crime.” In Nagel, S. (ed) Policymaking and Peace: A Multinational Anthology, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA. Braithwaite, J & Drahos, P (2000) Global Business Regulation, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Braithwaite, J & Parker, C (1999) “Restorative Justice is Republican Justice.” In Walgrave, L & Bazemore, G. (eds) Restoring Juvenile Justice: An Exploration of the Restorative Justice Paradigm for Reforming Juvenile Justice, Criminal Justice Press, Monsey, NY. Braithwaite, J & Pettit, P (2000) “Republicanism and Restorative Justice: An Explanatory and Normative Connection.” In Strang, H & Braithwaite, J (eds) Restorative Justice: Philosophy to Practice, Ashgate Dartmouth, Aldershot. Brehm, SS & Brehm, J W (1981) Psychological Reactance: A Theory of Freedom and Control, Academic Press, New York. Chomsky, N (2001) September 11, Allen and Unwin, Crow’s Nest, NSW. Clarke, RA (2004) Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, Free Press, New York. Collier, P (2000) Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy, World Bank, Washington, DC. Cooley, JK (2000) Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Press, London. Cray , Ed (1990) General of the Army: George C. Marshall Soldier and Statesman, WW Norton, New York. Dershowitz, AM (2002) Why Terrorism Works, Yale University Press, New Haven. Fandy, M (1999) Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent, Palgrave, New York. Ferrell, RH (1966) The American Secretaries of State and their Diplomacy: Volume XV: George C. Marshall, Cooper Square Publishers, New York. Frey, BS (2004a) Dealing with Terrorism: Stick or Carrot? Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. (2004b) “Calculating Tragedy; Assessing the Costs of Terrorism.” Working Paper No. 25, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich.

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Frum, D & Perle, R (2003) An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Random House, New York. Gunaratna, R (2002) Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, Scribe Publications, Melbourne. Hoffman, B (2002) “Lessons of 9/11.” Testimony to United States Joint September 11, 2001 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence, October 8, 2002. International Institute of Strategic Studies (2003). Strategic Survey, 2002–3, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London. Kennan, GF (1947) “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs vol 25, pp 566–582. Gilligan, J (2001) Preventing Violence, Thames and Hudson, New York. Ignatieff, M (2004) The Lesser Evil, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Jacquard, R (2002) In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, Duke University Press, Durham. Kaldor, M (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Polity Press, Cambridge. Neustadt, RE & May, EA (1986) Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers, Free Press, New York. New South Wales Department of Health (2004) Checklist Flip Chart for Root Cause Analysis Teams, NSW Department of Health, Sydney. Pettit, P (1997) Republicanism. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Pilger, J (2002) The New Rulers of the World, Verso, London. Pogue, FC (1966) George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope 1939–1942, Viking Press, New York. (1973) George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory 1943–1945, Viking Press, New York. (1987) George C. Marshall: Statesman 1945–1959, Penguin, New York. Quandt, WB (2001) Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, University of California Press, Berkeley. Sherman, LW (1993) “Defiance, Deterrence and Irrelevance: A Theory of the Criminal Sanction,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency vol 30, pp 445–473. Sparrow, M (2000) The Regulatory Craft, Brookings, Washington, DC. Stoller, MA (1989) George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century, Twayne Publishers, Boston. Touval, S & Zartman, IW (1985) International Mediation in Theory and Practice, Westview Press, Boulder, Co. (1989) “Mediation in International Conflicts.” In Kressel, K & Pruitt DG (eds) Mediation Research, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Turner, JC with Hogg, MA Oakes, PJ, Reicher, SD & Wetherell, MS (1987) Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory, Basil Blackwell, London.

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Tutu, D (1999) No Future Without Forgiveness, Rider, London. Tyler, T (1990) Why People Obey the Law, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. US Congress (2004) Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, US Government Printing Service, Washington, DC. White House (2003) “Fact Sheet: Progress in the Global War on Terrorism.” The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, July 1, Washington, DC. Wilkinson, P (2000) Terrorism versus Democracy: The Liberal State Response, Frank Cass, London.

Part three

THINKING ABOUT TOMORROW

chapter seventeen

Using Open Source Data to Counter Common Myths about Terrorism Gary LaFree

There is a central irony in our approach to global terrorism: Though effective policy against terrorism depends especially on hard data and objective analysis, the study of terrorism has lagged behind many other fields in the social and behavioral sciences. In their encyclopedic review of political terrorism, Schmid and Jongman (1988, p. 177) identified more than 6,000 published works, but point out that much of the research is “impressionistic, superficial [and offers] … farreaching generalizations on the basis of episodal evidence.” More recently, Silke (2003) concludes that only 3 percent of articles in terrorism journals used inferential analysis compared to 86 percent in forensic psychology and 60 percent in criminology. Similarly, Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley’s (2006, p. 8) systematic review of over 14,000 terrorism articles published between 1971 and 2003 found that only 3 percent were based on quantitative analysis. Thus, as a result of the lack of systematic empirical research, an area that is especially in need of clear-eyed, dispassionate facts is especially susceptible to half truths and myths. The purpose of this review is to use a newly available data set on terrorist attacks around the world since 1970 to challenge ten common myths about terrorism. I use myths here in the everyday sense of fictitious or unscientific conclusions. In fairness to researchers, studying terrorism raises unique challenges. To begin with, terrorism represents a type of behavior that is especially difficult to define and measure. As PLO Chairman Arafat The author thanks Erin Miller for her assistance with the database and Gary Ackerman and Erin Miller for helpful comments.

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famously noted in a 1974 speech before the United Nations, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” For example, though the United States regards Hamas as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (United States Department of State, 2008), many Palestinians regard it as a legitimate political party that won a major democratically held election in 2006. By contrast, whereas the Chinese regard the ethnic Uyghurs that have been detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay as terrorists, much of the rest of the world appears to disagree (Washington Post, 2005). Indeed, many of the most prominent terrorist groups in the world (including Shining Path, ETA, the FMLN, the IRA, FARC, the ELN, and the PKK) often define themselves as freedom fighters. This fundamental characteristic of terrorism no doubt explains in part why international organizations such as the United Nations have not succeeded in adopting a universally accepted definition (European Commission, 2008, pp. 3–4). Defining terrorism is no less complex for researchers. Schmid and Jongman’s review (1988, p. 5) found 109 different research definitions of terrorism. Indeed, the first chapter of many influential books on terrorism (e.g., Hoffman, 1998; Smelser, 2007) is devoted to exploring and defending competing definitions. However, despite the considerable complexity, most commentators and experts agree on several key elements, captured in the operational definition we use here: “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by non-state actors to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation” (LaFree and Dugan, 2007). Note that this operational definition excludes state terrorism and genocide, topics that are important and complex enough to warrant separate treatment. Beyond the challenge of arriving at a defensible definition of terrorism is the considerable difficulty of collecting valid data on terrorism. Data on illegal violence has come traditionally from three sources, corresponding to the major social roles connected to criminal events: “official” data collected by legal agents, especially the police; “victimization” data collected from the general population of victims and nonvictims; and “self-report” data collected from offenders (LaFree and Dugan 2004, pp. 53–74). Victimization surveys have been of little use in the study of terrorism. Despite the attention it

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gets in the global media, terrorism is much rarer than more ordinary violent crime. This means that even with extremely large sample sizes, few individuals in most countries will have been victimized by terrorists. Moreover, because victims of terrorism are often chosen at random, they are unlikely to know perpetrators, making it impossible to produce details about offenders. Finally, in many cases, victims of terrorism are killed by their attackers – a problem in criminology research limited to the study of homicides. Self-report data on terrorists have been more important than victimization data, but they also face serious limitations. Most active terrorists are unwilling to participate in interviews. Even if willing to participate, getting access to known terrorists for research purposes raises obvious challenges. As Merari (1991, p. 88) has put it, “The clandestine nature of terrorist organizations and the ways and means by which intelligence can be obtained will rarely enable data collection which meets commonly accepted academic standards.” Although government departments in some countries do collect official data on terrorism (e.g., the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center), data collected by governments are suspicious either because they are influenced by political considerations or because many fear that they might be so influenced. Moreover, whereas vast amounts of detailed official data on common crimes are routinely produced by the various branches of the criminal justice system in most countries, this is rarely the case for terrorism. For example, the majority of offenders suspected of terrorism against the United States are not legally processed for terrorism, but rather for other related offenses, such as weapons violations and money laundering (Smith, Damphousse, Jackson, and Sellers, 2002). In addition, much primary data are collected by intelligence agents (e.g., informers, communications intercepts) and are not available to researchers working in an unclassified environment. In response to these data challenges, researchers have long relied on open source unclassified terrorist event databases. Terrorism event databases generally use the electronic and print media to collect detailed information on the characteristics of terrorist attacks. LaFree and Dugan (2007) describe eight of these event databases, with varying coverage going back as far as 1968. Analyses based on event databases

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have provided important insights into a wide range of terrorism-related empirical questions. However, an important limitation of most event databases is that they include only transnational events – those involving a national or a group of nationals from one country attacking targets in another country or attacking foreign targets in their home country. This is a potentially critical limitation, because sources that have compared domestic and transnational terrorist attacks (Asal and Rethemeyer, 2007; LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw, 2009; Schmid, 2004) conclude that the former outnumber the latter by as much as seven to one. Moreover, as Falkenrath (2001, p. 164) points out, dividing bureaucratic responsibility and legal authority according to a domestic-international distinction is “an artifact of a simpler, less globally interconnected era.” Groups such as al Qaeda have global operations that cut across domestic and international lines. Others (e.g., the Abu Nidal Organization or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party) operate in multiple countries and hence engage in acts of both domestic and transnational terrorism. In short, excluding domestic terrorist attacks impedes a more sophisticated understanding of terrorism and may ultimately weaken counterterrorism efforts. In this essay I present conclusions drawn from newly available data on 82,910 worldwide terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2007 from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD is to my knowledge the most comprehensive open source database on terrorist attacks assembled to date. Importantly, it is also the first unclassified event database that traces domestic as well as transnational terrorism over a prolonged time period. In the rest of this essay, I will rely on the GTD to evaluate ten myths about terrorism. These myths are centered on common misconceptions about the extent of terrorism, the sources of terrorism, the lethality of terrorism, the resilience of terrorists, and counter-terrorist interventions.

THE EXTENT OF TERRORISM

MYTH 1: Terrorist Attacks Reach Every Corner of the World The ubiquity of modern communication systems means that individuals are now routinely bombarded by images of terrorist attacks

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Table 17.1. Twenty top-ranking countries in terms of total terrorist attacks and fatalities, 1970 to 2007 Rank

Most frequently attacked Country

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Frequency

Colombia Peru El Salvador India Northern Ireland Spain Iraq Turkey Sri Lanka Pakistan Philippines Chile Israel Guatemala Nicaragua South Africa Lebanon Algeria Italy United States

6767 6038 5330 4318 3762 3165 3161 2691 2611 2536 2490 2287 2140 2023 1986 1921 1913 1650 1487 1362

Most fatalities Country Iraq Sri Lanka India Colombia Peru El Salvador Nicaragua Algeria Philippines Pakistan Guatemala Turkey Burundi Afghanistan United States Rwanda Lebanon Russia Angola Northern Ireland

Fatality count 17754 14272 13434 13009 12822 12496 11324 8545 6304 5540 5135 4674 4084 3764 3339 3200 3093 3057 2861 2842

Source : Global Terrorism Database.

from around the globe. This blanket coverage leaves the impression that no location on the planet is safe from terrorism. But in fact, our analysis of the GTD indicates that terrorist attacks are highly concentrated in geographic space. This concentration can be demonstrated at the national level by examining the proportion of all terrorist attacks that take place in those countries with the most terrorist activity. In Table 17.1 we present the top twenty countries in terms of terrorist attacks, and compare the cumulative percentage of total attacks against these countries to their share of all countries in the world. According to Table 17.1, the top twenty countries and territories in terms of terrorist attacks account for nearly 72 percent of all terrorist activities, but less than 10 percent of all countries of the world. Two percent of the world’s countries account for more than 27 percent

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of the world’s terrorist attacks. Five percent of the world’s countries account for half of the world’s terrorist attacks. Considerable concentration is also apparent if we examine terrorist attacks with smaller geospatial units. For example, in an analysis of known terrorist attacks in India from the GTD, Cutter (2005) found that the vast majority of all attacks were concentrated in just two regions: the Punjab and Kashmir region on the border with Pakistan and the area around Bangladesh. The vast majority of Indian territory suffered few terrorist attacks from 1970 until quite recently – which is one of the reasons why the 2008 attacks on Mumbai were so shocking. Similarly, in an analysis of the GTD for Germany, Behlendorf (2008) found considerable geospatial concentration of terrorist attacks at the province level. In short, terrorism, like more common crime, is highly concentrated across geographical units. MYTH 2: Terrorist Attacks were Rapidly Increasing in the Years Leading up to 9/11 The tragic events of September 11, 2001, had an immediate and dramatic impact on levels of public concern about terrorism in the United States and well beyond. Similarly, more recent attacks such as those in Madrid on March 11, 2004, in London on July 7, 2005, and in Mumbai on November 26–29, 2008, also raised concerns about terrorism among citizens, not only in the countries attacked, but from observers around the world. Accordingly, many might assume that terrorist attacks and fatalities were up sharply in the years leading up to the twenty-first century. But the GTD shows that the patterns of terrorist attacks since 1970 are more complex than is commonly recognized. Figure 17.1 shows trends in total attacks and fatalities from 1970 to 2007. According to Figure 17.1, terrorist attacks reached their twentiethcentury zenith in 1992 (with over 5,100 attacks worldwide), but had substantially declined in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.1 1

Most of the 1993 data in the GTD were lost by the original data collectors and we have never been able to recover them fully (LaFree and Dugan, 2007). Unfortunately, 1993 was a very active year for world wide terrorist attacks. For Figure 17.1 and the other trend analysis we estimate 1993 rates by taking the average value for 1992 and 1994.

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All attacks Fatal attacks

5000

Frequency

4000 3000 2000 1000

82 84 19 86 19 88 19 90 19 92 19 94 19 96 19 98 20 00 20 02 20 04 20 06 19

80

19

78

19

76

19

74

19

72

19

19

19

70

0 Number of attacks

Figure 17.1. Total and fatal terrorist attacks, 1970 through 2007 (n = 82,910). Source : Global Terrorism Database.

In fact, total attacks in 2000 (1,351) were at about the same level as total attacks in 1977 (1,307). Looking more broadly at overall trends, Figure 17.1 shows that worldwide terrorist attacks through the mid1970s were relatively infrequent, with fewer than 1,000 incidents each year. But from 1976 to 1979 the frequency of events nearly tripled. The number of terrorist attacks continued to increase until the 1992 peak, with smaller peaks in 1984, at almost 3,500 incidents, and 1989, with more than 4,300 events. After the first major peak in 1992, the number of terrorist attacks declined until the end of the twentieth century, before rising steeply to a ten-year high of nearly 3,300 in 2007 – four years after the start of the Iraq War. Still, total attacks in 2007 were 36 percent lower than total attacks for the 1992 peak. Fatal attacks also declined in the years prior to the 9/11 attacks. In fact, fatal attacks in 2000 (580) were considerably lower than they had been more than two decades earlier, in 1979 (832). In general, the number of fatal attacks clearly followed the pattern of total attacks (r =.93), but at a substantially lower magnitude (averaging 947 fatal attacks per year compared to 2,294 total attacks per year worldwide). Fatal attacks rose above 1,000 per year for the first time in 1980. After hovering close to 1,000 attacks annually for most of the 1980s, they

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more than doubled between 1985 and 1992. Like total attacks, fatal attacks declined somewhat after 1992, bottoming out in 1998 with 426 attacks, and then rising again to a global peak of more than 2,100 fatal attacks in 2007. The peak in 2007 (2,111) was similar to the peak in 1992 (2,178). In short, in the four years prior to 9/11 worldwide terrorist attacks and fatal attacks were at the lowest level they had been at for twenty years. However, both total and fatal attacks have increased considerably since then, so that in 2007 total attacks were back to levels they had been at in the mid-1990s, and total fatal attacks were approaching the peak year of 1992. MYTH 3: The United States is More Frequently Targeted by Terrorists than any Other Country in the World The United States has long been perceived as being the target of an inordinate number of terrorist attacks. Thus, Neumayer and Plumper (2008, p. 2) argue that most foreign victims of terrorist attacks are U.S. citizens, and the U.S. State Department recently claimed that one-third of all terrorist attacks worldwide are directed at the United States (Crenshaw, 2006, p. 8). However, because previous estimates of attacks against the United States have been based only on transnational terrorist attacks, they do not take into account the possibility that the groups that target the United States may be even more active in targeting their own countries. In Table 17.2 I present new data from the GTD showing the twenty most frequently attacked countries in the world, from 1970 to 2007. I also present a rank ordering of the twenty countries with the most terrorist fatalities for the same years. According to Table 17.2, the United States ranks twentieth in terms of total attacks. The most frequently attacked country in the data set is Colombia, with over 6,700 attacks. Note that the top three most frequently attacked countries are all Latin American, and three other Latin American countries are in the top twenty (Chile, Guatemala, and Nicaragua). Latin America had the largest number of terrorist attacks of any region of the world throughout the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Four Middle Eastern or Persian Gulf countries are in the top twenty (Iraq, Turkey, Israel, and Lebanon) and four are in South Asia or Southeast Asia (India, Pakistan,

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Table 17.2. Percentage of total attacks for the twenty most frequently attacked countries, 1970–2007 Rank

Country

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Colombia Peru El Salvador India Northern Ireland Spain Iraq Turkey Sri Lanka Pakistan Philippines Chile Israel Guatemala Nicaragua South Africa Lebanon Algeria Italy United States

Cumulative % of all attacks 8.16 15.44 21.87 27.08 31.62 35.44 39.25 42.49 45.64 48.70 51.71 54.46 57.05 59.49 61.88 64.20 66.51 68.50 70.29 71.93

Cumulative % of all countries 0.48 0.96 1.44 1.92 2.40 2.88 3.37 3.85 4.33 4.81 5.29 5.77 6.25 6.73 7.21 7.69 8.17 8.65 9.13 9.62

Source : Global Terrorism Database.

Sri Lanka, Philippines). Western Europe contains three countries in the top twenty (Northern Ireland [treated here as a country], Spain, and Italy). South Africa and Algeria are the sole countries from Africa in the top twenty most frequently targeted countries. Table 17.2 shows that at number fifteen, the United States ranks higher in terms of total fatalities than attacks. However, 90 percent (N = 3, 007) of total U.S. terrorism fatalities from 1970 to 2007 are accounted for by a single event – the four coordinated attacks on September 11, 2001. If these attacks are removed from the estimates, U.S. fatalities during the period spanned by the data would be similar to fatalities for Canada or Greece. In a recent study, my colleagues and I (LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw, 2009) examined the attack patterns of fifty-three foreign terrorist organizations that were identified by the U.S. Department

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45,000 90.6% (38,113)

40,000 35,000

Attacks

30,000

Fatalities 25,000 96.6% (16,346)

20,000 15,000 10,000 5,000

3.4% (570)

9.4% (3,943)

0 U.S.

Non-U.S.

Figure 17.2. U.S. and non-U.S. attacks by 53 foreign terrorist groups identified as threats to the United States. Source : LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw (2009).

of State and subsequently the National Counterterrorism Center as especially dangerous for the United States. In Figure 17.2, I show the proportion of attacks by these fifty-three groups against the U.S. homeland and U.S. targets in other countries compared to attacks on targets not connected to the United States. The results are striking. According to Figure 17.2, between 1970 and 2004 more than 96 percent of the more than 16,000 terrorist attacks from these groups were directed at non-U.S. targets. Moreover, of the 3.4 percent of all attacks directed at the United States, only five attacks (0.9 percent) were on the U.S. homeland. These include one attack by Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) on August 18, 1983 against the Washington, DC Navy Yard (Navy Regional Data Automation Center) with small explosives as well as the four attacks that occurred on September 11th, 2001.2 Major targets for anti-U.S. attacks in other countries from these fifty-three groups included U.S. businesses (233), U.S. diplomats and embassies (106), and the U.S. military (96).3 The rest of the attacks are widely scattered in 2

3

The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing was not included in the analysis because the perpetrators of the event were not affiliated with any of the fi fty-three terrorist groups identified by this study at the time the attack occurred. The GTD excludes attacks related to open combat between opposing armed forces, both regular and irregular. However, the GTD includes attacks against the military

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terms of target selection and include U.S. educational institutions, journalists, nongovernmental organizations, and tourists. The U.S. suffered proportionally more fatalities from attacks at the hands of these fifty-three groups than their non-U.S. targets, with U.S.-directed attacks accounting for over 9 percent of total fatalities. But again, a very large proportion of these fatalities (76.3 percent) are accounted for by the 9/11 attack. The fact that total attacks and fatalities by this set of designated antiU.S. organizations is so lopsidedly against non-U.S. targets is consistent with the proposition that the decision of anti-U.S. terrorist groups to attack the U.S. is often strategic. Attacks on the U.S. may be useful for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons; attacks on Americans are highly visible, and both acts of terrorism and the American response may well arouse popular emotions in an audience of importance to the terrorist organization. Also, as Crenshaw (2001) suggests, the United States may become a preferred target if domestic challengers cannot succeed at home unless the scope of the conflict is expanded beyond local boundaries. Beyond these considerations, attacks on U.S. targets can be useful for directly influencing American policies – such as compelling the U.S. to withdraw from a military commitment that supports a local government. The bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 is a prominent example. Terrorism directed at the United States may also be a mechanism for drawing it into a local conflict, perhaps to pressure the government to make reforms or to undermine its legitimacy. Regardless of the strategic intent behind attacks on the United States, or the virulence of anti-American ideology, our results show that the vast majority of terrorist attacks by foreign groups deemed dangerous to national security by the American government are in fact directed at non-U.S. targets. Local governments suffer the most. U.S. decision makers might be well advised to avoid parochialism, and keep in mind the fact that even the most seriously threatening groups direct most of their activities elsewhere. if the military is there as an internationally recognized peacekeeping force, if the attack is against military forces on leave away from their area of operation (as in the attack on the USS Cole), or if the attacks are against military personnel who are in their place of residence (LaFree and Dugan, 2007).

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40,000

92.7% (35,322)

35,000 30,000

Transnational

25,000

Domestic

20,000

93.1% (15,225)

15,000 10,000 5,000

6.9% (1,121)

7.3% (2,791)

0 Attacks

Fatalities

Figure 17.3. Total domestic and transnational attacks by 53 foreign terrorist groups identified as threats to the United States. Source : LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw (2009).

THE SOURCES OF TERRORISM

MYTH 4: Most Terrorist Attacks Involve Disgruntled Groups and Individuals from One Country Carrying Out Attacks on Civilians in Other Countries As noted earlier, because none of the open source terrorist event databases before the GTD included domestic terrorist attacks over a long time period, we have lacked baseline information about how common domestic attacks were compared to transnational attacks. In the recent study by LaFree, Yang, and Crenshaw (2009), we were able to use the GTD to examine the domestic and transnational attack patterns of the fifty-three foreign organizations that were identified by the U.S. government as especially dangerous for the United States. Figure 17.3 shows that between 1970 and 2004, more than 93 percent of the nonU.S. attacks of these groups were domestic attacks. More than nine times out of ten, these groups operated at home against local targets. These fifty-three groups are not a random sample of terrorist groups in the GTD. However, because they have been identified by the U.S. government as foreign groups that are especially dangerous to the United States, we might assume that compared to a random sample, they would be especially likely to carry out transnational attacks. The

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fact that they do not has several important policy implications. First, it underscores the importance of proximity to terrorist targeting. Even though these groups have ample interest in striking the United States, actually doing so is not an easy task. Anti-American objectives are not sufficient. Mounting an attack against the United States from primary bases outside the United States is extremely challenging. Clarke and Newman (2006, p. 154) conclude that “Terrorists are constrained by geography. Like criminals, they will choose targets that are close to their operational base.” And second, the ratio of transnational to domestic attacks likely reflects challenges faced by attackers due to cultural and linguistic barriers. Foreign attackers typically encounter an environment in which they have an imperfect understanding of local language, culture, and daily life. This impediment may explain why recent research by Smith and Damphousse (2009) shows that international terrorist attacks against the United States have a much longer planning time horizon than attacks by domestic groups. To overcome cultural and linguistic obstacles, foreign attackers will probably be more likely than domestic attackers to rely on immigrant communities or diasporas within the target country. Similar reasoning leads Clarke and Newman (2006, p. 143) to conclude that “externally based terrorists will mount their attacks from locations that are as close as possible to the target.” Put in another way, foreign terrorist groups need locals. Thus, a recent report by the U.S. State Department (2008) stresses the importance to al Qaeda of local recruits, especially in the West. More generally, the results underscore both the atypicality and the lethal ingenuity of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda was able to engineer 9/11 without using locals, but instead relied on specially trained and highly qualified foreign operatives. Thus far the ability to commandeer such assets has been exceedingly rare. MYTH 5: Terrorism is Unrelated to Traditional Political Grievances Because of the seeming irrationality of high-profile al Qaeda attacks in recent years, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that a large number of terrorist attacks involve political disputes over territory. In Table 17.3 we list the twenty most active terrorist groups in terms of attack frequencies and fatalities. This analysis is based on a study by

Table 17.3. Twenty most active terrorist organizations in terms of attack frequency and fatalities, 1970 to 2006 424

Rank

Most frequent perpetrators Organization

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Shining Path (SL) Basque Fatherland and Freedom (ETA) Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) Irish Republican Army (IRA) Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) National Liberation Army of Colombia (ELN) Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement)

Most fatalities Frequency Organization

Fatality count

2817 1378 1249

Shining Path (SL) Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Al Qaeda

6057 4038 3460

1165 1066

Hutus Mozambique National Resistance Movement (MNR) Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Tanzim Qa’idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) New People’s Army (NPA) Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Hizballah Taliban Tutsi Armed Islamic Group (GIA) Irish Republican Army (IRA) National Liberation Army of Colombia (ELN)

3222 2247

784 608

8 9 10

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) Kurdish Workers Party (PKK)

569 568 535

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

New People’s Army (NPA) Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC) Taliban Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (CPN-M) M-19 (Movement of April 19) Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) People’s Liberation Front (JVP) Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) (Chile)

472 455 438 412 403 321 287 274 257

1856 1791 1646 1342 1151 1084 1071 1060 899 876 858 807 728 646

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LaFree and Dugan (2009) in which we analyzed both the GTD and an event database collected by the RAND Corporation. Notice how many of these groups are organized around disputes having to do with political control over territory. Although there are major differences in terms of their orientation, this explains in large part the motivations of virtually all of the top twenty groups, including Shining Path, ETA, the IRA, FARC, Hamas, and the LTTE. South Africa is an especially striking example of this phenomenon. Both pro- and anti-apartheid terrorist attacks in South Africa resulted in an enormous amount of political violence during much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in an analysis of terrorist attacks in South Africa using GTD data, Van Brakle and LaFree (2007) found that violence ended rapidly following the first democratic elections at the end of apartheid. In fact, a major reason why it is so difficult to develop a universal definition of terrorism is that it is often a method used to advance political goals on which nations and individuals disagree.

THE LETHALITY OF TERRORISM AND THE RESILIENCE OF TERRORIST GROUPS

MYTH 6: Most Terrorist Attacks are Incredibly Lethal Again, because highly lethal terrorist strikes are the ones that grab the headlines, it is easy to suppose that most terrorist attacks are incredibly lethal. In Figure 17.4 we examine total fatalities attributed to the 82,910 attacks in the GTD. According to Figure 17.4, more than half of all terrorist attacks since 1970 (where information was available) involved no fatalities. Many incidents are directed at property. Others attacks are aimed at civilians, but they fail. Furthermore, in many other cases terrorist groups provide a warning to civilians before striking. This has been a common practice for ETA and the IRA, and used to be a common practice for the Weather Underground. Thirty years ago these considerations led terrorism researcher Brian Jenkins (1975) to suggest that “terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” Of course, it is still the case that 45 percent of the attacks in the GTD (or more than 34,000 attacks) involved at least one fatality. Incidents

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Melee 1.98%

Chemical 0.26%

Other 0.37%

Incendiary 7.65%

Unknown 9.84% Explosives/Bombs/ Dynamite 43.68%

Firearms 36.22%

Figure 17.4. Weapons used in terrorist attacks, 1970 through 2007 (n = 82,910). Source : Global Terrorism Database.

that are especially worrisome are the 1.5 percent (or 1,138) that produced more than twenty-five fatalities. In fact, Jenkins (2007) has recently revisited his earlier statement, and after reviewing the stated plans of terrorist groups operating in the early twenty-first century concluded that indeed “many of today’s terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead.” But nevertheless, the majority of terrorist attacks since 1970 produced no fatalities. MYTH 7: Most Terrorist Attacks Rely on Sophisticated Weaponry Terrorism-related plots in the electronic and print media are often portrayed as incredibly complex operations relying on split-second timing and intricate weaponry. These images no doubt encourage us to think that most terrorist strikes depend on sophisticated weaponry. In Figure 17.5 we show the weapons used in terrorism attacks from the GTD from 1970 to 2007.

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60.00 50.00

Percent

40.00 30.00 20.00 10.00 0.00 0

1 2 to 4 5 to 10 11 to 25 Number of fatalities per attack

over 25

Figure 17.5. Total fatalities per terrorist attack, 1970–2007 (n = 82,910*). * Data on fatalities were missing in 8.1% of cases. Source : Global Terrorism Database.

Contrary to the view of terrorism that we commonly get from the media, the vast majority of terrorist attacks rely on readily accessible weapons. According to Figure 17.5, the most common weapons in the GTD database were explosives and firearms. These two categories account for nearly 80 percent of all attacks. For the most part, the explosives used were readily available, especially dynamite, grenades, mortars, and improvised devices placed inside vehicles (“car bombs”). Similarly, the most common firearms were also widely available, including especially automatic weapons, shotguns, and pistols. After explosives and firearms, incendiaries (fire or firebombs) account for nearly 8 percent of the incidents. Melee attacks, which include assaults with weapons such as blunt objects, knives, and ropes, account for fewer than 2 percent of all attacks. Weapons included in the “other” category were diverse, including items such as sabotage equipment, vehicles (not vehicle-borne explosives), biological, radiological, and fake weapons. Among the more sophisticated weapon types were 523 attacks using remote-detonated devices, 213 attacks using chemical agents, 26 attacks involving biological agents, and 15 attacks involving radiological materials. Note that chemical agents were responsible for about one quarter of 1 percent of all incidents, and biological

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and radiological agents were each present in less than three–one hundredths of 1 percent of all attacks. The remote-detonated devices were usually left on the roadside or attached to vehicles. Sometimes they were planted in packages and detonated at strategic locations. Chemical agents range from letters containing rat poison to tainted water supplies. Ten of the twenty-six biological weapons cases were the U.S. anthrax attacks of 2001 – in which seven people died. Likewise, ten of the fifteen cases involving radiological materials were related to attacks in which an individual sent envelopes containing monazite to Japanese government officials, causing no injuries. Terrorism is the tool of the poor and the weak. It is used precisely because the groups involved do not have a lot of sophisticated weaponry. If they did, they would probably use it in more conventional military ways. Typical terrorist attacks use readily available weapons. In contrast to high-profile media reports, sophisticated weapons, including chemical, biological, or radiological materials, are the rare exception. MYTH 8: Most Terrorist Organizations are Long Lasting and Difficult to Eradicate Given the persistence of high profile, long-lasting groups like al Qaeda, the Tamil Tigers, or the Irish Republican Army, there is also a common perception that most terrorist groups have long life spans. The GTD identifies more than 1,500 separate terrorist groups. We gauged their longevity by the amount of time from their first strike to their last. In Figure 17.6 I show the average length of time these organizations have mounted attacks, based on a recently completed analysis of an earlier version of the GTD (LaFree, 2008). According to Figure 17.6, nearly 75 percent of the terrorist organizations identified in the GTD from 1970 to 1997 lasted for less than a year. These results suggest that most terrorist groups are like most business start-ups – very likely to disappear during their first year of operation. Forming and maintaining groups is not all that easy, despite impressions to the contrary from the media. Why do we have the impression that terrorist groups are long lasting and difficult to eradicate? Probably because we hear so much about the groups that are successful. But for every al Qaeda and ETA, there are many more

using open source data to counter common myths 80.00%

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74.72%

70.00% 60.00% 50.00% 40.00% 30.00% 20.00%

14.77%

10.00%

4.62%

4.62%

6 to 10

11 to 20

0.00% Less than 1

1 to 5

1.26% over 20

Figure 17.6. Years of operation for terrorist groups, 1970–1997. Source : Global Terrorism Database.

short-lived, relatively unknown groups such as the Anti-Capitalist Brigades and the Revolutionary Flames.

COUNTERTERRORISM

MYTH 9: Terrorist Groups are Impervious to Governmental Counterterrorist Policies and Rarely Make Mistakes Just as some researchers and policy makers are overly optimistic about the abilities of governments to use deterrence measures to stop terrorist groups, other researchers and policy makers are overly pessimistic about the chances that terrorist organizations will make mistakes and miscalculations that can be exploited. Although research on the desistance of terrorist groups has been neglected, the topic has been receiving increased research attention in recent years (Cronin, 2008; Jones and Libicki, 2008; for a review, see LaFree and Miller, 2009). My colleagues and I (Dugan, Huang, LaFree, and McCauley, 2009) recently used the GTD to examine the targeting strategies of two terrorist groups that were based in Turkey, and were especially active during the 1970s and 1980s: the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG). At the end of the First World War,

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Government actions

Deterrence

Backlash 1.212

Falls Curfew

0.942

Internment

Operation motorman

–0.671

Criminalization/ Ulsterization

Backlash Deterrence

0.537

The Loughall Incident

0.083

The Gibraltar Incident

0.178 –1

–0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

Figure 17.7. Violent attacks in Northern Ireland, 1969–1992. Source : LaFree, Dugan, and Korte (2009).

the Armenian diaspora included roughly 1.4 million people in thirtyfour countries. Armenians worldwide had been traumatized by the brutal attacks that killed approximately one million Armenians in Turkey in 1915. Fifty years after these mass attacks, many Armenians felt considerable impatience with their traditional leadership groups who had been unable to advance recognition of the attacks, let alone advance national liberation for Armenians remaining in Turkey and the USSR. This discontent laid the foundation for ASALA and JCAG. In Figure 17.7, I show total terrorist attacks committed by ASALA and JCAG from 1975 to 1988 from the GTD. Figure 17.7 shows a dramatic increase in attacks by both groups, peaking in 1980 for JCAG and 1981 for ASALA. Following these peaks, attack levels fall off dramatically, especially for ASALA. Whereas ASALA staged fortysix attacks in 1981, by 1984 the annual total had dropped to only five attacks, and four years later, ASALA had stopped attacking altogether. Though JCAG never had as many attacks as ASALA, the number of attacks launched by JCAG also fell dramatically after 1982. Our goal in this research project was to figure out what explained the sudden desistance in violent attacks of ASALA and JCAG after the early 1980s. After modeling many possible explanations for this sudden desistance, our conclusion was that the most convincing explanation was a strategic shift by ASALA in its targeting strategy. Before the early

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1980s, ASALA was careful to target Turks and avoided non-Turkish and especially Armenian casualties. However, starting in the early 1980s, they became far less discriminate in their targeting methods. The pivotal historical event in our analysis was an especially brutal attack on Paris’s Orly Airport in 1983. An explosive device detonated prematurely in the terminal area by the Turkish Airlines counter, killing eight people (four French, two Turkish, one American, one Swedish) and wounding over fifty more. The expansion of increasingly inept attacks such as the one at Orly created a polarized and hostile climate within ASALA and in Armenian perceptions of ASALA. We concluded that this change in targeting strategy seriously undermined the legitimacy of ASALA among its supporters in the Armenian diaspora and in the West. Interestingly, although JCAG was not involved in the Orly bombing, and in general had a much more disciplined approach to the use of terrorist violence, JCAG attacks also declined rapidly following Orly. These results suggest that when a terrorist organization that depends heavily on a diaspora overreaches in terrorist targeting, it may offer a strong opening for discrediting terrorism as a tactic, even discrediting terrorist groups that have not overreached. Perhaps the most general lesson from ASALA’s rise and fall is a perspective on terrorist motivation. Most terrorists want to mobilize and lead others to support their cause. Terrorists who claim to represent an ethnic or communal group want to mobilize and lead their own people in preserving communal culture and values. Therefore, the most important audience of terrorist activity may often not be the enemy target of attacks, but rather the terrorists’ own sympathizers and supporters. Any terrorist group that loses sight of its major audience is vulnerable. MYTH 10: To be Effective Against Terrorism, Governments Must Strike Back Rapidly and Forcefully The belief that the credible threat of severe punishment deters crime and other objectionable behavior is as old as criminal law itself, and has broad appeal to both policy makers and the public. Deterrence models generally assume that human beings are rational, self-interested actors who seek to minimize personal cost while maximizing personal gain (Paternoster, 1987; Ross and LaFree, 1986). An

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important implication of such perspectives is that individual behavior can be altered by the threat and imposition of severe punishment. Deterrence models have been applied to a wide variety of criminal behavior, including drunk driving (Nagin and Paternoster, 1993), burglary (Wright and Decker, 1994), robbery (Wright and Decker, 1997), shoplifting (Piquero and Tibbetts, 1996), income-tax evasion (Klepper and Nagin, 1989), drug selling (Jacobs, 1996), and whitecollar crimes (Paternoster and Simpson, 1996; Simpson, Piquero, and Paternoster, 1998). Deterrence models would seem to be especially appropriate for understanding terrorist violence, given that many terrorist attacks are carefully planned and appear to include at least some consideration for risks and rewards. Indeed deterrence-based thinking has dominated counterterrorist policies in most countries since the origins of modern terrorism in the late 1960s (Braithwaite, 2005; Collins, 2004; Frey and Luenchinger, 2002), and there is substantial research support for the argument that deterrence-based policies can reduce terrorist violence (Clarke and Newman, 2006; Dugan, LaFree, and Piquero, 2005; Enders and Sandler, 2006). However, research on terrorism (McCauley, 2006; Nevin, 2003), and more generally, research from criminology (Braithwaite, 2005; Pridemore and Freilich, 2007; Sherman, 1993) and psychology (Brehm and Brehm, 1981; Tyler, 1990) suggests that the threat and/ or imposition of punishment does not always deter future acts of violence, and may in some cases, actually increase violence. Thus, it is useful to contrast deterrence effects (i.e., the extent to which government threats or imposition of punishment reduces the future incidence of prohibited behavior) from backlash effects (i.e., the extent to which government threats or imposition of punishment increases the future incidence of prohibited behavior). Researchers (Atran, 2003; Crenshaw, 2002; Higson-Smith, 2002) have long argued that terrorists frequently rely on the response of governments to mobilize the sympathies of would-be supporters. To the extent that government-based counterterrorist strategies outrage participants or energize a base of potential supporters, such strategies may result in a backlash that increases the likelihood of further terrorist strikes. Sharp (1973) refers to this phenomenon as “jujitsu politics,” and McCauley (2006) points out that because of this

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principle, responses to terrorism can be more dangerous than terrorism itself. Thus, according to Benjamin and Simon (2005, p. 21), Osama bin Laden’s decision to authorize the September 11 attacks was animated in large part by the belief that American retaliation would inevitably kill innocents and thereby demonstrate the extent of American hatred toward Muslims. More generally, there is an extensive psychological literature supporting the conclusion that under the right circumstances, punishment may elicit increases in proscribed behavior. Thus, in their formulation of reactance theory, Brehm and Brehm (1981, p. 4) argue that when an individual or group is threatened with some new form of social control they are immediately motivated to act to eliminate this control and restore their original freedom. Relatedly, much psychological literature (Duckitt and Fisher, 2003; LeVine and Campbell, 1972) suggests that threats from out-groups generally increase the cohesion of in-groups, and also the pressure on in-group deviants to conform and to support in-group leaders. Criminology literature also provides some support for backlash models. Thus, early labeling theorists (Becker, 1963; Tannenbaum, 1938) pointed out that punishment leads to identity changes in individuals as well as social changes in society that result in criminal offenders increasing their deviant behavior following their official labeling – a concept Lemert (1951, p. 77) famously referred to as “secondary deviance.” Sherman (1993) has argued that whether punishment results in deterrence will depend on whether offenders experience sanctioning as legitimate, the social bonds between the sanctioning agent and the individuals or groups being sanctioned, and the extent to which offenders can deny their shame by seeking support from others in the community. Support for the conclusion that punishment is more likely to be seen as legitimate by the punished when the punishment is perceived to be procedurally fair is supplied in several survey-based studies by Tyler (2000; for a review, see Tyler, 2006). My colleagues and I recently used GTD data (LaFree, Dugan, and Korte, 2009) to contrast deterrence and backlash perspectives based on the efforts of the British to stop terrorist violence in Northern Ireland committed by the Irish Republican Army and their allies. Based on a region about the size of Connecticut, with a population

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50

Terrorism activity

45

ASALA

40

JCAG

Incidents

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 Year

Figure 17.8. Attacks by ASALA and JCAG, 1975 to 1988. Source : Dugan, Huang, LaFree, and McCauley (2009).

of about 650,000, the republicans launched nearly continuous strikes from the 1960s through the early 1990s that made Northern Ireland the most politically violent region in the European Community (later the Union) during this period. We identified six high-profile counterterrorist interventions used by the British from 1969 to 1992 to reduce republican violence in Northern Ireland, and then we used statistical tests to determine whether the future risk of attacks during this period increased, decreased, or remained the same after each of the major interventions. Figure 17.8 shows that the results of these British interventions were more consistent with backlash than deterrence explanations. Three of the six British interventions produced significantly higher risks of future terrorist strikes by republicans and two interventions had no significant effects. The five interventions that were either followed by no change in terrorist strikes or significantly more terrorist strikes included two targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders (Loughall and Gibralter incidents), attempts to treat terrorists more like common criminals than politically motivated activists (criminalization), a military curfew (Falls), and a partial suspension of due-process rights for those suspected of terrorism (internment). The only clear-cut

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support for deterrence among these six interventions was the use of a major military surge called Operation Motorman, which significantly reduced the risk of new attacks. This is not the only study of terrorism to identify backlash effects. The basic finding that the imposition of harsh criminal justice and military interventions to reduce terrorism may well be counterproductive has been found in a wide variety of countries and under varying political circumstances (Collins, 2004; Geraghty, 2000; Kenney, 2003; Lichbach, 1987; Malvesti, 2002; Nevin, 2003; Soule, 1989; Turk, 2002). Given the evidence that deterrence-based thinking with regard to terrorism is often demonstrably unsuccessful, we must ask ourselves why it remains the most common reaction of governments to terrorist threats. One obvious answer is that governments that experience terrorist strikes face tremendous pressure to take some action, and oftentimes there appear to be few obvious alternatives to harsh military or criminal justice interventions. The British began experimenting with a variety of counterterrorist strategies after their forces moved into Northern Ireland in 1969. Only one of the interventions we examined showed signs of significantly reducing risks of more republican violence. I hasten to add that this is a case study. We do not know whether government counterterrorist strategies have had similar effects in other regions of the world, on different groups or individuals, or indeed, even in this region of the world during different time periods. Nevertheless, our results strongly suggest that in terms of the operation of the IRA in Northern Ireland at least, many deterrence-based measures adopted by the British either had no effect on future terrorist strikes or actually increased their likelihood. We need a lot more careful analysis of the deterrent and backlash effects of various counterterrorist strategies in different countries and contexts.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Historically, terrorism and its consequences have not been major specialization areas for researchers in the social and behavioral sciences. This could be regarded as a dangerous omission given that terrorists frequently try to exploit fear and provoke emotional rather

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than rational reactions. Social researchers can help sort out these complex forces; there are indications in recent years that they are in fact more engaged. Terrorism research solicitations by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the Bureau of Justice Administration, as well as the creation of the Department of Homeland Security’s Centers of Excellence program, have all strengthened support for social scientific studies of terrorism and responses to terrorism. The Minerva program (Washington Post, 2008), funded by the Department of Defense, promises to increase further levels of support. Moreover, spurred by brutal attacks such as the Madrid and London bombings, funding of social science research on terrorism and responses to terrorism has also expanded greatly in Europe (Eder and Senn, 2008). Several of the myths discussed in this paper could be more easily summarized as “the myth of the super-terrorist.” This would apply to the assumption that terrorist attacks are ubiquitous (myth 1), use sophisticated weaponry (myth 7), and are incredibly lethal (myth 6), and that terrorist groups are always long lasting (myth 8) and never make strategic errors (myth 9). As we have seen, terrorist attacks are highly concentrated in geographical space, rely to a large extent on readily available, unsophisticated weaponry, and frequently involve few or no fatalities. The typical terrorist group disappears in less than a year, and there is ample evidence that terrorists frequently make strategic errors. What makes terrorism so incredibly challenging is precisely the asymmetric weakness of its perpetrators. A half century ago, William Wolf (1957) drew this comparison memorably in an essay about the possible impact of a wasp on a speeding automobile with four passengers. If a wasp that flies into the window of a moving car causes a driver to lose control and crash, an insect weighing less than half an ounce, armed with a tiny syringe containing a drop of irritant, can take the lives of four people and convert a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap. Thus, “action and reaction can be ridiculously out of proportion” (p. 33). The exceptional originality of the 9/11 attacks are directly connected to several of the other myths discussed here, including the perception that attacks were rapidly increasing just before 9/11 (myth 2), the perception that the United States is the most likely country to

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be targeted by terrorists (myth 3), and the assumption that most terrorist attacks involve disgruntled groups from one country attacking civilians in another country (myth 4). The 9/11 attacks likely do represent a watershed of sorts – the end of the wave of primarily MarxistLeninist-inspired terrorism that dominated the world until a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of transnational jihadi-style terrorism that began in the 1990s and rose dramatically following the 9/11 attacks. As we have seen, there are many strategic reasons why the United States makes a good target for terrorist attacks. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that at least up until this point in history, the vast majority of terrorism has been carried out by domestic groups on local targets. This leaves myth 10, the assumption that deterrence measures are universally the best response to terrorism. At present there is very little extant literature on categorizing and measuring counterterrorism policies and efforts. But from the research that does exist, there is ample evidence to suggest that striking back forcefully does not always achieve the hoped-for policy objectives, and may trigger backlash effects that make things considerably worse. Sorely needed are more sophisticated analyses of countermeasures according to a taxonomy that spans the lifecycle of terrorist groups and events, from addressing grievances and countering ideological radicalization to deterring attacks and punishing perpetrators. Objective research on terrorism is especially critical, because policy in this area is likely to be driven – even more than with common acts of violence – by exceptional cases. We need to guard against what Thomas Schelling (1962) described many years ago as “a routine obsession with a few dangers that may be familiar rather than likely.” Social science research can help.

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chapter eighteen

Criminal Justice and Terrorism A Research Agenda Brian Forst

INTRODUCTION

Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld observed – just a year after the 9/11 attack – that a sea change had occurred in politics since the attack, but very little had changed in the field of criminology. His case was compelling: Though terrorism differs from crime in one fundamental way – it involves violence for an ideological cause rather than for personal gain – criminologists should study it nonetheless because it shares many other elements with crime, and criminologists may be able to apply their frameworks for analysis fruitfully to terrorism. He added that studying terrorism might even make criminology richer. The contributors to this anthology have demonstrated that we accept Rosenfeld’s argument, and we are not alone. Terrorism courses have emerged in criminal justice and criminology programs throughout much of the academy, and criminologists are engaging increasingly in research on terrorism. Much in the manner that a political scientist (James Q. Wilson), an industrial engineer (Alfred Blumstein), and an economist (Gary Becker) expanded the way we think about crime and analyzed it in the late 1960s, forty years later criminologists from different disciplines and with different skill sets are taking up Rosenfeld’s challenge, and thinking about terrorism in ways that are usefully informed by our understanding of violence and its basic elements. We have learned that terrorism is indeed different from crime in important ways, but that it shares essential features that cannot be ignored either by those aiming to enrich our field, or by those wishing to contribute to the public policy debate about how to prevent 443

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and respond to the problem. Acts of terrorism are, after all, virtually always criminal acts too, and they warrant no less attention as a class than do such criminological staples as domestic violence, organized crime, hate crime, and drug crimes. Acts of terrorism have occurred less frequently than other crimes, but they have proven to be no less profound in the public’s awareness, in media accounts, and in politics. We may wish that it received less media and political attention – if only to reduce its appeal – but that it gets so much is reason enough to give it more scholarly attention. Much as the study of crime was largely a subspecialty of sociology in the 1960s, the study of terrorism was, until recently, a subject of study mostly for political scientists, including Martha Crenshaw, Walter Laqueur, and Robert Pape. Then, following Rosenfeld’s urging, criminologist Mathieu Deflem edited an anthology, Terrorism and CounterTerrorism: Criminological Perspectives (2004), with essays by Gregg Barak, Bonnie Berry, Donald Black, Laura Dugan, Gary LaFree, Rosenfeld, and others. LaFree and his criminologist colleagues at the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism have written much on terrorism (e.g., LaFree and Dugan; LaFree and Hendrickson; Rausch and LaFree) and have assembled the Global Terrorism Database, an open-source data set with information on some 75,000 terrorist events internationally since 1970 – as discussed in the previous chapter. As they continue to grow the database, they are making the data available to other scholars to help better understand terrorist violence. This anthology provides further evidence of a deep, continuing interest. Scan any recent meeting program of the annual American Society of Criminology or European Society of Criminology, and you will find other criminologists contributing to our collective understanding of terrorism as well. Social scientists from other disciplines are weighing in fruitfully too. In 2003, sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer produced Terror in the Mind of God; the following year, psychologist Marc Sageman gave us Understanding Terror Networks (2004); and in 2006, economists Walter Enders and Todd Sandler wrote The Political Economy of Terrorism. Like crime, terrorism calls for eclectic perspectives, and there’s a place at this table for criminologists.

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LESSONS LEARNED: DEFINITIONS ARE NEEDED, AND SO IS FLEXIBILITY

How, then, can criminologists and criminal justice scholars contribute to the collective understanding of terrorism, and to the prospect of shaping interventions to prevent it? We can do so, first, by understanding basics: how terrorism is a unique form of aggression and crime, and how it is distinguishable from other forms of aggression – especially, street crime, war, and insurgency. It is essential also to consider different types of terrorism and the settings within which each type manifests. The preceding chapters have contributed to this goal. But the problem of terrorism is in many ways more challenging than that of crime and justice. Terrorism is a crime, but it is more, and one cannot say precisely how much more, because its boundaries are vague. Crime is defined by the law, and whereas some crimes, like marijuana use, make for problems at the margins of legality, these pale in comparison to those presented by our having to choose among the literally hundreds of available definitions of terrorism. We can say at least that terrorists are fundamentally different from criminals in one important respect: They generally do acts of aggression in the name of causes – political, religious, and other – beyond their own self-interest. A review of the definitions used by the contributors to this and other works on terrorism make clear, first, that there is no single, precise definition of terrorism with which all authorities will agree. Given the complexity of terrorism and the fact that it is not clearly defined by law, as are other categories of crime, we have resisted trying to find a single definition acceptable to all scholars and practitioners. Among the definitions that have been presented in this volume and elsewhere, some ignore threats; some focus on harms to human life and ignore property; some ignore attacks on military or government targets, regarding those as acts of insurgency or guerrilla warfare; definitions vary as to what constitutes a noncombatant (e.g., a few regard taxpayers who help to provide financial support for objectionable government acts as collaborators and legitimate targets); some include acts of “ethnic cleansing” that are motivated strictly by hatred and lacking in

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any coherent political objective; some exclude acts committed by sovereign states against their own people, regarding these as acts of brutal tyranny rather than terrorism; some hold that terrorism requires elements of secrecy and surprise, to ensure that the act shocks a target population; others distinguish their definition of terrorism by calling it a tactic or strategy rather than an ideology or other conventional “ism” – a definition that draws attention to ill-conceived political campaigns to wage unwinnable “wars on terrorism” (Forst, 2009). In Chapter 1 we started with a simple characterization of terrorism: “the use of force against innocent people, usually with a political or religious motive, and typically aimed at producing widespread fear.” If we must settle on a single definition, my nomination would be for one that is a bit more nuanced, which I have used elsewhere (Forst, 2009): Terrorism is the premeditated and unlawful use or threatened use of violence against a noncombatant population or target having symbolic significance, with the aim of either inducing political or religious change through intimidation and destabilization or destroying a population identified as an enemy.

LESSONS LEARNED: INTERACTIONS AND TYPOLOGIES OF TERRORISM

Interactions are an inconvenient reality in criminological research. Cause–effect relationships among variables of primary interest often depend on the levels of other variables. Arrest has been found to be an effective deterrent for employed domestic assault offenders, for example, but not for unemployed batterers (Sherman, 1992). Similarly, rehabilitation programs tend to be more effective for offenders who are ready to conform to social norms than for those who are not (Laub and Sampson, 2006). We ordinarily address this issue theoretically by identifying typologies of offending behaviors that vary by category of offender and victim, type of crime, situation, and so on.1 This should be the case as well for terrorism. One would expect, 1

We address the issue empirically using interaction terms if the effects are relatively fi xed and by estimating separate multivariate equations for different levels of key mediating factors when the effects vary with those variables.

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for example, that policies that are effective in breaking up terrorist networks will be of little help in solving “lone-wolf” terrorism, and that state-sponsored terrorism is likely to call for political rather than criminological solutions. Given the virtually infinite variety of circumstances that shape terrorist events, every group or act that fits any conventional definition of terrorism is unique, usually in several respects. Still, there are generic dimensions that distinguish various terrorists, terrorist groups, and terrorist acts from most others. Particular acts of terrorism fall invariably into any of a variety of categories, including the following: * whether or not politically motivated. * whether the group or individual committing the act operated under state authority. * nature and extent of association with larger terrorist organizations or networks. * size and extent of organization and planning. * whether justified in religious or ethnic terms. * whether aimed primarily at people or at symbolic targets (as with ecoterrorism). * types of people targeted. * lethality – extent of the harms inflicted. Each terrorist event can usually be characterized conveniently and usefully in terms of particular combinations of these and sometimes other dimensions. We classify in this way for two reasons. We do so for analytic purposes, intending to create a taxonomy that identifies variables that interact with policy options, and that produces greater variation of behaviors between the categories for any dimension than within particular categories. And we do so for policy purposes, recognizing that different kinds of problems call for different tools and interventions. For example, solutions to the problem of state-sponsored terrorism are more likely to be found through the lens of political science than through that of criminology, and solutions to the problem of identifying a lone-wolf serial terrorist are more likely to be found through the lenses of psychology and forensic science than through that of sociology. Much work remains to be done to refine the taxonomies on both the analytic and policy fronts, to link a variety

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of theoretical perspectives and emerging data sets to discrete types of events, motives, organizations, and outcomes.

LESSONS LEARNED: THE BARRIERS TO EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON TERRORISM ARE FORMIDABLE

One cannot help but notice the paucity of systematic empirical evidence on terrorism, as Gary LaFree and others have noted in previous chapters. To a much greater degree than for street crime, terrorism defies statistical analysis for several reasons. First, though terrorism cases may share the property of having a political motive,2 they are a heterogeneous stew that varies by type of extremism (Islamic, Christian fundamentalist, environmental, antiglobalization, etc.), whether connected to a larger network, extent of planning, weapon of choice, or other distinguishing factors. These subcategories of terrorism are as diverse as the major crime categories are different from one another. One cannot seriously consider either the causes of terrorism or successful counterterrorism strategies in such heterogeneous aggregates. Terrorism is difficult to analyze empirically for a second reason: Terrorists, to a greater degree than other criminals, tend to operate in unpredictable ways, aiming to create fear and turmoil, and relying on surprise to achieve both. When terrorist screening protocols used in the months after the 9/11 attack ignored women as suicide bombers, terrorists responded by enlisting women to participate in suicide bombings (see Simon and Tranel, this volume). To the extent that terrorists operate intentionally outside of predictable patterns to exploit elements of fear and uncertainty, such patterns are less likely to show up in the data. Terrorism is more difficult to analyze than other crimes for a third reason: We simply do not have enough reliable data on cases of each major type of terrorism to provide a basis for statistical inference along the lines that parallel the analysis of conventional criminal justice data. That there have been too few terrorist cases on American 2

We say “may” because some acts that for many authorities qualify as terrorism, such as genocide and hate killings, have a dubious political motive.

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soil to permit empirical analysis is a blessing for those of us who care first and foremost about the well-being of our loved ones, but it is a curse for empiricists interested in understanding terrorism.

PROSPECTS FOR RESEARCH ON TERRORISM

So much for barriers in the way of empirical analysis of terrorism. Let us turn now to the brighter side – prospects for criminologists to contribute to our understanding of terrorism. Criminologists have weighed in frequently with evidence about crime and interventions that has advanced the discussion of public policies and led to improvement. Research on community policing, intermediate sanctions, and reentry from prison programs serve as prominent examples. This will be more difficult to accomplish for terrorism, for the reasons noted. Empirical evidence can and should inform counterterrorism policy nonetheless. An abundance of opportunities remain for criminologists to make a difference in shaping more effective and just counterterrorism policies by making good use of data that are reliable and relevant. When the evidence is insufficient, we do the best we can with theory, indirect evidence, and common sense. Our goal is to explore research prospects that can provide insights into the development of sound policies for preventing terrorism, and for responding to it when our efforts at prevention fail. I see several prospects for achieving this goal, including the adaptation of crime prevention models to the problem of terrorism, the estimation of social costs associated with terrorism and counterterrorism policies, research into the fear of terrorism, and a miscellany of other topics. Let us look at each of these. Adapting Crime Prevention Models to Terrorism One major area in which we can contribute to the conversation on terrorism is in reshaping models for crime prevention that are applicable as well to terrorism. Several models have clear relevance to the prevention of terrorism, including the routine activities theory, randomized mixed strategies from the theory of games, and military gaming and simulation models.

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The routine activities theory (or opportunity theory) provides a platform for thinking about the prevention of terrorism even in the absence of empirical evidence. Opportunities for terrorism and other predatory crimes can exist only when there are willing offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of adequate guardians to protect the targets from the offenders (Cohen and Felson, 1979). If any one of these three components is not present or is unmet in a particular situation, there will be no opportunity for terrorism. This theory can help to inform the development of commonsense situational controls in determining how to allocate scarce guardianship resources toward the prevention of crime – even without valid empirical estimates. On the willing-offenders side, it suggests a need to focus on the surveillance of extremists and to target individuals and groups known to have ties with terrorists. Routine activities theory could help as well in developing a system of weights to drive the allocation of target-hardening and protective resources to accessible targets, in order to maximize the effectiveness of these resources (Clarke and Newman, 2006). Routine activities theory suggests, moreover, that fear-reduction strategies may be useful for making terrorist targets less attractive. In his chapter on routine activities theory and terrorism, James Lynch, though sober about the prospects for routine activities to help in preventing terrorism generally, nonetheless urges closer scrutiny of the relationship between opportunity reduction and the fear of terrorism – specifically, that it will be more useful to focus on opportunity-reduction strategies as they pertain to fear, if not to terrorism. Another model, which could be used in conjunction with the routine activities theory, is provided by the theory of games: the idea of a mixed strategy to inform the allocation of scarce guardianship resources (Luce and Raiffa, 1989; Enders and Sandler, 2006). The terrorist will have the most difficulty anticipating the likelihood of detection and capture if security agents and surveillance instruments are allocated randomly across the array of vulnerable targets in proportion to the net value that the terrorist attaches to each prospective target, taking into account the cost to the terrorist of attacking each target. This randomized strategy will apply to personnel and other movable resources, ensuring that they are optimally allocated, rather than to fixed protective resources, such as barricades and other

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target-hardening capital resources, which should also be allocated in proportion to the net value of the target, but in a fixed rather than random manner. Randomized and other strategies for preventing terrorist attacks can be assessed under a variety of scenarios by applying simulation gaming models. Gaming models have proven useful in developing military strategies in both conventional combat operations and to deal with problems of insurgency and other forms of unconventional warfare (Myerson, 1997). They could prove useful too for assessing alternative preventive approaches to protecting against assassination, hostage taking, and other terrorist threats. Estimating the Social Costs of Terrorism and Counterterrorism Policy A second major area in which criminologists can contribute to the development of effective counterterrorism policies is in the estimation of social costs associated with critical aspects of terrorism, such as fear, and to assess fundamental tradeoffs in terrorism policy. Criminologists have found that fear of crime can impose costs on society that exceed those of crime itself, manifesting as reduced quality of life, wasteful expenditures on resources and measures that do little to prevent crime, stress-related illnesses and health costs, and related social costs (M. Cohen, 2000; Warr, 2000). Because the shock and damage associated with successful acts of terrorism are generally much greater than for typical street crimes, the level of fear and the associated social costs are generally much larger as well. Estimates of the social costs of alternative counterterrorism policies can be useful also to find better balances between security and constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, to put principles discussed in John Kleinig’s chapter to use in assessing policies that threaten those rights. A prime example is the assessment of profiling and screening systems that aim to balance the social costs of false negatives (failures to detect real terrorists) and false positives (imposing delays and other intrusions on innocent people screened, and alienating them in the process) (Forst, 2004). Many of these costs are elusive, but we can begin the process of assessing them by imputing values implicit in policies that have been clearly shaped by politics rather than sound

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analysis. Specific interventions range from relatively benign passive screening systems at one end to torture on the other. Some, like unobtrusive surveillance systems, may be capable of simultaneously enhancing security and reducing intrusions that violate privacy or liberty. Others, such as torture to extract intelligence, are not only morally objectionable and illegal under most systems of justice with jurisdiction over U.S. agents, but also generate what Braithwaite refers to as “defiance” and appear to make us less secure. Other Prospects Criminologists and criminal justice researchers can contribute to our understanding of terrorism and how best to prevent and counter it in other ways too. Many of these prospects overlap, but they are distinct in essential ways. • Managing fear of terrorism. As noted in preceding chapters by Forst and Lynch, policy makers and researchers alike have directed the preponderance of their attention to the supply side of terrorism – focusing on the characteristics and motives of terrorists – rather than the demand side, on relationships between media, politics, fear, and target attractiveness. We would do well to call attention to this imbalance and shift the focus, assessing the costs of fear and the benefits to policies for managing it more effectively. We can contribute to the policy conversation also by further developing coherent theories of fear, crime, and terrorism, and testing those theories with direct and indirect evidence. • Dealing with the “bunches-of-guys” problem. A key to allocating scarce guardianship resources is to understand better how seemingly ordinary people become willing offenders. Research by Jessica Stern, Marc Sageman, and others has seriously undercut the notion that suicide terrorists are irrational. Mildly alienated young people, unchecked, can become extremists and then terrorists. Marc Sageman finds that terrorist groups are much like gangs in that they often evolve from friendships and kinships, that the seeds of terrorism germinate as some members of a cell influence the thinking of the others, and that the cells typically emerge spontaneously from below rather than through “top-down” recruiting. Sageman

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finds these internal group ties to be more powerful than external factors such as common hatred for an outside group. He sees the participation in these associations as more fraternal than deeply ideological, suggesting that the members may be more receptive to positive Western influences than their parents and grandparents were. David Curry’s chapter echoes some of these ideas; he notes, in particular, that both gangs and terrorist groups often emerge from social settings dominated by personal rather than instrumental ties. Curry’s distinction between an “alliance” model for the former and a “recruitment” model for the latter is rich with potential for further research and policy development. • Dealing with extremism. A related area for further inquiry is the development of more coherent approaches for understanding and dealing with extremists. Acts of terrorism are invariably committed by extremists. Although jihadi terrorism has received most of the attention since September 11, 2001, other religious extremists have engaged in terrorism over the years, as have extremists whose causes are secular rather than religious. Criminologist Franco Ferracuti urges officials to find inducements to encourage alienated extremists of all stripes to exchange the renunciation of violence for legitimate places in society. Much of the public response to extremism and terrorism has been overreaction – the product of fear, intolerance, and impatience rather than thoughtful, systematic approaches to developing and carrying out public policy in this critical area. Effective strategies for preventing hate crimes and responding to them when they emerge may be applicable to certain types of extremism. Extremism is, after all, generally grounded in hatred. Theories from the criminology literature may prove fruitful for our understanding of these groups and the forces that shape them, including general strain theory (Agnew, 2005) and life course theory (Laub and Sampson, 2006). • Restoring legitimacy through improved systems of accountability. The legitimacy of government is undermined when its agents fail to provide public services adequately, or when they show disrespect for the citizens they are sworn to serve. Military and law enforcement efforts to quell terrorism will produce a loss of legitimacy if the agents intrude excessively on the rights of citizens, or if they fail to

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provide adequate levels of security. Just as community policing and problem-oriented policing can be effective ways of building social capital in communities, as described by Jack Greene in Chapter 10, so can an enlightened counterinsurgency strategy succeed in winning support of areas besieged by terrorism. As with criminal justice legitimacy, the restoration of legitimacy in counterterrorism activities requires the effective use of sound systems of accountability, the absence of which has permitted such disasters as the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prison scandals and their aftermaths. These matters do not lend themselves readily to empirical analysis, but the criminal justice literature generally, and policing in particular, is rich in the analysis of systems of accountability, and we would do well to explore similar applications in assessing systems of accountability for counterterrorism. • Restoring legitimacy through more prudent exercise of discretion. Criminal justice decisions are driven not so much by policy as by the exercise of discretion by agents situated at or near the bottom of the organization chart (Ohlin and Remington, 1993; Walker, 1993). How well those agents exercise discretion is determined by the way in which they are recruited and screened, trained and supervised, and how they are held accountable. Lapses in any of these areas can induce random and often unwarranted disparities in the exercise of discretion, as well as systematic errors of justice, either in the direction of excessive intrusions against due process or excessive impunity (failures to bring culpable offenders to justice). Both types of errors have social costs (Forst, 2004). This is true in the criminal justice system, and it is no less true in the domain of terrorism and counterterrorism policy. Studies of discretion in economics and public administration have been usefully informed by principal-agent models (Stiglitz, 1987), and such models can be incorporated into criminal justice thinking on the exercise of discretion in matters of crime and terrorism. The chapters by Tomas Mijares and Jay Jamieson (Chapter 9) and by Edward Maguire and William King (Chapter 14) address this constellation of issues, and these provide a basis for further inquiry along these lines. • Discovering smart power. Repeated failures of the negative-sum game of hard power (i.e., military force and economic sanctions) have

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been well documented (see, for example, Savage and Vila, this volume), as have the repeated successes of the positive-sum outcomes of soft power – attractions that induce nations to cooperate in economic, social, and military alliances (Nye; Wright). The use of hard power under the war on terror and presumptions of zerosum stakes has had counterproductive effects in the Middle East, as has excessive use of force by the police in many American cities (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993). Each hangover from the overuse of hard power should serve as a reminder of Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenthcentury dictum that the least amount of force needed to secure order is both just and effective. Alternatives to aggressive policing (community policing, improved training, and constraints on excessive use of force) and nonpunitive alternatives to incarceration (restorative justice, mediation programs, reintegration, electronic monitoring, etc.) have counterparts in the use of diplomacy and positive inducements to reform, to take the wind out of the sails of terrorism. Much as effective interventions against crime require a judicious blending of restorative, rehabilitative, and protective instruments, so too may effective interventions against terrorism require “smart power” – a sensible blending of hard and soft power (Armitage and Nye, 2007). John Braithwaite argues along a similar line in his chapter that security can be strengthened by a shift from a hard power counterterrorism strategy to one that emphasizes the use of a public health model strategy. • Empowering women. Perhaps the most urgent long-term need – the most viable prospect for reducing terrorism throughout the world – is to find ways to activate what may be the world’s most effective force against violence: women. The potential for using this vast resource has been stifled most profoundly through the repression of women, particularly in the places that are the most prolific seedbeds of terrorists. Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis (2006) has made the point succinctly: “women are our best hope in dealing with the Muslim world, because they have so much to gain from modernization.” Women constitute the majority of the planet’s population. With individual exceptions, they have been a dominant voice against aggression in virtually every culture where their voices can be heard. For eons they have been the primary

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nurturers of children, who are every next generation of leaders and followers. When given the opportunity, they have proven themselves to be extremely effective in leading people through difficult times. Gradually, in one culture after the next, we have seen that women have made enormous gains in education, employment, and in social status, as Rita Simon and Adrienne Tranel observe in Chapter 6. The places in which women have made the most advances have tended to become more civil, more productive, and less inclined to produce wars and terrorists. Women’s gains, it turns out, are men’s gains too. One of the great tragedies is that their opportunities have been most severely limited in poor, failed states, the places most in need of effective leaders and followers. It will be difficult to change the deeply held prejudices that keep cultures stuck in this condition, but solutions to the problem may be more attainable and less divisive if we regard the prejudices as bound primarily in culture and tradition rather than religion. Criminologists such as John van Maanen (1978) have made considerable gains to advance our understanding of the rich textures of culture that defy quantitative analysis, and the prospective gains from research along similar lines applied to gender and terrorism are equally vast, with much larger stakes.

CONCLUSION

As noted at the outset of this essay, criminal justice policy research today grows not only out of the wisdom of sociology, but that of psychology, political science, economics, public administration, industrial engineering, and more. None of these scholarly perspectives has a monopoly on the information needed to deal effectively with either crime or terrorism. We are likely to be most effective in dealing with both problems by moving beyond interventions derived from reductionist thinking, by drawing from several perspectives in mixes that are bound to vary with specific problems and settings. Perhaps the most effective strategy for the academy to deal with the problem of terrorism is to let a thousand flowers bloom. This approach has helped criminologists and criminal justice researchers

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to understand crime and deal with it effectively, and the knowledge we have accumulated along the way has clear relevance as well to the problem of terrorism. A joke about different perspectives on problem solving may serve to make the point. It involves a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer who are each given a red rubber ball and asked to find its volume. The mathematician derives the formula V = 4/3πr3, furrows his brow at the prospect of having to measure anything and assumes the radius of the ball to be one inch, and calculates its volume as fourthirds π inches. The physicist takes a calibrated beaker half-filled with water, pushes the top of the ball down to the surface, and measures the rise in the volume of the water. And the engineer looks up the model and serial number in his red-rubber-ball table. As we continue to work to understand terrorism, we need not despair that there is so little reliable data to provide a basis for finding answers to our most critical questions. Criminologists can continue to join with other social scientists to develop more reliable data, and in the meantime interpret the data we have through the lens of coherent theories and the wisdom of common sense. Where data on terrorism are insufficient, theoretical insight, indirect evidence, and prudence will be the best we can offer. Of this we can be sure: We will never have the luxury of turning to the equivalent of a red-rubber-ball table to find lasting solutions to the problem of terrorism.

RE F E RE N CE S Robert Agnew, Why Do Criminals Offend? A General Theory of Crime and Delinquency (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2005). Richard L. Armitage and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Report of the CSIS Commission on Smart Power (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2007). Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Punishment (1830), Book I – General Principles, Chapter 6 – Measure of Punishment. John Braithwaite, “Preempting Terrorism,” Current Issues in Criminal Justice, Volume 7, Number 1 (2005), pp. 96–114. Ronald Clarke and Graeme Newman, Outsmarting the Terrorists (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006).

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Larry Cohen and Marcus Felson “Social Change and Crime Rate Trends: A Routine Activity Approach,” American Sociological Review, Volume 44 (1979), pp. 588–608. G. David Curry, “Gangs, Crime and Terrorism,” in Criminologists on Terrorism and Homeland Security, Brian Forst, James P. Lynch, and Jack R. Greene, editors (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Mathieu Deflem (editor), Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004). Department of Defense, Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (University of Chicago, 2007), originally Army Field Manual, FM 3–24. Walter Enders and Todd Sandler, The Political Economy of Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Franco Ferracuti, “Ideology and Repentance: Terrorism in Italy,” in Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind, Walter Reich, editor (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1998). Brian Forst, Errors of Justice: Nature, Sources and Remedies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Terrorism, Crime and Public Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Kimberly Kagan, “The Tide is Turning in Iraq,” The Wall Street Journal (September 4, 2007), p. A17. Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “How Does Studying Terrorism Compare to Studying Crime?” in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives, Mathieu Deflem, editor (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004). Gary LaFree and James Hendrickson, “Build a Criminal Justice Policy for Terrorism,” Criminology and Public Policy, Volume 6, Number 4 (November 2007), pp. 781–790. John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Bernard Lewis, “Modernizing the Muslim World,” Toronto Star (May 8, 2006). R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957). Roger B. Myerson, Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

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Lloyd E. Ohlin and Frank J. Remington, Discretion in Criminal Justice: The Tension Between Individualization and Uniformity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993). Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005). Sharla Rausch and Gary LaFree, “The Growing Importance of Criminology in the Study of Terrorism,” The Criminologist, Volume 32, Number 6 (November–December 2007), pp. 1–5. John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2007). Richard Rosenfeld, “Why Criminologists Should Study Terrorism,” The Criminologist, Volume 27, Number 6 (November–December 2002), pp. 1–4. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Lawrence W. Sherman, Policing Domestic Violence: Experiments and Dilemmas (New York: Free Press, 1992). Jerome H. Skolnick and James J. Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (New York: Free Press, 1993). Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (New York: Ecco, 2003). Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Principal and Agent,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Volume 3 (1987), pp. 966–971. John Van Maanen, “On Watching the Watchers,” in Policing: A View from the Streets, edited by Peter K. Manning and John Van Maanen (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 309–350. Samuel Walker, Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1950–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Mark Warr, “Fear of Crime in the United States: Avenues for Research and Policy,” Criminal Justice 2000 – Volume 4 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, 2000), pp. 451–489. James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Vintage Books, 2001).

Index

20–20 hindsight fallacy, 248 9/11, 1, 7, 20, 27, 40, 53, 200, 202, 245, 250, 273, 302, 337, 357, 433, 443 changed policing, 218 created a narrative about a new security-liberty balance, 371 failure to prevent, 251 internationalized terrorism, 116 leadership following, 291 like a wasp in a car, 436 product of numerous ignored threats, 391 product of numerous security lapses, 390 revealed lack of agency coordination, 322 revealed lack of preparedness, 296 stirred up fear of Middle Easterners, 306 9/11 Commission Report, 328, 371 actuarial risk models, 314–315 actus reus, 22–23 affect heuristic, 280 Afghanistan needed a Marshall Plan, not military power, 394 agency an aspect of right to privacy, 361 airport security, 140 al Qaeda, 20, 22–23, 31, 40, 61, 76, 107, 115, 117, 249, 252–253, 342, 391–392, 395, 414, 423 funded by Saudis, 395 missed opportunities by the West, 395 al-Hazmi, Nawaf, 249, 334 all hazards policing, 227

alliance model of terrorists and gangs, 102 al-Mihdhar, Khalid, 249 American Indians US-sponsored terrorism against, 48 American Society of Criminology, 444 Amnesty International, 304 amygdala, 277 animal-rights extremists, 45 anthrax attacks of 2001, 54 appeasement an empirical question, 89 Arafat, Yassir, 411 Arar, Maher, 261 Aristotle on assassination, 77 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, 429 Atta, Mohammed, 254, 334 Authorization for the Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, 36 availability heuristic, 279 Ayyash, Yahya assassination of, 393 backlash effects, 432–435. See also defiance theory beliefs common to terrorists, 73 Bentham, Jeremy, 384, 455 Beslan, 20 Bill of Rights, 373 bin Laden, Osama, 1, 61, 254, 256, 385, 387, 391, 433 offered for arrest prior to 9/11, 395 Black Widows, 115 Blair, Prime Minister Tony, 392

461

462 blowback. See defiance theory bond relationship targeting, 30 Branch Davidian incident, 200 bunches of guys, 452 Bush, President George H. W., 405 Bush, President George W., 388, 390–391, 394, 405 California, 23–25 laws relevant to terrorism, 21 Central Intelligence Agency, 58, 332 failed communication with FBI, 269 failure to act, not failure to connect dots, 251 failures to prevent 9/11, 249, 250 trained Islamists in guerrilla warfare, 392 Chechens, 20 Cheney, Dick, 273, 290 Chicago gangs more organized than San Diego gangs, 104 Christian extremists, 45, 49 Churchill, Winston, 291, 295 resisted by George Marshall, 388 civil liberties, 360 counterterrorism threats to, 143 civil society, 363 civility decline of, 288 clash of civilizations, 284 Clinton, President Bill, 389 cognitive-behavioral training, 140 communication failures, 248 community partnerships difficult to build, 221 community policing, 7, 142, 209, 212, 215–216, 219, 237 about building trust, 219 and terrorism, 220 as a fear-reduction strategy, 292 can reduce fear, 222 goals, 215 origins, 213 partnerships and prevention, 229 seeks to improve transparency, 234 varying effects on fear, 176 COMPSTAT, 225, 260 congressional inquiries on intelligence services, 245 connecting dots, 246, 402

Index failures by U.S. intelligence services, 248 involves four procedures, 248 logic of, 262 practicalities, 247 requires data and procedure, 247 containment v. enlargement, 389 containment model, 388 COPS Program, 221 cost-benefit, 141 cost-benefit analysis, 141–142 counterterrorism analysis, 247 and crime prevention, 134 criminal justice model slighty better than warfare model, 396 interactions are a key to understanding what works, 446 public health model for, 383 regulatory model is preferable, 383 research issues, 144–145 role of police, 255 too little focus on demand-side, fear, 274 via a criminal justice model, 395 counterterrorism strategies, 83 education, 84–85 limitations of protective strategies, 78 crime instrumental v. expressive, 163 crime analysis, 225 crime mapping. See crime analysis crime prevention, 210 aspects are relevant to terrorism, 130 evidence of effectiveness, 140 interventions are varied, 131 proactive and reactive approaches, 133 reactive strategies, 134 Crime Prevention Matrix, 131–134, 136, 139, 141, 143, 146 crime prevention strategies largely irrelevant to terrorism, 129 criminal investigation three segments of, 257 criminal justice system not really much of a system, 343 criminal profiling, 304 can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, 307 criminological theory, 14 relevance for counterterrorism policy, 14

Index criminologists and terrorism, 443 can contribute to understanding terrorism, 443–444, 457 criminology few empirical studies of terrorism, 411 has largely overlooked terrorism, 411 irrelevant to many aspects of terrorism, 129 multidisciplinary approaches, 130 Crips and Bloods, 105 C-SPAN, 289 culture of fear can be exploited by terrorists, 368 culture of prevention, 269 Defense Applied Research Projects Agency, 204 Defense Appropriations Act of 1997, 202 defiance theory, 384, 432, 452 democratic policing, 209, 237 definition, 212 diminished by counterterrorist activity, 239 Department of Homeland Security, 327, 330, 338, 436 an umbrella of agencies, 328 myopic focus on terrorism, 340 sprawling organization chart, 349 Department of State terrorism data, 57 Department of State changed definition of terrorism, 59 detention of combatants, 35 deterrence, 87, 383 can be more than offset by defiance, 384 limits of, 78 more effective when perceived as fair, 385 deterrent threats can be counterproductive in terrorism, 87 Detroit 1967 riot, 190, 203, 205 developmental democracy, 89 Dhanu, 120 discretion errors in the exercise of, 454 driving while black, 307 drug dealers similarities to terrorists, 191

463 Dulles, John Foster, 389 El Rukn, 106, 108 Ellsberg, Daniel, 357 emergency response, 203 enlargement failures, 391 era of terrorism as political hyperbole, 368 ethnic profiling, 302, 312 easier when a minority, 306 is not always effective, 308 legal and ethical aspects, 303 reifies perceived differences, 305 evaluation research on counterterrorism, 141 evidence-based medicine benefits from large samples, 402 evidence-based strategy, 401 evolutionary ecology, 66 evolutionary-ecological perspective, 67, 77, 88 extremism finding ways to deal with, 453 typically grounded in hatred, 453 extremists left-wing, 47 right-wing, 47 false negatives, 451 false positives, 451 Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, 420 FBI Annual Reports on terrorism, 57 fear a natural human emotion, 276 acute, 275 and risk, 278 associated with time watching TV, 285 can lead to harmful policies, 294 culture of, 281 due to sense of powerlessness, 283 excessive fear is self-endangering, 275 goal of terrorism, instrument of street crime, 274 goal of terrorist, instrument of criminal, 165 is accompanied by physiological changes, 276 is largely a matter of biology, 277 is mostly learned, 277–278 is shaped by experience, 278

464 fear (cont.) is useful up to a point, 275 keeps us out of harm’s way, 276 management strategies, 292–293 nature and sources of, 276 not a rare event, 173 of crime, managing, 292 of fear may be too small, 275 often excessive due to overestimated threats, 278 often inflated due to media, 282 political pandering, 289 reduction strategies, 292 role in crime and terrorism, 164 role of leadership in reducing, 295 social costs of, 282, 293 tends to increase with age, 277 fear management, 173, 223 fear of crime, 174 estimating the social costs of, 451 fear of terrorism, 152 is inflated well beyond reason, 275 understand in order to prevent terrorism, 450 fear reduction, 173, 216 central to policing against terrorism, 232 interventions, 177 fear-reduction programs for crime and terrorism may be similar, 177 fear-reduction strategies, 7 Federal Bureau of Investigation, 323, 331 11,633 agents in 2003, 323 central role in Joint Terrorism Task Forces, 329 Federal Emergency Management Agency, 201, 329, 340, 344 federal government role in homeland security, 324 federal prosecutors, 328 process few terrorism cases, 332 role in homeland security, 332 federal-local law enforcement coordination, 322 often more costly than beneficial to locals, 344 Financial Action Task Force, 394 first responders, 337 first-generation warfare, 28 foot patrols, 215

Index force, use of on suspected terrorists, 33 Fort, Jeff, 106 Fourteenth Amendment, 303, 310 Fourth Amendment, 310 fourth-generation warfare, 29 freedom distinct from liberty, 358 Kleinig definition, 358 gang crime falls between other crime and terrorism, 98 gang homicides related more to turf than drugs, 105 gang research, 97 gangs, 97 alliance and recruitment models, 5 and terrorist cells, 5 global interconnections, 105 less well-organized than terrorist groups, 103 most are weakly organized, 104 no allegiance to larger system, 108 gang-suppression programs in need of evaluation, 109 general strain theory, 453 Geneva Conventions, 35 Ghaddafi, Moammar, 393 Gingrich, Newt, 386 Giuliani, Rudolph, 291, 293 Global Terrorism Database, 414–415, 418, 422, 425, 427, 429, 433, 444 Goldstein, Herman, 216 Graduated Reduction In Tension Theory, 386 group polarization, 281 guardianship examples at airports, buildings and subways, 168 may be active or passive, 154 role in opportunity theory, 153 guerilla warfare. See terrorism: and guerilla warfare distinct from other forms of terrorism, 99 guerillas, 54 Halliburton, 202 Hamas, 412 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 36

Index Hanjour, Hani, 253, 334 hard power, 455 hate crime, 54 Hertzberg-Alarcon California Prevention of Terrorism Act, 25 heuristics, 279 Hitler, 388 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 295 homeland security core mission of federal prosecutors post-9/11, 328 federal-local coordination, 326 networks of networks, 325 hostis humani generis, 37 hot spots, 220 hot-spot policing, 140 Hurricane Katrina, 185, 200, 203, 339, 344, 348 Hussein, Saddam, 1, 398 Idris, Wafa, 118 illegal immigration, 143 immigrants threatened by police interrogations, 234 Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 329 improvised explosive devices (IEDs), 55 incapacitation, 309 incapacitative justice, 386 Incident Command System, 339 infiltration policing conflicts with community policing, 269 informants problem of revealing their identities, 259 information pooling, 266 insurgents, 50 intelligence, 245 actionable, 266 as art guided by evidence, 402 Brodeur’s definition, 246 essential to effective prevention of terrorism, 246 evidence-based, 402 few definitions of, 246 information flow, 337 role of police in gathering and analyzing, 255 intelligence analysts make poor police officers, 255 intelligence gathering

465 can harm police-community relations, 344 often conflicts with goal of conviction, 260 sensitive topic in a democracy, 261 intelligence information sharing often a one-way street, 262 intelligence services failure to prevent 9/11, 245 studies of the effectiveness, 245 intelligence-led policing, 231, 246 interagency partnerships often become bureaucratic, 341 investigation of terrorism, 340 Irish Republican Army, 129, 433 Islamic terrorists, 31 Islamist terrorism, 328 islands of civility as a source of terrorism prevention, 398 Japanese internment during World War II, 300, 302, 357 Jarrah, Ziad S., 334 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, 232, 323, 329, 340 can have sharp internal cultural differences, 347 consists of 38 agencies, 329 intelligence role, 329 investigative responsibilities, 345 mission of, 329 often become bureaucratic, 341 operations vary from place to place, 330 varying levels of local support, 342 Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide, 429 Kant, Immanual, 266 Kennan, George, 388 Kerner Commission, 218 Kerry, John, 273, 290 Korematsu decision, 357 Ku Klux Klan, 47, 74 Kurdish Workers Party, 115 labeling theory, 433 left-wing terrorists more educated than average, 72

466 legitimacy and transparency, 234 lost in intelligence-gathering, 229 of the police, 8 of wars on terrorism, 385 police, 211–214, 216, 219, 233, 240 undermined by intrusiveness, 236 undermined by lapses in discretion, 454 undermined by poor exercise of discretion, 453 liberty all constraints are not the same, 360 constraints often have undesirable side effects, 376 distinct from freedom, 358 Kleinig definition, 359 parallel with security, 363 liberty and security a tradeoff, not a balance, 369, 377 balancing social costs, 451 life course theory, 453 local governments role in homeland security, 324 London Metropolitan Police, 213 London transit attack of 2005, 30 lone wolf terrorists, 62 MacArthur, Douglas, 389 Madrid, attack of 2004, 416 managing fear of terrorism. See also fear management Mandela, Nelson model of restorative justice, 388 maneuver warfare, 28 Marshall Plan, 388 Marshall, General George C., 388–389, 405 decisive yet judicious, 388 model statesman, 387 martyrdom and defiance theory, 385 makes harsh sanctions counterproductive, 87 mass murder, 22–23, 26 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 389 McLuhan, Marshall, 284 McVeigh, Timothy, 40, 46, 49, 74, 76 captured via license check, 224 media, 282 a central instrument of terrorism, 282, 284

Index as terrorist’s oxygen of publicity, 289 capable of public service education, 295 commercialization of, 287–288 conflicting goals, 286 feeding fear and terrorism, 286 focus on extreme events, 285 incentives for reliable reporting, 286 news as entertainment, 288 nonprofit broadcasting, 289 objectivity, 286 often serve terrorist aims, 52 professionalism, 287 role in fueling fear of terrorism, 54 satisfying voyeuristic interests, 283 serve prophecies of clashing civilizations, 284 mens rae, 22–23 militarism concerns about increases in policing, 204 military adjustments to external shifts, 195 changes in the external environment, 188 changing role post-9/11, 186 distinct from police by design, 186 symbiotic relationship with police, 201 tragic results in domestic events, 183 used as law enforcers, 184 used in counterterrorism activity, 184 Mill, John Stuart, 359 Miranda rights, 34 mixed strategy to efficiently allocate scarce guardianship resources, 450 Moorish Science Temple of America, 106 moral panic preventing, 240 Moussaoui, Zacarias, 253, 255–256 Mubarak al-Rishawi, Sajida, 117 Mumbai attack of 2008, 296, 416 Murad, Abdul-Hakim, 252, 254 Muzhakhoyeva, Zarema, 122 myths about terrorism. See terrorism: myths nation building, 394 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks against the United States, 246 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 331

Index National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 444 National Counterterrorism Center, 46, 58, 420 National Gang Crime Research Center, 108 National Incident Management System, 338 National Public Radio, 288 National Response Plan, 338 National Response Strategy, 340 national security and national interests, 365 exploitation of it a slippery slope, 368 exploitation of it may undermine it, 367 not clearly defined, 364 relates to both borders and traditions, 365 National Security Agency, 249 need to know principle, 268 negotiation builds legitimacy, 387 supports procedural justice, 387 Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin, 394 netwar, 349 network analysis needed for criminal intelligence, 227 networks and networks of networks, 325 centrality property, 325 Nichols, Terry, 46 nuclear weapon proliferation, 389 Office for Domestic Preparedness, 331 Office of Community Preparedness, 331 Office of Law Enforcement Coordination, 331 Office of State and Local Government Coordination, 331 Oklahoma City bombing, 40, 46, 53, 273, 306, 337 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 197–198 open source data on terrorism, 413 Operation Phoenix as US-sponsored terrorism, 48 opportunity reduction strategies, 66, 78–80, 160, 169

467 opportunity theory, 6, 69, 151–152, 157 and common law crime, 158 and crime displacement, 162 and fear of terrorism, 450 effective for many situations, 160 is really a class of theories, 153 limited relevance to terrorism, 152 more policy-relevant than other theories of crime, 151 place or situation unit of analysis, 151 relevance to specific situations, 157 relevance to terrorism, 163 tests of, 158 to reduce fear, 172 use of wheel locks to reduce auto thefts, 159 used to reduce gas suicides, 159 used to reduce motorcycle thefts, 159 organized communities have low levels of crime and fear, 175 Padilla v. Hanft, 36 Padilla, Jose, 107 Palestine plagued by disunity, 398 Palestinian terrorism women actively involved, 118 Palestinians, 20 PATRIOT Act. See USA PATRIOT Act peace process unraveling of, 394 Peel, Robert, 205, 210 Peres, Prime Minister Shimon, 393 Phoenix Memo, 252, 254–255 piracy laws against, 37 PKK. See Kurdish Workers Party police accountability, 215, 219, 221 adjustments to external shifts, 197 and military, 7 changes in the external environment, 189 collaborations, 232 cult of evidence, 259 partnerships, 237 police intelligence units typical characteristics of, 258 police legitimacy. See legitimacy: police police officers make poor intelligence analysts, 255

468 police-community relations, 214 police-community relations era, 214 policing federal versus state and local authority, 8 real-world constraints on, 238 policing terrorism importance of information, 223 political criminology, 316 political pandering. See fear: political pandering politicians tend to err in favor of security over liberty, 377 politics as a blood sport, 289 politics of homeland security, 58 pork barrel in homeland security. See politics of homeland security Posse Comitatus Act, 33–34, 184 precautionary principle, 291 prediction of terrorism, 224 prejudices bound primarily in culture, not religion, 456 prevention of terrorism primary forms of, 396 secondary forms of, 397 tertiary forms of, 397 preventive diplomacy, 404 prisoners of war terrorists as, 35 privacy, 361 deontological considerations, 362 not merely an aspect of liberty, 362 privacy and secrecy barrier to police intelligence, 233 proactive policing, 140 probability neglect, 280 probable cause allows for probabilistic inference, 257 problem solving, 222. See also problem-oriented policing 220 through partnerships, 229 problem-oriented policing, 7, 140, 209, 212, 215, 219, 237 and terrorism, 220 application, 216 difficult due to mediocrity, 222 origins, 213 procedural justice, 385, 387, 404

Index profiling racial. See racial profiling social costs of, 451 Psychological Reactance Theory, 384 public health model relevance for counterterrorism, 396 three levels of prevention, 396 Rabin, Prime Minister Yitzak, 393 assassination of, 398 racial profiling, 300, 302, 357 based on flawed premises, 312 definition, 303 difficult to assess effectiveness of, 313 easier when a minority, 306 fundamentally unfair, 305 in vehicle stops, 304 is an ethical issue, 317 is not always effective, 308 legal and ethical aspects, 303 reifies perceived differences, 305 unclear whether it reduces crime, 307 RAND Corporation, 425 recruitment model of gangs, 107 Red Brigades ended by criminal justice sanctions, 395 Red Terror, 71 regulatory model, 383 Reid, Richard C., 254 responsive regulation, 403 Ressam, Ahmed, 248 restorative justice, 140, 386, 388, 404 relevance to counterterrorism, 138 retaliation and protection, 80–81 revolutionaries, 50 right-wing terrorists less educated than average, 72 risk assessment often distored by emotion, 278 often distored by heuristics, 279 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 295, 301 Routine Activities Theory, 77, 138, 450 routine activity theory, 154 a subset of opportunity theory, 153 policy implications, 155 Rowley, Coleen, 254 Ruby Ridge, 49 Sa’ad, Sumayah, 118 Saudi Arabia, 392

Index second- generation warfare, 28 secondary deviance, 433 Secret Service, 329 security and rights, 363, 451 as absence of threat, 364 individual and collective, 363 proper level depends on aversion to risk, 370 Security and Intelligence Review Committee, 249 security and liberty. See liberty and security severity of punishment does not deter terrorists, 87 Siddiqui, Aafia, 117, 121 simulation for assessing counterterrorism strategies, 451 situational crime prevention, 134, 138, 154–155, 178 a subset of opportunity theory, 153 advantages for empirical analysis, 154 smart power, 455 social capital, 454 social control theory, 5, 385 social costs, 451 social disorganization theory, 100 social network analysis under-utilized in counterterrorism, 349 social network theory, 325 boundary permeability, 326 boundary spanning, 325–327 strong and weak ties, 325 soft power, 85, 455 Soros, George, 398 Southern Poverty Law Center, 57 Sri Lanka, 115 Stalin, Josef tamed by George Marshall, 387 street gangs bear similarities to terrorist organizations, 97 suicide terrorists, 74 super-terrorist a myth, 436 supply-side criminology, 211 surveillance and right to privacy, 361 syllogism, 263 systems of accountability

469 can improve the exercise of discretion, 454 Taliban, 387, 394–395 means “scholars” in Urdu, 391 Tamil Tigers, 115 30% women, 120 target-hardening, 140 Task Force on Disorders and Terrorism, 56 tautology, 264 team policing, 214 technical core, 326 technology impact of changes on military, 196 transfers between military and police, 187 terror means fear in the extreme, 276 terrorism 1986 task force definition, 42 acts are also criminal acts, 444 ancient roots of, 53 and aggression, 2 and common law crime, 163–164 and crime, 19, 66 and crime prevention, 6 and criminal violence, 20 and education, 71 and fear, 7 and federal law, 25–26 and guerilla warfare, 20 and hate crime, 54 and poverty, 71 and profiling, 311 social costs, 451 and public policy, 33 and social control theory, 385 and state laws, 22 and war, 19 as a public health problem, 294 as a tactic, 67 as asymmetric warfare, 30 as crime, 2, 6, 21, 27, 32–34 as piracy, 37 as poor man’s battle, 29 as supply-demand problem, 142 as war, 27, 31, 34–35 barriers to empirical research on, 448 boundaries are vague, 445 by groups, 18

470 terrorism (cont.) by individuals, 18 can be reduced, not eradicated, 89 causes of, 70 changing nature of, 47, 61 Combs’s definition, 41 committed mostly by young males, like crime, 98 Cooper’s definition, 42 criminal justice model a poor fit, 383 danger of over-dramatizing, 67 danger of viewing as war, 67 Defense Department definition, 42–43 defies empirical analysis for several reasons, 448 definition, 129, 311 definition of, 2, 17, 29, 33 definition typology, 44 definitions, 41 definitions vary by agency interests, 46 difficult to predict, 169 difficulty of predicting events, 49 dimensions of, 447 distinct from guerrilla warfare, 54 distinct from other forms of aggression, 445 ecological perspective of, 4 elements of (Mullins-Thurman), 45 evidence-based prevention, 383 facilitated by technology and globalization, 116 FBI definition, 43, 70 Forst’s definition, 446 Friedman’s definition, 41 goals more complex than for crime, 165 growing public awareness of, 55 how definitions vary, 445 Howard and Sawyer’s definition, 42 in Algeria, 419 in Colombia, 418 in Germany, 416 in India, 416 in Iraq, 44 in Latin America, 418 in Northern Ireland, 433, 435 in South Africa, 419, 425 in South Asia, 418 in Southeast Asia, 418 in the Middle East, 418 in the United States, 47, 418, 422

Index in Turkey, 429 in United States history, 48 information gathering can backfire, 234 is committed for a cause beyond self-interest, 445 Jenkins’ definition, 42 Krieger’s definition, 41 Ku Klux Klan acts of, 55 LaFree definition, 412 lethality of attacks, 425 limited predictability of, 56 Lodge’s definition, 41 many definitions of, 2–3, 41, 43, 70, 412, 445 Martin’s typology of definitions, 44 media gets it wrong, 52 more than a crime, 445 myths, 411 need for creative thinking about, 37 not necessarily an irrational act, 452 open source data on, 413 Poland’s definition, 42 predicting, 61 primary motives for, 76 prospects for research on, 449 rarity makes prediction difficult, 168 root cause analysis of, 402 rooted in extremist beliefs, 72 Sobel’s definition, 41 socially constructed, 98 spatial distribution of events, 415 State Department definition, 43 taxonomy serves two useful purposes, 447 theory of deterrence doesn’t apply, 383 Thornton’s definition, 41 tool of the poor and the weak, 428 traditionally a subspecialty of political science, 444 typology of, 447 unlike common law crime, 167 unlike crime in primary goals, 164 US Air Force definition, 42 valid data are elusive, 412 varieties of, 18 war model a poor fit, 383 Wardlaw’s definition, 41 weapons used in attacks, 426 Whittaker’s typology of definitions, 44 women in, 5, 448

Index terrorism intelligence calls for analytic skill and artfulness, 403 terrorism investigation primary responsibility is federal, not local, 345 terrorism law, 32 Terrorism Liaison Officer, 341 terrorism prevention, 232, 239 benefits from multidisciplinary thinking, 456 partnerships may be key, 229 relevance of crime prevention models, 449 terrorist groups, 428 camaraderie like gangs, 99 often cooperate with organized criminals, 103 similarities to criminal gangs, 452 tend to live in poor societies, 71 terrorist incentives, 173 terrorist motives, 74 terrorist networks, 227 terrorist organizations, 428 goals of, 102 terrorist personality, 73 Terrorist Screening Center watch list of, 336 Terrorist Threat Integration Center, 58 terrorists agitational, 50 are not like typical violent criminals, 71 as pirates, 37 terror-oriented policing, 260 theory of games and counterterrorism strategies, 450 third-generation warfare, 29 Thirty Years War, 28 totalitarianism more effectively contained than countered, 389 transparency in policing, 221, 240 Transportation Security Administration, 329 Treaty of Paris, 37 Truman Containment Doctrine, 388–389 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 388

471 tyranny of the case file, 256 U.S. Attorneys, 332. See also federal prosecutors U.S. Civil War, 28 U.S. Coast Guard, 329 U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 329 USA PATRIOT Act, 26, 318, 357, 374 USS Cole, 250 Uyghurs, 412 victimization surveys, 154 used to test opportunity theory, 160 Vietnam, 189 lesson of, 188 vigilantes, 50 vulnerable terrorism targets, 60 war, 67 war model is based largely on deterrence, 383 war on terror has complicated jurisdictional authority, 185 War on Terror, 1, 5 alternatives, 79 war on terrorism, 302, 375 and legitimacy, 385 can’t win wars against -isms, 446 failures of under- and over-reaction, 405 is based largely on retribution, 383 Watts 1965 riot, 190, 194 weapons of mass destruction, 23, 53 exploited politically, 367 Weather Underground, 47, 86, 425 web of controls, 398, 400, 403–404 more effective when more redundant, 403 Westphalia, Peace of, 28 women as potent force for counterterrorism, 455 women terrorists, 113, 448 are usually not mothers, 121 brief history of, 114 can more easily conceal explosives, 119 demographic profile of, 121 in 19th century Russia, 113

472 women terrorists (cont.) in Chechnya, 115, 119, 121–122, 124 in Hamas, 118 in the Basque separatist movement, 119 in the IRA, 119 in the Red Brigades, 113 increased participation in suicide attacks, 114 motivated more by personal than political reasons, 115 motives, 113, 122 not related to women’s liberation movement, 113 often active participants in terrorist organizations, 116 Palestinian, 119 rarely involved in car bombings, 118 redemption as motive, 123

Index revenge as motive, 122 stigmatization as motive, 121, 123 usually between adolescence and late thirties, 114 usually from the middle and upper classes, 114 World Trade Center bombing of 1993, 273 World War I, 28–29 World War II, 29 Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, 58 Yousef, Ramzi, 252 zero-tolerance policing, 212, 217 distortion of Broken Windows approach, 260