Forging Improved Government Agency Cooperation to Combat Violence
John P. Sullivan
Terrorism, transnational gangs, and transnational organized crime are challenging traditional security structures. As criminal and extremist movements spread their reach across jurisdictional lines, their activities transcend the traditional boundaries of local, state, federal, international, and global jurisdictions. Responding to violence resulting from criminal and terrorist activity demands a high degree of interaction and cooperation among a span of government agencies. Such cooperation involves a range of enforcement, intelligence, and policy issues.
Globalization of economic processes has empowered a new class of transnational criminal actors including terrorists, organized criminals and gangs. These "global criminals" fuel conflict and stimulate a new security environment. As a result, the tensions created by globalization of conflict and crime are changing the nature of government agency and police coordination and cooperation.
Government agency cooperation to combat crime and violence can take many forms. It can be: 1) Networked or Hierarchical, 2) Formal or Informal, or 3) International or Global. Before examining these variations, it is important to examine the current threat stream.
Global terrorism and crime are pressing challenges. Terrorists, gangs, and organized crime can exist as independent threats, but increasingly, they interact in a number of ways. For example, terrorists or insurgents may exploit organized crime; criminal gangs may act as middlemen in small arms, explosives or human trafficking; drugs may finance operations; and actors on both sides of the house may facilitate or conduct attacks for each other.
The Evolving Threat Stream
One component of the terrorist threat stream is the global Islamist jihad—essentially a global insurgency. Islamist movements operate in a cooperative manner among "theaters of operation" where local groups gather intelligence and targeting data and share it across theaters within the global jihadi network, which is a loose confederation of independent movements and networks with varying local, regional, and global roles and reach.
Transnational organized crime groups have benefited from the existence of a stable state order while exploiting the seams between states. Traditional criminal enterprises have not sought to challenge the state; rather, they have exploited corruption and political influence to further their enterprises. This appears to be changing as a new range of transnational gangsters exploit shadow economies, the absence of effective states, and endemic corruption.
Terrorists and transnational criminal organizations are not the only enterprises to benefit from networked dynamics and city-to-city interconnectedness. Street gangs, specifically "third generation gangs" such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and its rival Eighteenth Street, both originally from Los Angeles, now operate throughout North and Central America exploiting the new spatial and geographic relationships afforded by globalization.
Once the province of inner-city ghettos, some gangs have evolved from a sole interest in turf or localized crime to gain in sophistication, political interest, and international reach. Exploiting seams in law enforcement, judicial structures, immigration (often by forced deportation), and technologies that foster communication, third generation gangs have also become de facto global criminals, threatening local stability and potentially fuelling broader networked conflict.
New forms of political, social, and criminal opportunity arise as networks and technology influence economic processes. Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics describes the rise of "global cities" in this context. The flow of capital, labor, goods, and people has occurred traditionally within the context of an inter-state arrangement of nation-states. However, privatization, deregulation, transnational firms, and technology enabling the participation of national economic actors in the global market have changed that. The result is the redistribution of strategic economic territories wherein national units are no longer the primary spatial focus of transnational economic transactions.
Sub-national or non-state actors are the principal beneficiaries of this economic restructuring. Cities, sub-national regions, cross-border hubs, and supranational markets and trade blocs are among those impacted (as are transnational criminal and terrorist actors). This makes actions by local police—especially metropolitan police—increasingly vital to global stability.
Countering this threat requires extremely close coordination and integration between and within a number of government agencies: police, intelligence, military, development, aid, information and administrative agencies. Such coordination is difficult within the federal government. It becomes increasingly problematic when applied across levels of government, and daunting when applied at the global level.
Countering the reach of both the global jihad and transnational gangs within networked diasporas is a global security priority. Police and intelligence services worldwide—especially in global cities with international political and economic importance and transnational connections—must develop relationships within their communities. These efforts must build upon community policing and develop the cultural understanding and community trust required to recognize the emergence of extremist cells, radicalization, efforts to recruit terrorists, and efforts to exploit criminal enterprises or gangs to further terrorist activities.
Also, these efforts need to be linked to develop the intelligence needed to combat a global networked threat. This requires more than information-sharing and cooperation. It requires a multi-lateral framework for the co-production of intelligence so police and intelligence services can recognize global interactions with local impact and local activity with global reach.
As a result of these needs, new police cooperative structures are emerging. These include linking police at local, state, and federal levels within the United States, and, increasingly, with their counterparts worldwide. The bulk of this interaction is informal, bi-lateral, and case-focused. Individual investigators reach out to their counterparts at other agencies on an ad hoc basis to solve specific crimes.
In major metropolitan areas and in a number of regions, this informal cooperation is augmented with task forces. Task forces range from short-term operations to address specific crimes or crime sprees to longer-term efforts such as Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to bring together the organizational expertise and jurisdictional advantages of ongoing multilateral collaboration. Similarly, "fusion centers" are emerging to link police, fire, and health agencies within states or regions to share information and intelligence about terrorist and serious organized criminal threats. To date, fusion centers have focused largely on moving information vertically between local and federal agencies. However, in order to enhance their effectiveness, they need to broaden their scope to include multilateral information sharing between fusion centers.
In some cases, the traditional state-to-state international relationships found in entities like Interpol (the International Criminal Police Organization) are being augmented with agency-to-agency links. These new networks are the foundation of global metropolitan policing. In response to transnational gangs we see the partnership between US and Salvadoran law enforcement. In this case, the Transnational Anti-Gang (TAG) initiative (Centro Antipandillas Transnacional) targets MS-13 by stationing two FBI agents permanently in San Salvador where they work directly alongside investigators and analysts from El Salvador’s Policia Nacional Civil to conduct joint investigations, share information and intelligence, and provide technical assistance.
There are additional initiatives in place at the local level as well. New York Police (NYPD) have developed their own global liaison network, and the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group (TEW) is an example of a local multidisciplinary, collaborative meta-analysis network where collaborative analysis, a network of local terrorism liaison officers (TLOs), and node-to-node collaboration led to the concept of co-production of intelligence (referred to above) and formed the foundation of a national network of fusion centers.
NYPD’s liaison program—which is based on the premise that "The war on terrorism has no national boundaries and now the NYPD doesn’t either"—is referred to by New York’s Police Foundation (which partially funds the program) as "Global Policing in the 21st Century" and currently has detectives deployed to ten cities worldwide: Toronto, Montreal, Santo Domingo, London, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Amman, and Singapore. These NYPD detectives are unarmed and are not directly involved in investigations and enforcement actions. Their role is solely liaison and information exchange.
Adapting to the Networked Global Landscape
As defense experts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt are frequently quoted, "it takes networks to fight networks." But networks are more than just a way of organizing criminal and terrorist conspiracies. Al-Qaeda is a classic network, or network of networks, but as Anne-Marie Slaughter (an international lawyer and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University) observes, we live in a "world of networks: of corporations, of nongovernmental organizations, of criminals, of government officials." Networks are decentralized, informal, and flexible, relying upon regular interchange among participants. Nations and their agencies can address networked threats by establishing networks of their own: global or regional networks of financial regulators, prosecutors, police, immigration officials, transport officials, and customs agents.
The new global landscape of government networks includes both horizontal and vertical government networks. Horizontal networks (characterized by peer-to-peer links with professional counterparts across borders) will be most common. Vertical, government networks, between national government officials and their supranational counterparts (e.g., Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court and the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights) will be a lesser player. In A New World Order: Government Networks and the Disaggregated State, Slaughter presents her typology which includes three types of networks: Information, Enforcement, and Harmonization that can be arranged as horizontal, vertical, or disaggregated international organizations. Information networks are cooperative and frequently informal. Enforcement networks result from the inability of individual agencies to enforce the law. Harmonization networks are typically authorized by treaty or by executive agreement. All can be formal or informal.
Law enforcement is also adopting many inter-linking networks: the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering (FATF) along with established groups such as Interpol and the TREVI group as enforcement networks. These are examples of selective multilateral action. The FATF, which seeks to detect and prevent misuse of world financial systems by terrorists, is a noteworthy case. It is networked, bringing together overlapping state, sub-state and suprastate actors from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, the European Commission, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Gulf Co-Operation Council, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Holland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the US.
Law enforcement (police) response to terrorists and other transnational threats (i.e., organized crime, third generation gangs) must build from effective policing practices for community interaction, investigation, intelligence, and enforcement. This must start locally with an eye on global trends and links. At the local level, police must actively work with the community to protect against crime and victimization. At all levels the police must be visible, engaged community partners, actively building trust and not serving as instruments of repression and corruption. Linking professional, accountable, and democratic police and law enforcement agencies in a distributed networked fashion is also a requirement.
Transnational criminal and terrorist support networks can operate beyond the territorial jurisdiction of domestic law enforcement authorities. In doing so, they can evade the normal countermeasures pursued in their home countries contributing to international insecurity. Law enforcement is constrained by a world of borders, while international criminals and terrorists move in a borderless world.
Global metropolitan policing is joining international policing as a model of police co-operation. NYPD’s International Liaison Program and the TEW model are two distinct expressions of this trend. NYPD opted for a bi-lateral hub and spoke network, while the TEW opted to be a node in a multilateral, all-channel network. Both approaches are hybrid forms blending networks approaches with hierarchical organizations. In the future, these may herald a move toward increasing bi-lateral and multilateral/multilevel liaison. Personnel exchanges among police agencies for liaison and the secondment of police to participate in task forces abroad are likely to increase as police battle terrorism, transnational gangs, and global crime.
This trend challenges traditional police relationships. Intelligence and law enforcement intersect, while eroding the distinction between domestic and foreign. Metropolitan police join national police, and liaison is now, potentially, shared at all levels of governance. This will require police to acquire new skills. Police (individually and collectively) will need to understand the nature of diplomacy and international relations, master multiple languages, understand multiple culture and legal systems, and bridge police and intelligence operations. From the local focus that dominated at the beginning of my career, police now must look locally and globally, and bring that global knowledge back home. International meetings, professional exchanges across disciplines, and public diplomacy now join local crimefighting and order maintenance as essential police skills.
Police and law enforcement need to cooperate across and erode these borders in order to preserve the rule of law in all nations and sustain global security. Yet, while cooperation is essential, the "devil is in the details." Virtually all police and government officials extol the benefits of cooperation, but effectively achieving cooperation requires in-depth re-engineering of organizational relationships, new legal and policy structures, and a great deal of effort to overcome bureaucratic rivalry for prestige, mission-share, and funding. Just bringing members of different agencies together does not ensure success.
Comprised of members from different agencies and levels of government, task forces and fusion centers face challenges as their constituent personnel are governed by different policies and legal authorities. Federalism gives different authorities and sphere of operations to each level of government. Control, accountability, and transparency can be compromised if 10th Amendment distinctions are not carefully examined and cooperation carefully constructed. Tactical, operational, and strategic issues must be identified and resolved in order to achieve optimal coordination and cooperation. State and local personnel can not be simply ‘commandeered’ to fulfill federal functions, but can be effective partners in multilateral efforts.
Effective interagency and intergovernmental cooperation results from partnerships that respect the different expertise, authorities, and jurisdiction of the cooperating agencies. Essentially, intergovernmental cooperation requires a coalition of reciprocal respect and interoperation. To achieve this, we need to go beyond broad statements of intent and stimulate the policy debates required to forge synchronized, cooperative networks to combat violence.
John P. Sullivan is a career police officer. He is currently a lieutenant with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department assigned to the Emergency Operations Bureau with responsibility for tactical planning. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Government from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Arts in Urban Affairs and Policy Analysis from the New School for Social Research. He is co-editor of Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Global Counter-Terrorism Network (Routledge, 2006).