International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 23

Answering the Terrorism Challenge
Boston area. The Tsarnaev brothers had 3 pressure cooker bombs plus 7 pipe
bombs when they headed to New York.
-----They would have arrived at around 5:30 A.M. Had they made the trip
they might have waited until rushhour, possibly in an area where persons
from Chechnya, like themselves, had migrated from.
----- Fortunately, the Intelligence Division knew where that would be; and
more fortunately their plan came to a halt in Watertown, Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, media coverage of this important program distorted its
purpose, frivolously referring to it as surveillance of the Muslim community. Nothing
could be further from the facts; surveilling any community would be a waste of
time, effort, and talent. It has also been referred to “ineffective”. Again, this claim
is frivolous and demeaning to the outstanding detectives who did the work of the
program. Sometimes pointing to the fact that the Demographics Unit never produced
an investigation or lead, those referring to it as “ineffective” fail to understand—
purposely or otherwise—that its mission was not to surveil, investigate, or produce
investigative leads, but rather to provide locational data that could be used if and
when needed as noted in the case of the Tsarnaev Brothers.
Information Sharing Practices
Aside from leadership, information sharing is the single most important
factor driving the effectiveness of the NYPD Intelligence Division in the 12 years
following the 11 September attacks on New York City. In its narrowest form this
means sharing information between individual analysts and individual detectives;
between teams of analysts and teams of detectives; between each of the more than
16 units that made up the Intelligence Division counterterrorism program. And
ultimately between one organization and another.
This is easier said than done. Thus, the role of leadership in driving home
the point by virtue of who is invited to a meeting, who is asked questions, how
leadership responds to those questions, and what leadership asks and expects of its
personnel.
-----Technical solutions are only the means by which information sharing
occurs; they can make it easier and more efficient but do not produce
information sharing, which can only emerge from a policy that emphasizes
it and a management team that requires it and a leadership that demands it.
The NYPD Intelligence Division had the advantage in creating an environment
of information sharing because all of its work was done on the basis of unclassified
open source, research, and its own investigative findings. In this respect, there was
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