Policing in the Future One

Policing in the Future

One of the greatest challenges facing modern law enforcement agencies is the incorporation of anti-terrorist activities into everyday policing efforts. The reason that the incorporation of anti-terrorist activities is so difficult is that terrorism differs from traditional crime and traditional crime prevention. The majority of non-terrorist crimes are either centered on individuals or have some type of personal motivation like personal wealth accumulation. However, terrorism is different. Terrorists also have personal motivations, but these motivations do not help the police determine how they select their victims or who those victims might be; largely because any person in America is considered an appropriate target. These anti-terrorist efforts will have different impacts on individual police personnel, police management, and the community. Furthermore, it is important for police everywhere to be aware of possible terrorist activities; while terrorists may target large cities or government targets, they tend to train in smaller areas.

One of the issues facing individual police personnel is learning to recognize terrorists from routine encounters with the police. While some terrorists may engage in lesser criminal activity to pay for their terrorist activities, the majority of terrorists have outside sources of money and do not have to resort to petty crimes. (Riebling, p.14). However, individual police officers will still have the opportunity to interact with terrorists, and need to understand how to recognize suspicious behavior. Individual American police officers can learn a valuable lesson from members of the Israeli police force, who oftentimes consider intelligence gathering to be more important than the underlying criminal investigation. (Riebling, p.5). In addition, individual police officers need to understand the importance of community relationships, and need to concentrate efforts on previously ignored populations, such as Arab and Islamic immigrant populations with low crime rates. By making sure that members of these communities feel comfortable approaching the police, individual officers make it more likely that they will report suspected terrorist activity.

Of course, individual officers can only do so much without aid from police management. Management needs to increase surveillance efforts, aimed at detecting terrorists. One of the major things that management can do is increase traffic control. From the Department of Motor Vehicles, which screens people before issuing identification, to officers in routine traffic stops and roadblocks that look for suspected terrorist activity, management can change policies in a manner aimed at increasing detection. (Riebling, p.8). The more routine contact that the police have with members of society; the more likely they are to uncover possible terrorist activity.