Fusion Centers - Where are they now? Part 1.

1. A little while ago I came across this thesis from the Naval Postgraduate Institute about fusion centers.  I’ve written about them before and my opinion of them is pretty low.  I do think they have enormous potential for either good or ill but generally have just been wallowing in oceans of mediocrity and bureaucratic self interest.  They are important to follow though because of their potential and so I try to keep current on their latest (d)evolutions. 

I’m not a total masochist so I didn’t bring the entire report with me to read on vacation, but just the most interesting looking chapter titled:  Analysis of Current Practice for Fusion Centers.  I recommend checking it out, even if you read nothing else because it raises some interesting issues (I suspect some unintentionally) that are in desperate need of discussion .

So, here are my comments on what I’ve read so far.  I’ll try to give enough context from the original paper to give you an idea of what prompted my comments without quoting the paper at length.  My perspective on this issue is based on work I did with one fusion center (rather extensive but more than a year ago) as well as regularly reviewing the products of several fusion centers.  I feel I have a pretty good picture of the analytical capability and internal operating environment of fusion centers generally and that is responsible for my generally pessimistic outlook on them.  That being said, I have had some contact with a member of one center who leads me to believe that there may be hope out there. We’ll have to wait and see.

Customer Identification: 

1. Who are the customers for fusion center products?  The thesis says that one survey “overwhelmingly identified investigators and law-enforcement as their primary customer” yet a discussion with analysts in those centers revealed confusion about who their customers were supposed to be and what they should be producing.  Fusion centers are often run by state law enforcement agencies, usually by people who understand how to run criminal investigations but have a weak grasp of what intelligence is and how it can be used.  As a result, fusion centers tend to flail about and can’t seem to claify what their mission is or how they intend on doing it.  What they do is hide their confusion in a bunch of management speak gibberish and throw around words like ’symatry’, ‘paradigm’, or ‘value added’ without having the slightest idea of what they’re talking about.  The confusion drips down to lower levels and before you know it, no one knows what they should be doing.
2. This jives with my experience where fusion centers, anxious to be the ‘one stop shop’ for every conceivable issue (so that they can stick their hand into every possible funding source) sell themselves as having a focus on ‘All threats, all hazards’.   Fusion centers don’t want to turn away any potential customer so they promise everything to everyone. 
3. Since fusion centers have a heavy investigative bent in their management and a weak grasp of intelligence they, de facto, overwhelmingly become case support focused in their production.  There are many ways to look at potential customers for a fusion center and as far as I know, very little time is spent on identifying who they should be before the center opens its doors (the best time to figure out what you’re going to do is before you start).  Are you going to target police makers, managers, line supervisors or rank and file?  Perhaps you want to focus on one component;  law enforcement, EMS, fire, etc.  Maybe it’s some combination of those.  Still, that needs to be clearly  articulated and far too often, it is not.
4. This is also a difficult problem because many (most?  all?) of the potential customers out there are unfamiliar with the concept of intelligence in their operations and decision making processes and so fusion centers have to take it upon themselves to educate potential customers about what they can and can’t do and given #1 above, that’s a pretty tall order if the leadership doesn’t know itself.

Tasking:

• The author cites an unnamed analyst who seems brilliant and I really want to buy him/her a beer.  In one quote (s)he says:
  • “One of the biggest problems facing fusion centers is getting law enforcement administrators to establish standing requirements.  Law enforcement administrators cannot become effecient consumers of intelligence if they do not take an active part in establishing what requirements are established or why.  The standing requirements of a fusion center should not be established in an ad hoc fashion.” 
• I think law enforcement is loath to establish standing requirements, in part, because they fear repurcussions if they don’t pick the ‘right’ requirements.  What happens if some criminal or  crime type grabs the headlines and sparks fear in the population and it turns out that our brave little fusion center wasn’t tracking that particular threat.  I think the perception is that could end a career.  Better to not establish any priorities so that when times are good you can claim to be tracking every possible threat to mankind and when times are bad you can hope no one will notice.

I don’t want this post to get too unwieldy so I’m going to have to break it up.  Stay tuned for part 2.

Procrastination Part 2

I highly recommend this post and, even more so, the comments to it by Megan McArdle of the Atlantic.

The rundown is this:  The Atlanta PD, in an effort to make their warrant/arrest quota (yeah, read that again…they felt you could treat conduct law enforcement like an assembly line) shot and killed a 92 year old woman.  That’s not all.  Then, they decided to plant evidence on her and cover everything up.

The whole mess highlights some of the major problems with law enforcement today.

We grade our prosecutors not on being right, but on winning. Also, our law enforcement agencies.  We grade them on arrests, not on who is guilty.  Worse, we grade them on a whole bunch of things except reduction in crime, the most obvious and important metric they should be judged on.

A prosecutor has discretion as to the exact charge brought against a suspect. He can make criminals seem to be much worse or more powerful than they are by making different charges. If a glorified courier gets popped with drugs that are ready to sell he can use kingpin statutes and make it appear he is doing great things in the war on drugs. Remember this the next time you read about arresting ‘the 20th hijacker’ or a gang ‘kingpin’.  Pay particular attention to these things in the months leading up to 1)  elections for prosecutors/attorney generals or 2) contract negotiations for police departments.  You’ll be surprised how many terrorist/gang/drug leaders coincidentally get arrested exactly when police and prosecutors need good press.

These are two reasons why I coming to suspect intelligence in law enforcement is ultimately doomed without a major overhaul in the system.  True intelligence in a law enforcement environment should be geared towards developing tactics and strategy which leads to a reduction in crime.  But, the problem is we hand out rewards in the criminal justice system only when we ‘get the bad guy’ which, in a perverse way, actually requires ‘bad guys’ to get.  And if they don’t exist, we need to create them.

Just iamgine this.  One prosecutor/police chief that instituted programs that reduced crimes but resulted in no major arrests during their tenure.  Another that saw no real reduction in crime but had numerous high profile arrests and has a reputation for a no-nonsense, get tough approach to criminals.

Who’s going to have a better chance of getting promoted/elected?

Good vs. Evil Part 2

I’ve received a torrent of comments about my earlier post about The Lucifer Effect (ok, one comment and an email) and so I’ve figured that I should expand upon the subject, particularly, as the findings might relate to intelligence analysis.

First of all, let’s look at how situational factors might might influence the act of intelligence analysis using an obvious example. It’s estimated that upwards of 70% of the classified intelligence budget at the federal level goes towards private intelligence contractors. These individuals and companies are (and have been) making huge gobs of money since 9/11. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the government contract gravy train will stop if the threat from the “Global Jihadist/fascist/communist/Chavezist/vast right wing conspiracy” network disappears. So, just how likely to you think individuals and companies are going to be (even on an unconscious level) to provide assessments which indicate the threat to the United States is decreasing or low? That would be essentially like sending a memo to your boss explaining how your job is redundant and if they fired you they could realize big savings with no loss of productivity. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Even if it was so obvious that the threat was so small that it could not be denied (and let’s face it, that would be quite a feat…, apparently it’s possible for some people to believe that Cuba poses an existential threat to the U.S.) you could be rest assured that these contractors would have a long list of new threats that desperately require not only all the resources currently under contract but a host of new ones as well (all available at a very reasonable price, if you act now).

There’s an even more prevalent instance of how situational factors can negatively affect intelligence products. Every agency has its own culture and set of assumptions. Challenging those assumptions risks having your analysis marginalized or even damage to your career.  Paul Pillar wrote about these issues in his article about how intelligence was manipulated to lead us into the Iraq war:

Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts — for whom attention, especially favorable attention, from policymakers is a measure of success — felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.

A clearer form of politicization is the inconsistent review of analysis: reports that conform to policy preferences have an easier time making it through the gauntlet of coordination and approval than ones that do not. (Every piece of intelligence analysis reflects not only the judgments of the analysts most directly involved in writing it, but also the concurrence of those who cover related topics and the review, editing, and remanding of it by several levels of supervisors, from branch chiefs to senior executives.) The Silberman-Robb commission noted such inconsistencies in the Iraq case but chalked it up to bad management. The commission failed to address exactly why managers were inconsistent: they wanted to avoid the unpleasantness of laying unwelcome analysis on a policymaker’s desk.

As Pillar and Zimbardo both point out (although in different ways), an even more subtle form of bias is the imposition of norms or standards that take on the equivalent of physical laws.  Those norms and standards make it difficult to do ‘macroanalysis’ of the system and even more difficult for such analysis (if done at all) to be accepted and acted upon.  For example, in law enforcement circles the common response to a criminal problem is suppression through the use of (or threat of) arrest and imprisonment.  The underlying assumption is that everyone (including criminals) make their decisions based upon cost-benefit analysis and the threat of arrest trumps virtually benefit.  If crime continues (assuming that’s the benchmark used to determine success), it’s not that the underlying assumption is wrong, rather it’s that the penalty isn’t stiff enough or we aren’t arresting enough people.  But what if that’s not how people make decisions? Or, if what is motivating criminals is more basic (a la Maslow) that the fear of imprisonment? 

That might prompt some analysis to look for alternate ways to deter crime but would require everyone to shift their perspective from the established current one that says “You fight crime by locking people up.”  That could be a scary idea for people who’ve made their career based upon that idea.  When ideas like that pervade an organization it’s difficult for metaanalysis to crack that mindset and so analysts are left with little option but feeding the organizational delusion.  From Pillar:

As any competent pollster can attest, how a question is framed helps determine the answer…On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.

Not particularly encouraging, I know.  If anyone has an idea of how to overcome such obstacles, I’ll buy ya a beer.

Good vs. Evil

I just finished reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is best known from running the Stanford Prison Experiment in which a number of men were randomly assigned the roles of ‘prisoner’ and ‘guard’ and placed in a mock prison setting in order to see how otherwise healthy, well-adjusted, people would react.

The subtitle of the book is “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” and Zimbardo uses the Stanford Prison Experiment to demonstrate that situations exert a great deal of influence over the actions of individuals. He then describes research (including the famous Milgram experiment) which further highlights the power of situation and authority to get people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t believe they would do. He then goes on to demonstrate how the events at Abu Ghraib mirror those of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Now, I know what you’re thinking and Zimbardo goes to great lengths to say that his argument is not an attempt to enshrine ‘excusology’ into our lives and or eliminate the concept of personal responsibility. What he does say is that despite how most of us read about the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or lynchings in the U.S. and say that we’d never do such things the fact is that if placed in those specific situations many of us would pull that gas lever, pick up that machete or pull on that noose. As he often repeats in the book, the problem may not be (and often is not) that there are some bad apples who do evil but that there’s a bad barrel that can make virtually everyone do evil. In short, the potential is in every human being to engage in the most despicable and most heroic actions.

The implications for intelligence analysis (both in the military and law enforcement) are really amazing. Our culture is based upon the idea that situational influence plays virtually no role in individual behavior. Rather, as Zimbardo points out, virtually every aspect of our society (the medical, judicial, psychological, etc.) is based on such the assumption that all causes of behavior are dispositional (inherent personal factors like free will, genetic makeup or personality traits).   If we actually consider situational factors as motivators for specific behavior then we might consider a different set of responses to crime, terrorism or other negative behavior.

Lest you think this is all a bunch of namby-pamby, Nancy Pelosi loving, brie-eating nonsense  check this out:

Protracted popular war is best countered by winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace and separating the leaders, cadre, and combatants from the mass base through information operations, civil-military operations, economic programs, social programs, and political action. (FM 3-24)

In other words:  You win insurgencies through changing the situational factors for the population which (if successful) will make them less inclined to support your enemies.

It took the powers that be more than 3 years to figure out that while you can kill the number 3 man in Al-Qaeda, if you don’t change the environmental factors that created him you’re likely to only have a host of volunteers willing to step into his shoes.  It’s the old idea of winning ‘hearts and minds’ given scientific support.

While the DoD may have adopted this message the law enforcement community resists it strongly.  Virtually the only strategy offered to combat crime in the United States has been various schemes designed to ‘get tough’ on criminals.  Just as in our fight against Al-Qaeda however, you can arrest all the drug dealers, gang members and other criminals you want but if you maintain the same situational factors (social, economic, and cultural) you find that new ones spring up hydra-like.

There’s too much good stuff to continue in this post but I’m hoping to revisit this book in a future post and highlight some of the more revealing passages in it.

The only unfortunate part of the book is the author’s attempt to indict the Bush administration for ‘building the bad barrel’ and establishing the conditions that led to Abu-Ghraib.  It needlessly politicizes the book and, I fear, means that a lot of people might pass the book over.

Street Gangs…just how organized are they?

A recent comment in one of my posts about 4th Generation Warfare brought up a common controversy in law enforcement/public policy circles. Are street gangs organizations with structure and hierarchies like traditional organized crime, networks of criminals that share some sort of loose commonality but essentially act independently, or some other type of grouping.

It usually serves the interest of law enforcement and elected politicians to claim that gangs are highly organized groups that resemble a corporation in structure like General Motors. After all, if you have a threat like that you can justify all sorts of policies and expenditures that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster among the general population.  Also, by making street gangs (or whatever the threat d’jour is) essentially evil mirror images of our police forces you get a nice narrative that explains why we have so much trouble eliminating them.

My experience has been that gangs want to be organized and structured (the desire screams through in their correspondence and rules that attempt to impose some sort of rankings to their members) but ultimately, members put their individual interests ahead of those of the organization. This leads to a sort of “Tragedy of the Commons” run amok. Most members, complements of an inflated sense of self worth, think that they are superior and have more intrinsic worth than their peers. Hence the large number of gang members willing to become informants and give evidence against those that they swear loyalty to unto death. My guess is that they watch Scarface and the Godfather too many times and draw the wrong lessons from each.

In some areas of the country I’m sure gangs do exhibit the sort of internal discipline necessary to establish a hierarchy and structure but the vast majority of gangs operate via informal relationships and try to take more out of their relationship with the gang than they’re willing to put into it. It matters more who grew up in the same project as who or who is the natural leader rather than which person has the title of ‘5 star general’.

I guess one argument against gangs being 4^th Generation warfare threats is their political blindness. Regardless of their criminal behavior, most gangs and gang members are firm believers in Western capitalism whether they know it or not. That is why, despite being economically deprived with little hope of advancing, gangs don’t try to alter the underlying political structure but rather just try to leap frog ahead of others in the race to get more stuff.

The problem with virtually all street gangs (at least from their point of view) is that they aren’t able to make decisions or plans that extend beyond the short term. My opinion is that this is because many people who become gang members have difficulty in conceiving of life in the long term (for an example of such thinking check out the documentary ‘Reversal of Fortune‘ which, while it doesn’t discuss gangs and crime, I think gives a wonderful glimpse into this mindset I’m talking about here) and so don’t seem to be able to plan much further beyond immediate needs or desires. That is why, the vast majority of crimes committed by gang members can best be described as ‘impulse’ crimes. That is, crimes either designed for immediate monetary reward or some sort of retaliation for a (real of perceived) slight. If street gangs are the scourge of many parts of the country than why, after more than thirty years of existence (in their present manifestation) are they still overwhelmingly focused on retail narcotics sales, robbery/burglary, assaults and other crimes that carry relatively low profit potential along with high risks of getting caught?

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that street gangs today pose no threat to the general population. Research has demonstrated that gang members do commit more crime than their delinquent non-gang peers and certainly many people are legitimately frightened by gangs that may be active in their neighborhoods. But that does not necessarily mean that gangs are highly organized or that their actions are dictated by a centralized command structure.  And (finally) I can come full circle back to my original post.  I don’t think a threat has to intend to destabilize a system in order for it to be a threat to that system.  Street gangs are both a threat to the existing civic structure as well as a manifestation of the flaws within that structure.  The only way to get rid of the former is to eliminate the latter.

4th Generation Warfare and Law Enforcement

I was over at the D-N-I website the other day and saw this post which talks about ‘4th Generation Warfare‘. From Wikipedia:

Fourth generation warfare (4GW) is combat characterized by a blurring of the lines between war and politics, soldier and civilian, peace and conflict, battlefield and safety…the fourth generation signifies the nation states’ loss of their monopoly on combat forces, returning in a sense to the uncontrolled combat of pre-modern times.

I found the concept of 4GW interesting because it seemed to mesh well with my experiences in Afghanistan. While there, I saw a number of parallels between the type of ‘warfare’ being fought there and the threats that seemed to be emerging in the law enforcement arena. For example:

• In the shooting wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies are non-state actors. They have wide ranging motivations such as political ideology, religion, economic interests or apolitical power grabbing. All however wish to erode or destroy the authority and power of the state.
• In the U.S., the biggest threats (at least, as described by the state system) have evolved from structured, hierarchical ones (the mafia, the Soviet Union and their clients) to unstructured, networked ones (street gangs, leaderless resistance terrorist groups, etc.)
• In both circumstances, it is quite clear that hierarchical structures (like us) don’t do well against unstructured ones. They are slow moving, reactive and have difficulty in understanding and fighting anything that doesn’t look like themselves.
• In many cases this lack of understanding results in situations where the ’structured entities’ (us) devolve into self promotion and institutional preservation. Look at the emphasis in Vietnam on body counts to demonstrate our inevitable victory there. Or today, the regular press releases about how many of Al-Qaeda’s ‘top leadership’ we’ve killed and captured to demonstrate we’re winning the War on Terror or in Iraq. Even worse, consider arguments which point to increases in spending or expansion of bureaucratic institutions as progress in the War on Terrorism.

The same holds true in the law enforcement arena. As organized criminal groups began to suffer from the superior organization and resources of the state system (RICO prosecutions, money for more cops and prosecutors, better information systems), a niche for criminal networks have arisen which make such tools less effective.

So, what is the typical response? In law enforcement at least, the trend has been to try to cram these groups into the ’structured organization’ mold. Therefore, when you see a press release for a big arrest of a street gang, you’ll usually see a chart demonstrating the organization of the gang that makes it look like it was run like a major corporation. Such organization is frequently more present in the minds of both the criminals and law enforcement than actually occurs. Dumb criminal organizations (usually the ones that get caught) try to emulate a highly structured and organized system, usually because they think such a system is the way it has to be done as well as providing an important sense of self worth (if every gang member spent as much time actually working at being a master criminal as they spend in trying to imitate one with images taken from Scarface, The Godfather and whatever else is discounted at Blockbuster this week we’d be in real trouble).

By trying to treat these 4^th generation threats as 2^nd generation we never make any real progress. Ever wonder why, when we have more people incarcerated than ever before in our history and despite almost constant trumpeting of “biggest drug seizure ever!”, “violent gang that terrorized city broken up” or “Number 3 Al-Qaeda man killed” we don’t seem to be making much progress either in serious criminal issues or the War on Terrorism? In many cases it’s because we still have difficulty in getting out collective head around the very nature of the conflict we’re engaged in.

Some point to street gangs (specifically MS-13) as examples of 4th GW in domestic terms but I’d have disagree. At least here in the U.S., they don’t constitute a significant threat to the existing state order. Like many other gangs, anecdotal tales of horrific violence are assumed to be normal behavior for the majority of members (which just isn’t true) and events that occur in other countries are assumed to be occurring here or ‘just around the corner’. So, while MS-13 and similar groups have a much greater influence in a number of Central American nations, and could potentially threaten the existence of the state, the same is just not true here in the U.S.

I discussed this with a colleague of mine and he thought that that one of the signatures of 4^th GW was the intent of the threat to destroy the existing system, which would exclude most of criminal groups existing today. Most criminal groups enrich themselves by acting as parasites on the existing system and require some form of stable system in order to operate efficiently. People need to be able to have jobs and make money in order to charge them for drugs, steal their possessions or con them out of their savings.

I don’t think intent is necessarily a defining characteristic of 4^th GW threats. Rather, it seems to me that so long as the threat, through it’s actions, has the capability of destroying the existing system (intentionally or not), it should be considered a 4^th GW threat. Do we care if network A wants to tear down the social fabric of our society and build another according to their ideology or if, for some other reason their actions destabilize our society? It seems to me the result is of the same severity which demands the same level of mobilization in order to eliminate the threat.

There is a danger in such an argument though. This certainly opens up the possibility to declare anyone who disagrees with goals of the state a mortal threat which should be silenced. We certainly don’t want to give aspiring Orwellian Big Brothers a justification to oppress citizens exercising their constitutional and human rights. How such a compromise could be reached is not clear to me but worth some more thought.

I’m also wondering if our current approach to threats might be misguided. Right now we tend to divide threats into categories based upon the type of threatening activity they are engaged in. So we have narcotics, terrorism, organized crime, and other specialized units to focus on those threats and rarely interact with each other, even when part of the same organization. It also tends to encourage law enforcement to focus on the threats they can easily disrupt rather than those that actually pose the most serious threat (and law enforcement certainly isn’t alone on this. Iraq had the misfortune of being the weakest and most easily invaded of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and so suffered the consequences. To argue it was a most significant threat to the U.S. and it’s interests of the three is just silly.)

The threats in 4^th GW, however, are likely to move in and out of these and other categories to suit their needs. I wonder if it would be better to focus on the severity (or potential severity) of threats rather than just what type of activity they’re engaging in. Apart from institutional self interest and bureaucratic inertia, does such a division of labor make sense given the declarations that we are facing ‘existential threats’? Perhaps these threats aren’t as serious to our existing order as we’ve been told but if they are it seems like the best course of action is to adapt to this new world we’ve found ourselves in rather than expecting our opponents to be concerned about making our jobs easier for us.

The 2007 NJ Gang Survey - Part Deux

The media’s take on the 2007 NJSP Gang Survey is starting to be revealed today. I think the decision not to include total gang population estimates was a good one since it looks like it’s forcing people to read the report rather than latching onto a number like a Titanic survivor clinging to a life preserver and ignoring everything else. As a result, the stories seem more informative and well rounded than I remember in the wake of the 2004 Survey.

Here’s a roundup of some of the stories out there:

Asbury Park Press - Pretty good focus on Monmouth and Ocean counties.

Gloucester County Times - Focuses (as you might expect) on Gloucester County. Good discussion about gang migration and gangs in suburbs.

The Star Ledger - Good general overview with discussion about links to the Governor’s newly released crime plan.

The Times of Trenton - This is a pretty good article with the exception of the description of MS-13 as ‘movers and shakers’. MS-13 hysteria has more to do with a few grisly acts that get a lot of media play as well as linking to the anti-immigrant feeling sweeping the country than the true nature of the threat.

Some of the interesting themes in most of the stories:

G.R.E.A.T. got mentioned a couple of times as a tactic to help keep kids out of gangs. Unfortunately, like D.A.R.E., the program doesn’t actually seem to do much other than make people feel like they’re doing something. The two programs cost a great deal of money and there’s very little evidence that they’re effective.

A few of the article pick up on the fact that the report is actual a survey of law enforcement’s perception of the gang environment in their jurisdiction rather than an attempt at any sort of objective description of gangs. Those two could be very different depending on a host of factors like agency experience in identifying gangs, public/political pressure, agency priorities, etc.

Many people have been beating the drums about the fact that gangs can’t be considered solely an inner city issue. The problem is that most people have deeply ingrained images of both gang members and a gang neighborhood and it’s hard to get your head around the fact that someone could be in a gang and not fit that stereotype. There’s been some good academic literature comparing crime (specifically juvenile crime) in depressed, inner cities and in the suburbs. The criminal justice system is much more likely to identify urban, minority criminal suspects as gang members while white, suburban individuals charged with the same (or similar) crimes are often regarded as delinquents or even ‘boys raisin’ hell’. As a result, every time some report comes out talking about gangs in the suburbs there’s both alarm (Oh, my god! Get my gun!) and disbelief (I haven’t seen any people dressed in red hanging out on the street corner selling dope, that report must be a lie!). We should expect gang members in a middle class suburb to act in the exact same ways that gang members in a inner city housing project would.

The 2007 New Jersey Gang Survey

The New Jersey State Police released their 2007 Street Gang Survey today. This is the third survey (others were in 2001 and 2004 although the first survey did not result in a published report) in what looks to be a regular three year cycle. Highlights from the findings include:

• Gang presence in New Jersey is widespread, but generally ‘thin on the ground’ -Types of gang theft crimes reported tend to be ‘crimes of opportunity’ or ‘impulse crimes’ rather than crimes requiring planning, resources or organization. meaning that although many (43%) municipalities report the presence of gangs, the size of gangs in these towns is usually (84%) relatively small (fewer than 50 members, and often more like a dozen).
• Types of gang theft crimes reported tend to be ‘crimes of opportunity’ or ‘impulse
  crimes’ rather than crimes requiring planning, resources or organization.
• Violent crime in schools (aggravated assault, attempted homicide, homicide) is very rare.
• The Bloods street gang was named by a large majority (87%) of municipal respondents reporting the presence of gangs. No other gang was named by more than half of the municipalities with a gang presence.

A very interesting and positive aspect of the survey is that it refrains from making estimates of the total numbers of gang members in the state. There’s often big demands to make such estimates in order to justify political points of view but such numbers generally have little real practical value. Thus, the report states:

The 2007 New Jersey State Police Street Gang Survey makes no attempt to estimate the total number of street gang members in New Jersey. The quality and precision of available data does not support such efforts, and past attempts to generate statewide gang membership estimates have been incorrectly characterized and misrepresented in public discourse.

The 2004 Gang Survey (which is worth checking out as well to compare with the new report) estimated almost 17,000 gang members throughout the state but my question was (and remains), so what? Would there be a policy difference if the estimate was 15,000 or 20,000? How about 10,000 or 30,000? Basically, once you get to these sorts of numbers I think you cross a line where variations of the estimate don’t effect how you react to them. Best to just say: “There’s a whole heck of a lot of gang members out there.” and move on.

Of course there’s also the problem that there are no universally held definition for gangs or gang members. New Jersey has 567 municipalities, 21 counties and several state law enforcement agencies, each of which can independently decide what constitutes a gang, gang member and gang crime, assuming they want to define them in the first place.

More later as I digest the report and commentary…

How are we doing? Metrics for the GWOT and beyond…

Way back in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld wrote a famous memo asking how we were doing in the ‘War on Terror’. The famous line quoted is:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Now, never mind that the question itself makes all sorts of assumptions that may or may not be true (are madrassas pumping out terrorists like factories make widgets? Are our opponents so organized that they are consciously deploying their ‘assets’ against us in a monolithic, systematic fashion? Are the clerics the ones doing the recruiting?). Also, forget the whole problem with the concept of a ‘War on Terror’ which, as many people have pointed out, is completely nonsensical (hey, let’s have a war on AK-47s! Or, maybe a war on sieges!) since you can only have a war against people (and sometimes intelligent robots or zombies) and not concepts, tactics, diseases or poverty.

The point is that, we’ve had a great deal of difficulty in identifying reliable benchmarks to determine what is going on in our various efforts. The old fall back is body counts which everyone seems to say isn’t good yet just about every day there’s another press release about how many ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ were killed (and the inevitable controversy about how many of them were actually women, children or wedding guests).

I saw a speaker recently who attempted to lay out some potential metrics for judging our progress against Al-Qaeda. His list (along with my explanatory comments) was:

• Initiative- who has it? Who’s on the offensive and the defensive? Are we waiting for the attack or ‘leaning forward’ and preventing attacks or (even better) disrupting networks to the point that they can’t organize or even plan coherently.
• Safe Havens- Are there areas ‘off limits’ to them or us?
• Freedom of action-To what extent to obstacles interfere with their (or our) activities and plans
• Network building- How easy is it to develop relationships, allies, and partners?
• State Sponsorship- Not only the existence of sponsorship but also the degree to which it is overt or covert
• Finances- What financial resources do they have? How easily can they access, transfer, use their money?
• Personnel-How many members do they have? Is recruitment exceeding attrition? What types (demographics, socio-economic characteristics) of people are they attracting? What skills do they have/want?
• Leadership-Centralized or diffused? What type of structure would they want to have?
• Tactics-Why are they using the tactics they use? Are there preferred tactics they are unable to use?
• Strategy- What is the master plan? How has/is it evolving?
• Battle of ideas- How is the conflict seen outside of it’s boundaries? What group(s) are supporting which side?
• Public Opinion- How are the various sides seen by the ‘domestic’ population (the area where the conflict is being played out)? What group(s) are supporting which side?

I got to thinking about the general lack of discussion about the use of metrics in law enforcement. For years the law enforcement community has relied on the civilian equivalent of body counts…arrests and drug seizures. Even though everyone likes to point to those figures as examples of progress the fact remains that they don’t really tell you anything about how effective our tactics are in combating criminal activities. What those figures are very good at doing is justifying budgets, padding resumes, and justifying promotions.

It’s a bit of a cliche now to say that we won’t arrest our way out of our crime problems but there hasn’t been much discussion about how we change the way law enforcement actually does something different from the old “Book ‘em Dano” mentality.

I’m wondering if solutions to criminality (at least endemic criminality as seen in many urban, economically depressed areas) should be viewed more broadly with metrics like those mentioned above used to both determine progress and, more importantly, areas that the state should focus its resources on.

Lest anyone think that the above metrics are too ‘touchy feely’ and that only hard numbers will be acceptable, I think in many (although not all, the issue is just to complicated to reduce to a checklist) cases you could come up supporting metrics that support some of these more general categories. Want an example? Well, you’re going to get one anyway….

To support the ‘Public Opinion’ category, you could look at the number of tips coming in to authorities from the area in question (not including people looking to trade information for reduced sentences or otherwise avoid punishment) the number of people from these areas who are joining organizations closely associated with the establishment (police, military, fire departments, etc.) as a sign that the local population is giving allegiance to legal institutions.