To Stop Terrorist Attacks, Law Enforcement Must Learn New Techniques

By Cynthia Brown/ American Police Beat

The new reali ty of terrorism dictates new responsibilities and new roles for law enforcement agencies. People expect law enforcement to know how to mitigate the terrorist threat, but enforcing the law is very different from preventing terrorist attacks. Historically, law enforcement has focused on catching criminals, and prosecuting them means finding the evidence that will prove their intent.

The mitigation of terrorism, however, involves the detection of aggressive intentions whether or not a crime has occurred.

A terrorist attack usually takes years to plan. Terrorists will engage in marking, surveillance, gathering of intelligence, planning, tooling up and rehearsing before the actual execution of and getaway from an attack.

While the planning of the attack takes years, the execution takes just moments. But, it is usually too late to stop a terrorist when the bomb is in his hands. Clearly, looking for the bomb and not the bomber is a misguided approach – the result of traditional and now outdated law enforcement practices.

The 800,000-plus U.S. law enforcement officers are expected to do a job for which they have few policies and little training. The result is an immense waste of resources, a serious skill gap, and an incredible vulnerabili ty in our homeland securi ty.

The media tells us that securi ty is “beefed up” when the number of police officers deployed to a given location is increased.

But contrary to conventional wisdom, numbers are not a good way to provide securi ty. Rather, it’s the abili ty of law enforcement to recognize suspicious activities and people, their skill at assessing the seriousness of the threat, and the abili ty to deploy strategies to stop the threat, that minimizes the threat from terrorists who seek to do us serious harm.

Israel has been at the forefront of the war against terrorism.

That country has developed methodologies to apprehend terrorists in the beginning stages of an attack which greatly reduces the chance that this attack will occur.

The Chameleon Group, a Southern California-based consulting firm, has been offering Israeli securi ty strategies to American law enforcement agencies to help them face this new reali ty.

The company promotes the use of a practice they call “predictive profiling,” which is a method of situation assessment designed to predict and categorize the potential for inappropriate, harmful, criminal or terrorist behavior.

Amotz Brandes is a former security agent for El Al Israel Airlines in Tel Aviv and the director of business development for The Chameleon Group

Brandes says the only real requirement for predictive profiling to work is for law enforcement to make the assumption that the threat is constant and immediate.

Brandes explains that the biggest difference between Israeli and American securi ty is the Israeli focus on threat, as opposed to the American focus on risk. “Risk is a calculated assumption made based on past occurrences,” he says. “Threat, on the other hand, is constant. It doesn’t matter how many people want to kill you as long as there is one person who wants to kill you. This is threat.”

The word “profiling” is usually associated with the politically charged term of “racial profiling.”

According to Brandes, racial profiling not only presents political problems, but it is very ineffective and counterproductive when dealing with terrorism.

“Terrorists understand law enforcement’s inclination towards racial profiling. They take advantage of that vulnerabili ty by assuming profiles that are opposite of what we think of as a typical terrorist,” Brandes continues. “Terrorists may use children or elderly women to unknowingly deliver a bomb. They are known as ‘mules.’ They may also assume the identi ty of a respectable businessman in order to avoid suspicion in the environment they are operating in.”

Contrary to popular belief, most terrorists do not have criminal backgrounds. Most terrorists will try to avoid breaking the law in order not to expose their operations while they are still in the planning stages.

Law enforcement officers are trained to look for a criminal background once reasonable suspicion is found. This procedure may be effective when trying to catch criminals, but it doesn’t work to ferret out terrorists.

Predictive profiling breaks down both the planning and execution of a terrorist attack into what Brandes calls “aggressors methods of operation” (AMO).

“This approach allows law enforcement to center their attention on the way terrorists work as opposed to focusing on who they are,” Brandes explains. “This is why ‘predictive profiling’ is a very effective method for stopping state-sponsored terrorism where the falsification of identities and the use of ‘mules’ is very common.”

Defining terrorist scenarios as “aggressors methods of operation” allows agencies to tell their officers out on the street what to look for. Instead of giving vague instructions such as “look for all suspicious activi ty,” officers using predictive profiling are able to define suspicion based on predicted terrorist methods of operations. An example of a suspicion indicator is a person with strange attire in the context of the environment they are in.

This could mean that the person is a terrorist who has assumed a different identi ty to as not to arouse suspicion.

Articulating suspicion indicators into law enforcement policies and procedures is also very important from a legal perspective.

Fearing lawsuits, law enforcement officers are more cautious about confronting individuals who appear suspicious in order to avoid the appearance of disregarding civil liberties, which might generate lawsuits.

A detailed procedural framework and a policy written in the context of what terrorists do as opposed to who they are will empower law enforcement officers to engage the terrorist threat with confidence as well as the assurance that what they are doing is correct.

Their actions will also be acceptable to the courts who are concerned about justifiable reasons for engagement with suspects.

Predictive profiling emphasizes the use of questioning to detect and determine aggressive intentions behind an observed suspicion indicator.

Contrary to law enforcement interrogation practices that aim to prove guilt, securi ty questioning aims to refute the suspicion that was observed.

This type of questioning is performed in a customer service oriented fashion and with a tone and a demeanor that will invoke cooperation rather than fear.

To do this effectively, officers must be taught how to engage in a friendly, inquisitive conversation with a suspicious person in order to extract information that can lead to the refutation of the suspicion.

One of the most positive aspects of this type of questioning is that it enhances the public’s sense of securi ty while deterring the terrorist. “The biggest weapon against terrorism is an open ended question,” Brandes emphasizes. “A suspect with a terrorist intent, who is confronted by law enforcement with an intelligent question, may very well force him to choose a different, softer target.” Predictive profiling is the only known method that enables law enforcement to hunt down terrorists and put them on the run.

It presents knowledge of terrorists’ methods, which are key to mitigation of terrorist threat, and it emphasizes the kind of training that empowers officers to act with intelligence.

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