The men and women of state and local law enforcement, both by the strength of their numbers and through their daily contact with the public, are the most likely to be the first to come across the new breed of homegrown violent extremists. That makes this proud blue line of 750,000 law enforcement officers across the nation our first line of defense against homegrown terrorism.

Today the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on the role of local law enforcement in stemming homegrown terrorism, and our witnesses - from a geographic cross section of our nation’s police agencies - talked about their counter-terrorism strategies.

Representatives from the Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department discussed the findings of their groundbreaking report: “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.�  After more than two years of investigation, they mapped out the radicalization process that is taking place in New York City, the United States, and elsewhere in the world. Their conclusions were riveting, impressive and disturbing: Violent Islamist ideology can motivate alienated but otherwise “unremarkable� individuals not normally found on law enforcement’s radar to commit terrorist acts. Often the Internet is a driver and an enabler of the radicalization process in America. And, once radicalized, people may act on their own or in small cells without any direction from, or connection to, a foreign terrorist organization. This is the pattern that has developed in attacks, both carried out and thwarted, in Europe and the United States– from London, England to Lackawanna, New York, from Fort Dix, New Jersey to Portland, Oregon. The NYPD report also laid out the challenge for local law enforcement in this area – they must be able to identify, pre-empt, and thus prevent homegrown terrorist attacks, even though plans for such attacks may not resemble typical criminal behavior that would draw police attention. That’s why neighborhood intelligence and outreach to the Muslim community is so important.

We also heard from representatives of the Los Angeles, Miami Dade and Kansas City police departments.

At the heart of their strategies is the requirement for knowledge of and familiarity with violent Islamist ideology and the local Muslim communities who overall are not engaged in such activities.

Each of these local police departments has reached out to their Muslim communities and established relationships with local Muslim leaders and with the Muslim-American families in their cities who want nothing more than to raise their families and prosper in this country they are proud to be citizens of. Each has developed strategies that integrate the global threat of Islamic terror into local solutions, whether it is LAPD’s new Community Mapping Project, Miami-Dade County’s focus on long-term intelligence gathering, or Kansas City’s patrolling strategies and actions to stop terrorist financing.

Each department took the initiative to develop their programs and they are carrying out a national function in doing so. They have set a national standard, and we’re going to make sure the rest of the country catches up to them.  It is crucial that these and other local efforts be linked together so clues to potential terrorist attacks are not lost through jurisdiction silos but are shared by local departments nationwide through shared intelligence databases, fusion centers and Joint Terrorism Task Forces that can connect the dots with information gathered at all levels – and geographies – of law enforcement.

The departments represented at our hearing today do this well, but that is not the case nationwide. One of the major post-9/11 reforms was to break down the stove pipes. It is critically important that we come together and share information.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Homeland Security, Politics .