9/11 and Community Policing

Community policing may be on a comeback trail under the Obama administration after receiving a short shrift in the post 9/11 period.

University of Texas criminology professor Ben Brown says there is a natural convergence between the much discussed intelligence based policing and a community based approach.

He says that police force forces could build greater trust in US Hispanic communities, for instance, as violence has the potential of spilling over from Mexico and the war on drugs continues.

Furthermore, urban police departments do not have the money in these times of budget constraint to hire enough analysts to make sense of the accumulated information sitting in elaborate data banks.

"It is one thing to record hours and hours of conversation each day [through wire tapping]. It is another thing to have somebody listen and make sense out of it," says the professor.

Brown is the author of a critical 2007 paper that took Washington and George Bush to task for curtailing federal expenditures for community policing.

Community policing does entail more cops on the beat. After the 9/11 terrorism attacks, he reports, the federal money directed to local police departments for the purpose of hiring of new officers went from roughly a billion dollars a year in the late 1990s to less than $200-million in fiscal 2003.

Furthermore, Brown continues, community policing began as a major police reform in the 1970s in places like New York City where the emphasis was on building a closer relationship with citizens, identifying and eliminating the causes of crime in a neighborhood and a greater degree of problem solving in the community to build local trust

The idea, which seems like a no-brainer, is that police officers can do a better job of fighting crime and terrorism if they can gather good intelligence from just being in regular communication with local citizens.

While not all police departments bought into George Bush's inspired combative policing tactics which included an enforcement of immigration regulations and the targeting of people of Middle Eastern origin, sufficient numbers of urban police forces did get onboard with new purchases of technology and greater use of SWAT teams.

Law enforcement officials in some cases themselves "clamored" for facial recognition software, computer programs which can scan millions of email messages and biometric identification -- while an industry stood by ready to provide the solutions, Brown says.

"There is little evidence to suggest that the decrease in support for community policing or the increased use of aggressive tactics and invasive technology will either reduce the threat of terrorism or be an effective means of controlling crime and disorder."

Brown offers evidence that co-operative citizens and the police's willingness to share information can make a difference in a criminal investigation. 

He cites the example of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo who terrorized Washington DC and evaded capture for weeks despite police road blocks and the application of technology including surveillance conducted with military aircraft.

"The key to their arrest was cooperation between law enforcement and the citizenry. Specifically, police officials informed reporters that Muhammad and Malvo were suspects in the sniper investigation.  Although the officials withheld a description of the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice the suspects were driving, reporters culled the information from police scanners and broadcast it. Consequently, two cooperative citizens heard the information on the radio, spotted the vehicle at a rest-stop, and called 911."

Using international examples, Brown points to the British in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and Israel in the 1980s and 90s as examples of how ignoring the social and political causes for unrest within an alienated population be they Ulster Catholics or Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, invariably leads to more violence. He notes that the authorities' reliance on counter terrorism, combative policing and approved torture, can be a recipe for failure.

It all comes down to money, adds Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief and the author of Breaking Ranks - A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing.

He has heard anecdotally that American law enforcement may be shifting back to community policing.

But it was the previous US presidential administration that created the climate for militarized policing in the first place and so it will be incumbent upon Washington to direct the change, says Stamper.

"[After] 911, the federal government through Homeland Security started doling out huge sums to local enforcement to upgrade their homeland security capacity."

Photo by Beth Rankin. CC Attribution 2.0 Generic