Copyright © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press.
Opinion |
The Unintended Consequences of September 11th
* Chief of Police, Los Angeles Police Department, USA. Email: malinowski{at}lapd.lacity.org
William Bratton, Chief of Los Angeles Police Department, describes how the law enforcement paradigm in the United States has shifted dramatically since 11 September, and how the reallocation of federal resources to combating terror has impacted on fighting organized crime.
The world is a markedly different place than it was on 10 September 2001.
I had left policing and was traveling the globe helping local police grapple with their crime problems. The crime reduction successes in New York, and the tipping point effect across the United States in the 1990s resulted in an optimism that the police can and do make a difference. The lives saved and revenue generated for cities that had driven crime down and increased their tax base inspired a new sense of cooperation between the federal authorities and local law enforcement.
Then it happened. In a matter of a few hours, on the morning of 11 September 2001, as the world watched the unfolding events surrounding the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, everything changed. Our view of the world, our priorities, our sense of commitment, all evolved, in a sense, in the recognition that we needed to shift our direction, close ranks and protect ourselves from a new threat. And shift we did.
Following the tragic events of 11 September 2001, the law enforcement paradigm changed dramatically. Federal resources were reallocated from fighting street crime and organized crime to terrorism, and many state and local police agencies expanded their roles from fighting crime to include the prevention of, and response to terrorism. Unwittingly, as law enforcement reacted to the aftermath of 9/11, and the United States' federal dollars and priorities shifted, organized crime groups were able to exploit the reduction in law enforcement attention and moved aggressively to establish new ‘trade routes’ and alliances.
As of this writing, a disturbing trend has been identified: illegal profit-minded groups are branching out to other crimes such as the narcotics trade, the very profitable sales of untaxed cigarettes, and the counterfeiting of mainstream products (e.g. clothing, designer purses, lip balm, motor oil, baby formula, and pharmaceuticals including prescription medication).
Further, more and more of our organized crime investigations lead circuitously back to terrorism cases. We know that there is a confirmed link between counterfeit products and terrorism funding. This position is supported by reports from the United States House Committee on International Relations and House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, which indicate that the sales of counterfeit goods finance terror organizations and facilitate violent criminal activity.
Hindsight being 20/20, could it be that in our well-intentioned and patriotic zeal to protect the Homeland allowed these groups to morph into more complex, profitable and interconnected criminal enterprises that in turn aid and abet the very foe we were trying to contain?
Was such a dramatic shift necessary? We will never know for sure. To a large degree, we have been extremely successful in our efforts to prevent and interdict terrorist attacks. No major attack has been executed within our borders since that fateful day. A number of attempts have been thwarted and if an attack were executed, we are much better prepared to respond.
As the paradigm shifted, and organized crime began its quiet resurgence, street crime continued to decline based in part on the renewed emphasis on crime reduction spurred by community policing and organizations like the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) and thefederal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office in the 1990s. These historic crime reduction efforts continued to bring dividends in terms of sustained declines in crime rates throughout the country. Was there a lag between the time it took for us to fully immerse ourselves in the Counter-terrorism Homeland Security mindset and the time it took for major cities to start registering crime increases? Yes. I believe so. It appears that by focusing on good policing practices, accountability through COMPSTAT and an emphasis on crime reduction from the mid- to late-1990s a kind of momentum was created that continued to surge ahead even after the paradigm began to shift in 2001. So, for a couple of years we saw a huge increase in our resources, capability and emphasis on counter-terrorism and we still saw steady declines in crime.
It was not until 2005 that we began to see some disturbing evidence that has given rise to concerns that our efforts to embrace our expanded role in Homeland Security may have inadvertently lead to a dilution of our basic core mission of crime fighting. Just as organized crime was able to rebound as priorities shifted so too, it appears from the evidence, that street crime, particularly violent crime may be rebounding. Indeed, some cities are once again experiencing spikes in violent crime, most notably in robbery, homicide, gang and juvenile crime.
It was against this backdrop that concerned police chiefs from throughout the United States came together in August of 2006 to discuss what I describe as a gathering storm of crime. Through our informal discussions leading up to this violent crime summit, and as laid out in PERF's report, it became clear that something was very different about crime in 2005 compared to what we had been seeing for the better part of the prior 8 years. Violent crime was making a comeback. When preliminary figures for the 2005 FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) came out in 2006, they confirmed our concerns that violent crime had dramatically risen—the first major increase in more than a decade. This trend continued in 2006.
For further data, I encourage you to go to the PERF Web site and download the entire report, ‘A Gathering Storm—Violence in America’. It shows there are a number of cities across the country reporting large changes in the extent and nature of violent crime. The report does not suggest that all cities are experiencing large increases in violent crime, but rather shows that a cross-section of cities nationwide are witnessing increased volatility in violent crime. As stated by PERF's Executive Director, Chuck Wexler, OBE, ‘This merits attention. In looking back at the early 1990s when violent crime first began its meteoric rise in the United States, it did not increase all at once but rather in stages. There are some in both academia and government who believe these increases in violent crime may represent just a blip and that overall crime is still relatively low. They argue that before we come to rash conclusions we should wait and see if the violent crime rate continues to increase over time. This thinking is faulty. It would be like having a pandemic flu outbreak in a number of cities, but waiting to see if it spreads to other cites before acting. Importantly, for many police chiefs, mayors and others living in dangerous communities, they do not have the luxury to "see what happens." The time to act is now.’
This is not to say that we should back off in our efforts to mitigate and interdict acts of terror. We must continue to move forward with our homeland security initiatives with our federal colleagues, while continuing to focus on driving down crime in our communities and the rebuilding of communities that were torn apart by the violent crime trends of the 1980s and 1990s. But we cannot do it alone.
The federal government must recognize that while we are committed to balancing Homeland Security demands with our responsibility to prevent and respond to traditional crime, fear and disorder, we need some of the federal resources and assistance that helped reduce crime dramatically in the 1990s. We need to refinalize the partnerships we forged and the meaningful change we accomplished through that concerted effort to drive down crime. At the local level, we created many initiatives and ideas that were implemented with great positive effect with significant federal investment. But for the last 5 years, the feds have been deinvesting from traditional crime fighting at a time when we are finally getting it right. I believe that the spikes we are seeing are the first signs that the residual benefits of the 1990s investments are coming to an end.
If this deinvestment is not reversed, we risk returning to an era where the police were thought to have no impact on crime and no role in crime prevention and control. We must be careful to shape our own role in the public interest rather than allow the availability of funding and a myopic hysteria overtake us and force us to deemphasize crime fighting in favor of counter-terrorism. We, and as importantly, the federal government, need to seek a coordinated, balanced approach to both important missions.
One of the great developments of the past few years has been the dramatic expansion of the law enforcement network internationally. In the past, we were limited by technology and bureaucracy, often to a single point of contact between and among police agencies throughout the world. Routine requests were routed through INTERPOL and emergency requests required elaborate rationale and persistence to get to the right person overseas. Now, based in part on the necessity of immediate and actionable intelligence after the attacks of 11th September and 7th July, local police have realized that their federal governments lack the ability to provide a meaningful and timely link, a cop-to-cop link between police agencies across the globe.
I just returned from a conference in Northern Ireland and follow-up discussions with the London Metropolitan Police. These contacts, these cop-to-cop connections, are vital in our pursuit of solutions to both homeland security and crime problems. During the 7th July London underground bombings I was able to reach out directly to one of my senior managers who was on secondment to the Metropolitan Police in London, to get accurate and timely intelligence on what was happening on the ground. Using this information we were able to effectively deploy our resources to assist in our mitigation efforts here in Los Angeles. Since that time I have sent a number of my officers of various ranks to London and other cities abroad to examine best practices and to bring that knowledge back for use in our City.
We got it right in the United States in the 1990s when we formed inter-agency partnerships and developed our own ‘spider webs’ to combat both organized crime and street crime. We know from that experience that we can make a difference. The good news is that we have identified these trends early enough. We can now exploit our emerging relationships to deploy our best and most seasoned organized crime investigators alongside our counter-terrorism resources and analysts to form a seamless linkage to protect our cities from terrorists, to begin to dismantle newly reconstituted organized crime groups, who are aiding and abetting terrorists, and to stem the growing tide of street crime and violence gripping our communities. It is about cooperation, networking, openness and transparency. We have an overriding need to balance traditional crime fighting and the new challenge of counter-terrorism. We can succeed in striking this balance if we are vigilant, inquisitive and tireless in our efforts to reexamine the way we do business.
The world is a markedly different place now than it was on 10 September 2001. It is incumbent upon us as police leaders to recognize the unintended consequences of events such as 11 September and 7 July, to gather accurate timely intelligence, to rapidly deploy our resources, to employ smart, effective tactics and then to follow up relentlessly, through a transparent process of self-critical examination, in order to balance our ever increasing list of organizational priorities.
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