Cops or Police in Counterinsurgency COIN

[davidbfpo]

Moderator's Note

This thread contains two old threads 'Send more cops' and 'Cops Show Marines How To Take On Taliban'. It has been renamed 'Cops or Police in Counterinsurgency' following today's post.

There is another related thread, but that refers to COIN coming home to assist law enforcement (mainly in the USA):http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=5424 (ends).

Hat tip to Leah Farrell on:http://allthingsct.wordpress.com/

An interesting article by Spencer Ackerman, on his blog, entitled 'Three Cheers For A Law Enforcement Approach To Terrorism': http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2.../sendmorecops/

He starts citing President Obama's speech:

Although our intelligence community had learned a great deal about the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen — called al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — that we knew that they sought to strike the United States and that they were recruiting operatives to do so — the intelligence community did not aggressively follow up on and prioritize particular streams of intelligence related to a possible attack against the homeland… this contributed to a larger failure of analysis —- a failure to connect the dots of intelligence that existed across our intelligence community and which, together, could have revealed that Abdulmutallab was planning an attack.

Ackerman's reflections ends with:

A joint approach is the right approach if you want to see everyone’s information. But it is to say that within that joint entity, (my emphasis) analysts need — wait for it — a law enforcement approach to terrorism.

Spencer Ackerman is a new name for me and his wiki entry is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Ackerman . He is a reporter for The Washington Independent.

Leah's blog has a follow-on piece, drawing on her Australian experience: http://allthingsct.wordpress.com/201...-to-terrorism/

Taken from it:

the crucial issue: Intel Agencies collect, they aren’t meant to share. It’s not what they do. Ergo sometimes they’re not good at sharing, even though this is changing....Cops investigate and share. Not all the time..

Many of these issues have appeared post-Detroit on a number of threads: the main Detroit attack thread: http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9331 and the wider discussions on intelligence after MG Flynn's report:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9412

Here is a UK academic review 'Tracking terrorist networks: problems of
intelligence sharing within the UK intelligence community' by Anthony Field (University of Warwick), not read fully yet and the link:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action...4&aid=6459944#

This is currently free and is part of a collection of pieces on the future of UK intelligence and special forces: http://journals.cambridge.org/action...=0&issueId=04# )

I attended a number of conferences in 2008-2009, which underpin the publication and this is the first aspect that has been published to my knowledge.

This could sit in the 'Law Enforcement' thread, but is more on intelligence IMHO.