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Whether or not police officers are in the best position to spot and report on potential terrorists or acts of terrorism is a subject of much debate in the post 9/11 world. But wherever you come down on the issue of local law enforcement’s role in the fight against terrorism one thing is clear. As things stand, most cops that see something they feel may be related to a potential terrorist or act of terrorism don’t have an easy way to get that information to the people that are best positioned to do something about it.
In Los Angeles the LAPD has a solution for this problem. And unlike a lot of the measures taken by federal law enforcement officials at the FBI and DHS, this plan has a good chance of actually working. That’s because, like a lot of innovations in law enforcement, this idea came from inside a police department.
The new Los Angeles Police Department program hopes to make sure that tips about potential terrorist activity are passed from beat cops to federal security officials in Washington.
The program has been up and running for a few months and rapidly becoming the "heart and soul" of the LAPD's counterterrorism efforts, Police Chief William Bratton said.
And despite the concerns of civil-liberties groups that say it turns beat cops into spies, so far there is very little in the way of evidence that peace officers are going overboard with their newfound status as intelligence agents.
The program is under the direction of Commander Joan McNamara, the department's No. 2 counterterrorism official. She took the job a year ago.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff refers to the nation's 800,000 police officers as "the cloak of security across America." But when she looked around her department, she says, she thought, "I don't think so."
There was no system for officers to report terror tips garnered from their patrols to the rest of the department, much less to the NSA, DOD or CIA.
LAPD Sgt. Shannon Paulson, a reservist in Naval intelligence, suggested that police reports include information on incidents that could be connected to a terrorist plot.
The "suspicious activity reports" would be routed to analysts at the LAPD's counterterrorism bureau who would assess them and assign codes so the data could be studied. The data could then be cross-referenced with other databases, to look for patterns.
Cmdr. McNamara's program measures intelligence produced by the department, said Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who heads the LAPD's counterterrorism division. But it also gives police officers a seat at the table. They "no longer feed off the bread crumbs of that table," Downing told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.
But with rising rates of crime, massive budget shortfalls and the officer recruitment/retention crisis, critics of the LAPD approach wonder if this is the best time to add “intelligence specialist,” to the already crowded list of things police officers are charged with.
In addition civil-liberties advocates say such information gathering without evidence of a crime is ineffective and invasive.
"That sort of observation of innocuous behavior is completely inappropriate," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who is a national-security specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The last thing the LAPD needs is for the law-abiding community to feel like the police are spying on them."
To check the city's legal assessment and liability issues, Deputy Chief Downing sent the proposal to privacy lawyers at the information-sharing division in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the department that oversees most U.S. intelligence operations.
Officials at that agency say that they have concluded the program makes a priority of protecting privacy and should be a national model for other law enforcement agencies. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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