COIN comes home to assist policing

[MikeF]

Our approach to law enforcement is expensive, but I'm not sure there is a realistic way around this.

At some point, our law enforcement efforts will become too expensive, and we're going to have to ask if we willing to lose our civil liberties when drones are flying over the skies and we're using social network analysis to map out the human terrain- which goes against our constitution.

It also argued for removing he mandatory sentence times for drug use, which I strongly support. Politicians have in effect took on the role of the Judge and Jury by mandating a minimal sentence for specific crimes (politically popular), instead of allowing the jury and judge to assess the total person and the overall context of the alleged violation, and then determine an appropriate punishment instead of X=Y.

Concur. We need to empower local leaders. The bureaucracy is not the answer.

On the other hand, what the article didn't address is the potential impact of not arresting the growing number of gang members. Failure to enforce the law and for the government to protect the population from criminals has its own costs. If you take a position you can always spin the numbers to support it, so we all need to take a step back and look at the problem in a more holistic manner in my opinion.

For a holistic manner, I would submit that it's not simply a police or governance problem. Rather, it's a community problem.

If the police are taking ownership to "fix" it, then that decision absolves the local leaders, families, churches, NGOs, etc from having to step up and be good citizens.

It's similar to some parents who drop their kids off at school expecting the teachers to have sole responsibility for educating their child. They outsource their responsibilities and do not take the time to work with their children on homework and during the summer.

[Bob's World]

What we enforce is a fuzzy thing in the best of times. In less than a year of county budget crunch, we went from charging drug residue in a simple glass tube crack/meth pipe as a felony possession, to a misdemeanor, to a mere violation. Such is politics.

Can we afford our current war on drugs, with indirect costs that far exceed the extremely high direct costs? I don't think so. We can come up with smarter policies to mitigate the down side of legalized drugs that will be well funded by the legal revenues from the sale and taxation of the same.

Morality is shaped by what we can afford to feel indignant about.

[socal1200r]

Watched a very interesting movie last night, called "Bloody Sunday", directed by Paul Greengrass from 2002. It's about the killings of numerous unarmed Irish civil rights protestors by British army troops on Jan 30, 1972. Now I can't tell if it's entirely objective, but it does raise some very interesting points, that are still applicable today, maybe even more so.

The most obvious one is the military is not trained for the law enforcement mission. They can secure an area for the police-types to come in and do what they're trained for, but the military, for the most part, should not be charged with doing what is primarily a law enforcement mission (rounding up suspects, effecting arrests, searches and seizures, etc). In this movie, some members of 1 Para are so keyed up, they don't view these protestors as fellow citizens, but as hooligans who are responsible for the deaths of fellow troops, and are bent on revenge.

Another obvious paradigm that is clearly shown is, "the best laid plan never survives initial contact with the enemy." There's a scene where the staff shows some higher-level officer the placement of their troops, the route of march of the protestors, what they anticipate the protestors actions will be, what their reactions will be, etc. Although it may have looked great on the wall in the command post, once events started to unfold, it quickly got out of hand.

Some other TTPs that came into play are unity of command, maintaining good SA and discipline, and good comms. A lot has been mentioned about the Brits' experience with the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, as a good source of lessons learned regarding COIN, strategic comms, etc. There's a scene at the end, where the member of Parliament who was the main organizer makes a statement that the British govt has just handed the IRA their biggest victory. This is a great example of the superior force losing the battle of the narrative.

All in all, a very well done movie, with lots of good discussion points relevant to today's operational environment.

[davidbfpo]

The title of a 'Wired' article on an issue that lingers around and irregularly returns, as seen in:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ad.php?t=15971

The article has information I'd not seen before on the scale of this largesse, if not greed:

the Fairmount Police Department. It serves 7,000 people in northern Georgia and received 17,145 items from the military. The cops in Issaquah, Washington, a town of 30,000 people, acquired more than 37,000 pieces of gear.

In 2011 alone, more than 700,000 items were transferred to police departments for a total value of $500 million.

Citing a former Seattle PD chief:

.. having small local police departments go around with tanks and military gear has “a chilling effect on any effort to strengthen the relationship” between the community and the cops. And that’s not the only danger. “There’s no justification for them having that kind of equipment, for one obvious reason, and that is if they have it, they will find a way to use it. And if they use it they will misuse it altogether too many times,” said Stamper.

Link:http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012...tary-gear/all/

[bourbon]

The Mass State Police C3 Policing Project in Springfield was featured on 60 Minutes last week:

Counterinsurgency Cops: Military tactics fight street crime. CBS News 60 Minutes, 5 May 2013.

[bourbon]

Police clicking into crimes using new software - Harvard students’ software seeks to help police dismantle networks, by Aaron Lester. The Boston Globe, 18 March 2013.

Called Nucleik, the software is being tested by Gregorczyk and his gang unit. Nucleik is the brainchild of three Harvard University engineering students who hatched it as a class project for a professor with friends in law enforcement. The students were struck by how little technology was used by police to organize all the information they gather in their surveillance of gangs.

“We’re seeing these guys fighting crime everyday, putting their lives on the line everyday, but they’re not doing it with the right tools,” said Scott Crouch, cofounder of Nucleik.

So they set about to create a single platform for multiple uses, whether as a mobile app used in the field for street-level info or as a powerful desktop tool that could sift through mountains of data. The Springfield gang unit has been trying out the first version of Nucleik since mid-summer.

“Normally you’d need probably five pieces of software to do all of this and it would take hours. Now with one software, it takes minutes,” said Crouch.

The MSP C3 Policing Project has worked Harvard bioengineering professor Major Kit Parker, who enlisted his design engineering class to help tackle project related problems. One output from that was a set of software tools designed to support C3 Policing – with the help of Harvard's innovation lab, the students who originally developed the tools have launched a start-up called Nucleik.

[JohnBertetto]

I am currently working on a similar software package. Dynamic SNA, geospatial and spatio-temporal, and social media analysis.