Changing Our Paradigm for Anti-Terror Policing

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

On Monday, I noted that because of the difficulty of protecting ourselves from terrorism in an open society without sacrificing our openness, some commentators have concluded that nothing can be done.  Today, my new article, "Toward Intelligent Anti-Terror Policing," is up at Front Page Magazine.  The article is a refutation of those who claim that we cannot protect targets like the New York City subway system because the very act of improving our security would make riding the subway too unwieldy.  Perfectly encapsulating this view is a Newsday column written by Ellis Henican, which I quote both in my Monday post and my FPM article, in which Henican writes:

Every day, 4 1/2 million men, women and children climb aboard [the New York City subway] trains.  Add another half-million or so for the commuter rails, another 2 1/2 million if you count the buses.  You're gonna strip-search every one of them?  You're gonna walk them through metal detectors and wand their bodies when the magnetometers ring?  You're gonna rifle every briefcase, knapsack and gym bag?  Impossible!

Henican concludes that it's impossible to protect the subway system because he's only looking at the issue through our current anti-terror policing paradigm, which my article describes as a "one-size-fits-all model of anti-terror policing wherein every passenger must be treated equally.  In this model, everyone must be equally inconvenienced by metal detectors, wands, and bag searches."  This paradigm is best reflected in our current approach to airport security, but sadly extends far beyond that.  I argue that by shifting away from this method of policing, we can increase our chances of preventing terrorist attacks while avoiding undue burdens on society as a whole:

A far better policing model would seek to maximize our chances of disrupting a terrorist attack by more efficiently targeting the areas where terrorists are likely to strike.  The first component of this model is less of an emphasis on keeping people out of soft targets (through metal detectors and the like), but attempting to identify potential bad guys once they're inside.  In New York subway stations, for example, this would involve roving policemen tasked with identifying possible terrorists.  While we cannot search every man, woman and child climbing onto the subways, we can focus on those who best fit the terrorist profile. . . .

A second component of an intelligent policing model is that the officers charged with protecting soft targets from terrorists would have more interaction with civilians.  They should be trained to be polite and courteous, and to defuse possible tensions. . . .  However, officers should be encouraged to ask questions of passengers who seem suspicious, and, when necessary, to ask passengers to open up their jackets or bags.  In this way, officers could use their own insight and initiative to identify and investigate individuals who seem suspicious.

I discussed this article on The G. Gordon Liddy Show this morning and had several calls from law enforcement officers, all of whom agreed with my thesis that we need to move from a rigidly bureaucratized approach to protecting terrorist targets toward one where police are given more leeway to use their own ingenuity and intuition.

I wrote this article last weekend, before Bill West's July 12 post on bolstering transit security.  However, I was interested to see that Bill and I had similar thoughts on the matter.  Bill argues:

A key component to enhancing the security of the Nation�s land transit systems will be to quite simply increase the manpower and training available to these transit police and security forces.  The presence of uniformed armed police officers in train stations and bus terminals and aboard those trains, as well as plainclothes undercover officers conducting covert surveillance in the stations and aboard the trains and buses, makes for a powerful deterrent.  The more such officers there are, and the better trained they are, especially if they are trained in behavioral profiling techniques like the Israeli security services have used for decades, the better protected these transportation systems will be.

Bill and I are on the same page about the need for improvements in training, and would like to see an emphasis on policing -- rather than controlled-access security systems -- to protect important soft targets.  I'm not sure that I agree with his desire to increase manpower; making better use of what we have now would be a start.

TrackBack