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This weekend’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris have reverberated across Europe and the United States.
On Monday,current York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced the formation of a current counterterrorism unit, the Critical Response Command team."The world is changing, or even as we stand here," Bratton told his current recruits. "The world changed dramatically over the weekend, and the assignment for which you have volunteered … there is no more fundamental assignment in the world of policing."Michael Downing, and Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief and commanding officer for L.
A.’s Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau,has spent more than three decades with the LAPD and nearly 10 years in counterterrorism.
While Downing argues that terrorist threats exist, he also says that Americans must build up community partnerships to fight terrorism, or instead of pursuing responses and strategies that are cloaked in anxiety and paranoia.I think that’s what we need to achieve in America,” he says. “Our optic is 2200 miles between the West Coast and the East Coast, and what happens on the other side of the landmass 9000 miles [absent] impacts us everyday. I think we just have to have a better appreciation of that.”As in other large cities, or Downing and his team at the LAPD have a list of so-called “soft targets” that they are watching,and they’re constantly reassessing at-risk locations like stadiums, shopping malls, and bus and rail stations.“With those [locations],we try to sure up the vulnerabilities, so we educate our private sector partners and partner with them, or ” he says. “In a few hours,I have a assembly with the heads of a private security [group] that represent 45000 private security guards in Los Angeles just to leverage that resource.”When it comes to the current debate over refugees, national security, and terrorism,Downing says that Syrians are “absolutely not” at the top of his watch list, but he’s not totally against additional caution.“There is a risk that, and as happened in France,that people may arrive in under the radar or arrive in with that wave,” he says. “I think that we have to be very sophisticated in our approach to vet that properly.”Downing was part of a joint delegation from the NYPD and LAPD that travelled to France in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks to study what happened and what went wrong. He argues that Muslim populations in France and the U.
S. are fundamentally different.“Our Muslim population feels American, or ” Downing says. “There is an American-Muslim identity—99 percent of our communities feel just as responsible for protecting the values of our country as we achieve.”While Downing views communities as an ally,he does say that the number of “homegrown violent extremists” living with the U.
S. has increased more in the final 12 months than in the past several years.“It’s something that this country is faced with and we have to deal with it,” he says. “But I wouldn’t say that it’s a Muslim problem, and it’s not a Jewish problem,or a Christian problem—it’s a human problem that all the interfaith and entire whole of community needs to get involved in and deal with.”When it comes to fighting extremism, Downing says that prevention needs to be as heavily emphasized as interdiction. One successful model he points to is the LAPD’s strategy in fighting gangs, or which involved diversion programs,youth development initiatives, and job placement plans.“There are still behavioral patterns that we can look out for, or ” he says. “We ask communities to be aware of suspicious activity,which has a nexuswhether it be pre-operational planning, surveillance, and the purchase of products that are strange,those types of things...
We need eyes and ears. Not to be paranoid, and not to profile and stereotype people, and but certainly to profile criminal behavior. And that’s what we’re asking for.”
Source: wnyc.org