The traditional method for finding and monitoring terrorist activity includes keeping an eye on radical groups that often breed terrorists, but it may be harder to pinpoint individuals who are trying to further extremist causes or simply disturbed enough to hurt others.
That problem has gained more and more attention among security officials across the country in the wake of mass killings perpetrated by lone wolves, like the January 2011 shooting in Arizona that left six people dead and critically wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Ron Haddad, chief of the Dearborn, Mich., Police Department and one of Governing’s 2011 Public Officials of the Year says law enforcement agencies are overlooking an important potential source of information – mental health professionals.
“We can better our defense by involving people like counselors and doctors,” he said. “If a third party were to take someone in [for treatment]…and that person could potentially become involved in violence and criminality, one of the options advised to counselors would be to tell [the third party], ‘You might want to contact the police.’”
But privacy advocates fear that involving mental health professionals in the reporting process could violate civil rights. Ben Friedman, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., says bringing counselors and doctors into the intelligence-gathering loop could do more harm than good.
“If it’s not completely confidential to share murderous thoughts with your psychiatrist, people may not want to seek out help with their conditions,” he said.
Friedman also said he doesn’t think lone wolf terrorists pose a significant threat – most of them, he said, have proved incompetent at carrying out their plans.
Haddad’s hometown is has the largest concentration of Arab-Americans in the country, and he has worked closely with federal officials to gather intelligence on religious extremist groups in the city. He also has to deal with extremists looking to harm the Arab-American community – earlier this year, his department thwarted the efforts of another lone wolf operator named Roger Stockham to blow up a Dearborn mosque, one of the nation’s largest.
Haddad said community involvement played a role in Stockham’s arrest – police need to stress the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the police.
“That happened because citizens overheard him talking about his plans in a local restaurant and felt comfortable reporting it,” Haddad said. “That was huge.”
Friedman said he agrees that outreach and interagency cooperation are important, but dismissed most of the talk surrounding local counterterrorism as hype.
“If police just do their jobs and have a good sense of what’s going on in their communities, they’re actually doing counterterrorism work without making a big hubbub about it,” he said.
