You talked about the challenge of some of the sunshine laws and other factors that police forces had to be cognizant of. There are citizens’ groups as well as civil libertarians who have expressed a lot of concern about the various programs as well as technologies that are used to either profile select groups of people or monitor conversations. You encountered some of these criticisms when you were in Los Angeles with the programs that were looking to map areas where Muslim-Americans were living in communities. Are these concerns valid? Should there be such a heightened sense of anxiety from these groups?
Whether they’re valid or not, the reality is that the Muslim community is concerned that it is being unfairly targeted or identified as being a source of terrorism within the country as well as the source of external threats. The unfortunate reality is that the predominant terrorism threat does come from radical elements of that community. The more significant activities have been generated from that community. It’s all the more important that the Muslim community understand their responsibility to the larger community in terms of the recruitment by the radicals of young people into terrorist types of activities.
The importance of policing and intelligence is the idea of gathering information from which you can make better intelligence. If, in fact, the most significant threat to our country comes from within that community, it’s understandable that law enforcement is going to pay extra attention to them.
It’s much the same as when you’re tracking more traditional crime. There’s an expression: You “put cops on the dots.” You’re not going to put cops in a safe neighborhood if you have limited resources. You want to put them where there’s emerging problems and trends.
The good news is that the democracy that we live in creates significant safeguards against unnecessary police intrusion or intelligence gathering. We have to justify what we’re doing and, in some instances, go through many legal hoops and hurdles to engage in that activity.
This concern, though, is that well-intentioned activities on the part of law enforcement can be the cause of the fear or concern and be misunderstood. One such effort was one we undertook in Los Angeles where we had a desire to really understand a community we’d had very minimal contact with over the years, because they were by and large a law-abiding community.
We didn’t know much about them in terms of crimes committed by their population, including traditional crimes, because their neighborhood by and large was relatively safe. The idea was to try to understand a religion and a culture we had very little understanding of. This included knowing about sensitive sites like mosques, schools, and cultural centers.
We considered it sensitive from the idea that if there was a heightened terrorist threat or alert that would generate potential activities against those sites, we, the police, wanted to know where they were so we could help to safeguard them.
Having the name and location of a facility enabled us to put it on the alert list that we maintained. We were concerned that following a terrorist incident there might be retaliation directed against Muslims or Muslim facilities.
It’s no different than what we’ve done for years with the Jewish community in New York, Los Angeles, or anyplace there’s a large Jewish population. You want to know where the synagogues and schools are, where the community groups are, and who the leadership is in that community because of the potential for terrorist acts to be directed against them.
In the case of the LAPD, it was a well-intended effort, because that’s what we’ve done with the Jewish community for 50 years. We wanted to be in a position to offer the same services, but because of [the] post-9/11 [atmosphere], the Muslim community’s sensitivity to the idea that they were being unfairly singled out or that the intelligence we were seeking to gather was going to be used inappropriately against them [provoked] a strong reaction to it.
Part of that strong reaction was the use of the term “mapping.” It has a negative connotation like the term “profiling.” Profiling is done in so many positive ways in our society, but when you attach that term “racial” to profiling it becomes a phenomenally negative term. It’s the same with mapping, which is very commonplace in policing crime, but when the term was used in this particular case with the Muslim community, it immediately took on a racial, negative connotation.
What are the technologies that are missing today that could better serve law enforcement that we don’t have in operation today?
The tragedy of American law enforcement today is that there is so much technology out there that if it were all used by one organization and coordinated with others, it could do a phenomenal job of helping police continue to dramatically reduce crime, fear, and disorder in their communities.
Technology would in fact be a force multiplier at a time when departments are reducing the size of their forces. When properly coordinated and applied, technology saves personnel, time, and effort. The frustration for American police chiefs and mayors is that there is so much of it on the shelf that could be bought and used to benefit police forces but the budget constraints in our respective cities and states are so limiting, we’re lucky we can retain cops let alone acquire equipment.
I’m talking about technology such as in-car camera systems and camera and audio systems that officers can be equipped with as they walk beats or get out of their cars, and technological enhancements for real-time crime centers equipped effectively for policing activities. An example is the monitoring of prisoners with the ankle bracelets that used to be so big and cumbersome that have now been miniaturized. You can now track hundreds of people with crime-mapping capabilities and GPS systems.
The states don’t have the budgets to buy that technology and to train people to use it for monitoring. The tragedy of American policing is that even if we figured out how to reduce and prevent crime, a lot of the technology and tools that could enable us to do an even better job are just not there.
In some respect it’s the same thing with policing today. We’re still using an ax and a hammer to build our police forces and our capabilities.
It’s like a carpenter being forced to build a house with just a hammer, nails, and saw and not being able to use nail guns, circular saws, and all the advanced technology that a homebuilder now has.
In some respect it’s the same thing with policing today. We’re still using an ax and a hammer to build our police forces and our capabilities.
What’s the one threat you wish people would take more seriously that they are not paying attention to?
I think it’s the importance of continuing to invest scarce public dollars in public safety. With so few dollars to go around, there is a temptation, particularly since crime has gone down so dramatically over the past 20 years, that we can safely disinvest.
I would argue strongly against that.
The most critical investment of government dollars is public safety, because if you lose the safety of a city, if fear and disorder take over, investments in libraries and other forms of government services are not going to be of much value to citizens who are afraid to leave their homes to use them.
Public safety has to remain a priority, and I think that at this particular juncture, public safety consumes probably the largest proportion of most communities’ budgets.
It is, as we’re clearly seeing in the current Republican presidential debates, a matter of great concern in the face of economic issues and all the other things that are being discussed in those debates.
One thing you don’t hear discussed is crime.
When Vice President [Joe] Biden raised the issue, his words were immediately seized upon for political purposes and distorted. What he was trying to say quite simply was, if you reduce the number of police on the street in all likelihood crime is going to go back up again. That is something we need to be concerned about in regard to the prioritization of how you spend public dollars. His argument was that part of the prioritization had to be for public safety personnel such as police and firefighters.
After years of public service, you’re now firmly ensconced in the private sector. Has it changed your view on anything?
No. Like most people, I’m a constant work in progress. I deeply believe in the policing processes and changes I helped to create and participate in. I still get that opportunity in the private sector I’m currently working in. Fortunately, much of the work that Kroll is involved in is in the public sector, so I’m still involved. I’m still learning and applying what I learned throughout my 40 years in law enforcement.
You can’t stay still in either world because the world is not going to let you. The world is constantly evolving and changing. Policing for a large part of the ’70s and ’80s was evolving and changing, but in the wrong direction.
In the ’90s, we got back on track just in time to be prepared to deal with the 21st century, with the advent of terrorism and now the budget issues that the whole country – if not the world – is facing.
So we were fortunate that in the ’90s, we saw a rebuilding of police confidence, capabilities, and capacity. That’s what is carrying us forward at this time with all the issues we have to face.
As for me, I’m always open and welcoming new challenges and opportunities in this space, and there are no shortages of that.
This interview was first published in The Year in Homeland Security: 2011-2012 Edition.