Policing Of Terrorism Research Articles

Terrorism, Political Extremism, and Crime and Criminal Justice

This review focuses on terrorism and extremist crimes, including ideologically motivated hate crimes. Research on these topics has become more rigorous in recent decades, and more scholars have engaged in original data collection. Our assessment found a burgeoning literature that increasingly includes the application of integrated theories, but gaps remain as few studies examine life-course and critical approaches. Our review of the policing of terrorism found a limited evidence base for counterterrorism initiatives. We also found that court/sentencing issues are understudied. We suggest improving data quality in these areas by creating a national data collection protocol on these crimes, enhancing the rigor of offender and victim self-report studies, and requiring more transparency from open-source research efforts. We propose that government agencies fund rigorous evaluations of policing strategies in the terrorism context. Finally, it is hoped that increased access to federal court documents will lead to more scholarly attention on sentencing issues.

Guidelines for first responders based on results from deploying a mockup radiological dispersal device

During the past 7th Security Framework Program the European Commission funded a research project called CATO (CBRN Crisis management, Architectures, Technologies and Operational procedures) to develop a prototype decision support system for crisis management in addition to providing a suite of guidelines for first responders and incident commanders when dealing with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear incidents. In order to derive these guidelines a proof-of-concept experiment was setup during which several passive agent (Stable CsCl) dispersions with improvised explosive devices and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices were carried out. Each dispersion was thoroughly characterised by a number of monitoring devices, including high-volume air samplers and size-segregated air samplers. All environmental and forensic samples were collected by the UK counter terrorism police, following strict labelling and chain-of-custody protocols. The samples were analysed at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center suing the k0 method for instrumental neutron activation technique. A full consequence assessment analysis was carried out assuming that the observed concentration of Cs-133 in samples was Cs-137 instead and use was made of the specific activity of Cs-137. Due to the sensitivity of the information the European Commission classified this research. The resulted reported on in this work have been unclassified and are released to assist emergency planners and first responders to take the necessary precautions. The results indicate that, up to distances of 50 m from ground zero radiation levels will be considerable and therefore live-saving actions must be performed by fire/rescue wearing full protective gear. In addition, low-wind conditions will favor a long airborne residence time and therefore the use of full-face protective gear is a must. In order to protect first responders, a radiation protection specialist is to determine how long people can enter and remain in the contaminated area. The recovery of evidence in the case of a car-bomb will be hard or even impossible due to the high level of radioactive material remaining inside the vehicle.

Terrorizing police: Revisiting ‘the policing of terrorism’ from the perspective of Danish police detectives

A common conclusion in criminology is that fears of terrorism are being (mis)used. The media have used them to market their products, politicians to promote themselves as protectors, and the police have profited through being granted increased powers and resources. Some scholars even argue that one outcome has been a growing militarization of the police. This article revisits this debate. It does so by taking an ethnographic look at how the war on terror has affected a number of Danish police detectives’ daily work. In doing so, the paper shows how the idea that police (mostly) benefit from the war on terror somewhat misses the mark – at least when seen from the perspective of frontline officers. As the article demonstrates, rather than mobilizing Danish detectives, terrorism most often makes them feel mired.

Neighbor Terrorism and the All-Risks Policing of Terrorism

Debate continues as to the transformations in terrorism evidenced by the September 11 attacks and since that time. Some, including the former U.S. President, point to changes in the nature of terrorism and argue that September 11 constituted a wholly new form of terrorism that demanded a novel response. Given the prior events of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the East African embassy bombings in 1998, it would appear more appropriate to depict a transformation in scale and tactics rather than nature. This article seeks to explore a third perspective. It accepts the fact that there have been transformations in terrorism, but it focuses on the actors rather than on their actions. It suggests that one’s neighbor has become a potential foe and that this trend became apparent only gradually after September 11. There are important consequences for law enforcement beyond the major adaptations already incurred. The move toward neighbor terrorism has perhaps been masked by the other more brutal changes, but it is this trend towards all risk policing that has the potential to cause the most lasting and insidious impact on everyone’s lives.

Policing of Terrorism Using Data from Social Media

This article considers the challenges of policing terrorism in social media and investigates whether and how these challenges are being addressed in the research and development of tools to detect radicalisation in social media. The availability of big data tools for the analysis of social media has raised concerns about the onset of algorithm-driven profiling techniques leading to social control that extends to large populations. However, it has not been clarified whether such tools are used by the police and whether they fit the requirements of policing in the field of terrorism. The article provides an overview on research and development of big data tools using data from social media in the field of terrorism and extremism. The tools presented predominantly use supervised machine learning classifiers to discriminate between two classes of content, e.g. radical and non-radical. Most of the tools follow a technology-driven approach aiming to optimise the precision of algorithms. They lack both a conceptual model of (violent) radicalisation as well as a clear focus on providing decision support in terms of helping human analysts to filter data. The article argues that technology-driven approaches do not fit with current practices of policing in the field of terrorism and extremism, which build on professional judgement rather than algorithm-driven pattern identification in big data. The paper concludes with the hypothesis that the application of machine learning algorithms can support analysts in generating predictive knowledge, but will not lead to an algorithm-driven security production.

Perspectives and Challenges in the Policing of Terrorism

Terrorism poses a unique challenge for police beyond petty, serious or organized crime. Ranging from inept lone-wolf terrorists to transnational highly-trained terrorists, law enforcement is involv...

Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism. By John Mueller and Mark Stewart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 408p. $31.95 cloth.

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Book Review: John Mueller and Mark G Stewart, Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism

Book Review: John Mueller and Mark G Stewart, <i>Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism</i>

Chasing ghosts: the policing of terrorism

Chasing ghosts: the policing of terrorism

Chasing ghosts: the policing of terrorism

Chasing ghosts: the policing of terrorism

The policing of terrorism: organizational and global perspectives

The policing of terrorism: organizational and global perspectives

The Policing of Terrorism: Organizational and Global Perspectives By Mathieu Deflem Routledge. 2009. 230 pages. $39.95 paper

Journal Article The Policing of Terrorism: Organizational and Global Perspectives By Mathieu Deflem Routledge. 2009. 230 pages. $39.95 paper Get access Pavel Osinsky Pavel Osinsky Appalachian State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 89, Issue 1, September 2010, Pages 342–343, https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2010.0079 Published: 01 September 2010

The Policing of Terrorism: Organizational and Global Perspectives

This book offers an analysis of the policing of terrorism in a variety of national and international contexts. Centered on developments since the events of September 11, 2001, the study devotes its empirical attention to important police aspects of counter-terrorism in the United States and additionally extends its range comparatively to other nations, including Israel and Iraq, and to the global level of international police organizations such as Interpol and Europol. Situated in the criminology of terrorism and counter-terrorism, this book offers a fascinating look into the contemporary organization of law enforcement against terrorism, which will significantly influence the conditions of global security in the foreseeable future.

British Counter-Terrorism After 7/7: Adapting Community Policing to the Fight Against Domestic Terrorism

After the Madrid and London train-bombings, perceptions of the sources of Islamic terrorism changed. The British response to domestic jihadism was to apply community-policing principles to counter-terrorism enforcement. This essay describes the origins and intentions of the community-based policing of terrorism and partnership programmes with Muslim faith organisations. Collaboration with Muslim partners has helped to build confidence within government agencies that Muslim leaders are keen to curb terrorism, but has failed to build trust among the general Muslim public. The application of community-policing principles is, it is argued, an effort to bridge steep trade-offs between effective prevention and the social and political integration of Britain's Muslims.

Social control and the policing of terrorism: foundations for a sociology of counterterrorism

Sociologists have by and large neglected the study of terrorism and counterterrorism. The continued relevance that terrorism may be expected to have in our era should stimulate the development of new sociological ideas. I propose a sociological perspective of the policing of terrorism that is conceptually informed by a neo-Weberian bureaucratization theory of police. The theory holds that antiterrorist efforts at the level of police rest on a formal-rational conception of the means and objectives of counterterrorism, although ideological and political sentiments on terrorism are very intense and divisive within and across national states. Social control and counterterrorism are complex realities, comprised of a multitude of dimensions which are not necessarily in tune with one another. High-profile terrorist incidents, such as the events of 9/11, lead to attempts by national governments and international governing bodies to re-direct police efforts against terrorism in function of political objectives. Yet, because the bureaucratization of modern police institutions is at an unprecedented high level, the theory predicts, police agencies will resist these (re-)politicization attempts to continue counterterrorism activities that rest on an efficiency-driven treatment and depoliticized understanding of terrorism.