Policing Terrorism

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An interesting learning point for all is that terrorism is not a new type of criminal act, and it is a criminal act. Terrorism has been around for years and it has been homegrown for a lot of these terrorism criminal acts. It is important to understand that criminals participating in terrorism are not just one race, not just one religion, and not just from one country. Discussed by Peter Earnest in his video about the History of Terrorism in the U.S. (2004) he talks about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting rounding up and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans. None of these prisoners were ever found guilty of espionage but because of the fear created by the attack, it was a knee jerk reaction to imprison them all. This is significant …show more content…
In Policing Terrorism: An Executive's Guide (2008), one of the myths discussed in Brief 6 is that every immigrant is a suspect. Understanding that individuals that share the widely associated characteristics of terrorists are not automatically terrorists allows law enforcement to better connect with everyone in their communities and not alienate people but automatically being suspicious of them. It is also important to understand that terrorism is not something that is going to be stopped, but something that is going to have to be minimized as much as possible. In Brief 7 Newman and Clarke (2008) discuss how identifying capturing and killing terrorist is not the best way of looking at fighting terrorism because knowing someone's identity does not automatically mean they can be caught. As responding agencies to terrorism, it needs to be known what local vulnerabilities are as well as on a wide scale. Having knowledge of what a terrorist group may have as a target can help local agencies keep better track of what to be more watchful of and what areas to have more protection (Newman, …show more content…
Terrorism is an attempt to induce fear in a wide range of people with the option of harming multiple people, taking out an important monument, attacking a symbolic building, or even going after a location that could cripple the response to the attack (Newman, 2008). Some examples of attacks are chemical, biological, cyber, radiological, and explosive attacks. With each of these attacks there are different risks that first responders need to be aware of (Department of Homeland Security, 2013). A first responder is going toward the area of a terrorist attack while everyone is going in the opposite direction and this puts them at risk of exposure to chemicals that were released from an attack as well as chemicals released because of damage to containers that had those chemicals in them (Department of Homeland Security, 2013). They are also at risk of being exposed to a biological attack before others and need to know how to quarantine before the spread reaches a wider area and more people. Other risks that may happen are secondary blasts from explosives left to go off after the first or even ones that did not explode originally and were delayed (Department of Homeland Security, 2013). First responders need to have a plan when attempting to respond to terrorist events and it is up to all levels of the community from local to government to create a seamless