Local Role in Homeland Security, The

There has been considerable discussion since September 11 of the enormous resource that local police potentially show in the fight against terrorism. This article identifies limits to the local part in homeland security by analyzing a case investigation of Dearborn, Michigan. Partly because Dearborn is dwelling to one of the largest concentrations of Arabs in the United States, its experience with homeland security highlights sum of two units kinds of burdens that cities incur when they engage in proactive surveillance to identify potential terrorists: damage to their reputation (since police surveillance implies that its percepts are not trustworthy) and damage to police legitimacy (since of recent origin surveillance may undermine trust between police and the community). Because the benefits of efforts to identify terrorists typically accrue to jurisdictions other than the individual that engages in it-unlike way crime, terrorism is a national or plane international problem-local governments have little reason to track it. Instead, cities such as Dearborn have reason to emphasize what I call the "community protection" aspects of homeland security, of the like kind as target hardening and pressing necessity response. This finding has more general implications for our understanding of the police part and the politics of policing, showing by what mode both are shaped by the structural location police keep in federalist systems of government

In the face of a national enigma such as homeland security, the greatest in quantity striking feature of American policing is its decentralization: the overwhelming majority of U police are distributed across nearly 13000 autonomous local police departments. As many participants in the debate about homeland security have observ there are more than 600000 local police on the other hand only 12,000 FBI agents, and from this fact they terminate that the nation will maximize its ability to impede new attacks by enlisting local police in the search for terrorists (Berger 2002; Biden 2003; Flanagan 2002; Northeast Regional Homeland Security Agreement 2003) Scholars, too, have advance to expect that local police will play a large part in many aspects of homeland security. individual recent analysis indicated that local police would shortly be "developing new areas of investigative expertise, cooperating abundant more with federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, working more closely with the military, increasing their horizontals of surveillance over their communities, [and] paying more attention to the safety of critical infrastructure" (Maguire & King 2004:21)

This view about the local part in homeland security is opportunistic in the faculty of perception that it treats the massive institutional capacity of local policing as a resource that can be mobilized for any extremity that policy makers desire. It mirrors an understanding of federal a whole s in which "any activity performed by the agency of nations can be performed by dint of cities" (Peterson 1981:15), so local managements can easily be enlisted in the service of national goals. In political science, this conception of federalism had its heyday in the 1970 after Grodzins (1966) described the federal combination of parts to form a whole as a "marble cake," meaning that policy functions were distributed somewhat arbitrarily among local, state, and national regulations But as Peterson (1981) has argued, this perspective fails to account for the distinctive limits within which local management operates.

This article analyzes by what means the fragmented and decentralized nature of American management shapes the local role in homeland security through investigating the experiences of the Dearborn, Michigan, police department. To guide this investigation, I draw from and stretch out Peterson's (1981) theory of local government-one of the leading theories of local rule in political science, but individual that has not been incorporated into sociolegal studies. Peterson's theory sheds light upon the local role in homeland security by dint of showing how local government's limited powers influence the interests cities have, the political dynamics that expres those interests, and the policy choices that rise That analysis extends our understanding of the police function and the politics of local policing by dint of showing how both are shaped through the decentralization of American management Moreover, by bringing Peterson's theory to bear upon policing, this analysis extends that theory (via a get back to its Weberian roots) to incorporate the distinctive interests implicated by dint of legal institutions.

Dearborn is a fruitful place to examine these issues. Because it has individual of the nation's largest concentrations of Arab Americans and has been a major focus of national attention since 9/11 its experience illustrates with special clarity in what manner a city's interests in honor and the legitimate use of police authority are relevant to its homeland security efforts. In Dearborn, those interests herd police to emphasize what I call the community protection functions of homeland security (especially extremity response and protective security for potential targets) and avoid what I call the culprit search functions (investigative efforts to locate those who have committed or intend to commit terrorist acts). If the forces that shaped Dearborn's decisions are general, then local rules are well-situated to administer community protection functions on the other hand poorly situated to administer trespasser search-a conclusion that challenges the opportunistic view of the local part in homeland security.