The police appear divided on the volumes of information stored on databases coming their way.
So, observes criminologist Samuel Nunn who has local Indianapolis police officers attend his class on crime and technology which he teaches every other year at Indiana University.
While "the administrative brain trust," heading the Indianapolis police department is never going to turn down data coming their way the lower level patrol officers only want stuff that is going to help them do their jobs, he says.
"The local level officers are not as impressed with all of this information generating capacity as their bosses," says Nunn.
He reports from conversations with his students that it is the common technologies embodied in the laptops, PDAs, cell phones and wireless devices in general plus applications like GPS that excites them the most.
Yes to global positioning systems or a tool that details the history of an address including the number of police calls made to it.
On the other hand, "to hell with that," is the general attitude towards more esoteric stuff like data mining, Nunn finds.
What has come to be known as intelligence led policing, itself a product of 9/11 and the counter terrorist impulse emanating from Washington seems to be receiving a mixed response at the street cop level.
An intelligence based approach involves "connecting the dots," the lack of which we are told led intelligence and policing pre-9/11 at the national level in the US to ignore credible reports from sources that terrorist attacks were about to occur.
Intelligence analysts in policing, especially in the cross country fusion centers, have become the norm as a result of that failure. Their job is to spot for what is called in the trade, "precursor crime."
But the ineptitude surrounding the Christmas bomber's ability to get onto a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit shows that the compiling of hundreds of thousands of names on various watch lists of people has not made American any safer.
The challenge, says Nunn, is that analyzing electronically stored data for potential threats "is tougher to do," than old fashioned talking to people on the street and developing leads in the solving of a crime.
"More information is clearly better than less information, but more information at some point can block you up."
80,000 people including one recently publicized eight year old boy will get pulled aside annually at US airports for special interrogation by authorities before they are able to board a plane.
But those absurdities have not lessened the love affair with intelligence based policing.
What we are dealing with here, Nunn wrote a few years ago, are billions of bytes of data on individuals circulating among police agencies. They include criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at particular times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints, photographs, DNA samples), etc.
"At any given moment, thousands of inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national, and international systems seeking answers to questions about people's identity, where they are, what they have done, or what more other agencies and agents know about these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) averaged 4.5 million inquiries per day."
Meanwhile, popular American culture has played a significant role in nurturing some misconceptions about the technological capabilities of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Nunn cites the film, Enemies of the State, as a prime example
"People's expectations get pumped by fictional treatments of crime and police technology. You can see it turning into pressure to get local police or any police agency to modernize and to get better at what they do."
In the cultural narrative depicted in movies like Minority Report and televisions shows like 24 and CSI the good guys always uncover the conspiracies concocted by the terrorist, which Nunn has dubbed as "the boogeyman of the 21 century."
Writes Nunn, "This model helps us accept 9/11 as an interruption or aberration. Looking back, we had the pieces if only someone had put them together: the plot was within our grasp. Heroic FBI agents wrote memos, villainous or incompetent supervisors ignored them or, worse, destroyed them."
If terrorists are sneaking around in an urban setting, American authorities in these films, rely on surveillance technology to root them out, Nunn observes.
"If we know a sleeper cell is operating in a city's neighborhood, the authorities can place the cell under surveillance with visual monitoring, communications interception, dialed number logs, video taping, credit card purchases, and other transaction footprints used to build a virtual sphere of information control. Alternatively, we can figure out what terrorists 'look like' through profiling, find them, surveil them, uncover their plans, and incarcerate them. We will process information to prevent terrorism."
Therefore, it is not surprising to discover that the US government under George Bush made an effort after 9/11 to encourage the making of films where potential scenarios of criminal actions were played out in a fictional format to help Washington develop real counter terrorism tactics.
Nunn says that some Hollywood productions and planned TV shows were altered or postponed after 9/11 either because of fears the depicted violent strategies could be successfully imitated by real terrorists or they had the potential to cause a public panic.
Photo of Sam Nunn courtesy of Indiana University.
