Who wins where terrorism loses out to crime

ARTICLE: “Rethink spending on anti-terrorism, report says: Police, mayors say shift more funds to fight crime,” by Mimi Hall, USA Today, 2 October 2008.

I’ve written about this before: the reality that “three strikes” took many off the streets in the 1990s but that now we’re processing more ex-cons than criminals, so an ensuing flood of damaged people back into inner cities, and guess what? Crime inevitably rises, as long predicted by many far-sighted metro police chiefs I’ve interacted with over the past few years.

Add in the shift to anti-terrorism spending, so mandated in our post-9/11 mania, and you have a bad equation, especially with an economic downturn in the making.

This one was too predictable for words: a recalibration of American strategy that brings us back to the world’s more normal trajectory. This is the essential theme of Great Powers.

Comments

[Ted O'Connor]

The resources of municipal police departments and county sheriff's have mainly remained focused on crime. They don't have much leeway in the assignment of personnel. People are still murdered, raped, robbed and abused every day. Cars are stolen and houses are broken into. The initial reaction to 911 saw some officers assigned to new "anti terrorism" units and lots of meetings and attempts at cooperation and coordination between agencies. It has been seven years since 911 and the political realities of running a police department have seen the resources and time devoted to terrorism greatly reduced. Gangs, guns and drugs are the problems in our cities. Remember that a police department has to put officers in squad cars 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all year long. Christmas, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July. The FBI has experienced a momentous shift in resources. The organized crime squads, the corruption squads, even the FCI squads have suffered the loss of agents and resources (read that as money) as the Bureau tried desperately to stop the "next" attack. We now have hundreds of analysts with nothing to analyze and agents looking for indigenous terrorists who simply have not appeared. I remember working with some agents who had spent their entire careers in New York and D.C. watching Russians. The Russian UN contingent and the Russian (OK Soviet) embassy in D.C. When the "Wall" came down and the Soviet Union fell apart, these poor guys were lost. I knew one who used to sit at his desk and stare out the window. He was just waiting for his pension. The great bogeyman was gone.