The Importance of Law Enforcement Training in Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism

The RAND Corporation assessed various aspects of the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT), a program from the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) that provides specialized training to state, local, and tribal law enforcement on understanding, detecting, deterring, and investigating acts of terrorism and violent extremism. Overall, only 6 out of 10 workshop participants indicated that the information provided during the SLATT workshops would change their approach to international terrorist or domestic terrorist threats and/or how they might investigate them.

The SLATT Program is broad in its reach; however, the majority of survey respondents indicated that they had participated in only one or two SLATT trainings in the past five years. This suggests that the exposure to the information provided in the SLATT workshops is infrequent for most law enforcement personnel and not enough to assume that it will lead to actual behavioral change. 

These findings are significant because as of the time of the study, the program had provided instruction to almost 150,000 practitioners, but it was evaluated as insufficient to change behavior. 

Although the United States has not suffered an attack in the past 15 years as catastrophic as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, terrorism trends show that there appears to be no significant abatement of attack attempts or attack planning since 2011. While al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) attacks have been unsuccessful on U.S. soil, the recent successful strikes by Islamic State (IS)-inspired extremists in France and Belgium should give serious cause for concern.

The IS represents a growing transnational terrorist threat to the United States. These foreign fighters pose a future risk to the United States, while the immediate threat lies in IS’s radicalized support base and presents a significant rise in terrorist activity in the United States. Further, with the US’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan, we are in a race against terrorist groups to construct an effective counterterrorism program. 

Over Halloween weekend, authorities were on high alert throughout Northern Virginia after they were made aware of reports of potential threats towards retail centers, possibly linking back to ISIS. A senior law enforcement official reported that the threat was in fact credible and stated that they were aimed at shopping malls in the Fredricksburg, Virginia area specifically.

Another concern has been the growth of the QAnon movement, which specifically targets government officials and law enforcement. QAnon supporters have been linked to multiple attempted kidnappings across the United States. In September, a California Native was charged after taking his two children on a summer trip to Mexico and killing them after reading QAnon conspiracy theories online. 

A kidnapping plot in France that occurred on Apr 13, 2021, marks what is believed to be the first time that a crime in Europe has been linked to the QAnon conspiracy theorists. This shows that while the QAnon movement was once strictly a U.S based movement, it has quickly spread to over 85 countries and its beliefs have been adapted to various contexts and languages around the world. Recently, Europol, the European umbrella policing agency, has added QAnon to their list of growing threats. 

These trends suggest an ongoing need to ensure that state and local law enforcement receive training in this area. Although the FBI and other federal law enforcement are responsible for investigating terrorist threats, they rely on the information-sharing about terrorist threats and the detection and response by state and local law enforcement. State and local law enforcement play an important role in detecting and preventing terrorist attacks. 

Any strategy for countering violent extremism (CVE) has to go beyond the federal joint terrorism task forces (JTTFs) and will depend on strengthening local partnerships with communities and reducing barriers to sharing of information; law enforcement will be a key partner in this regard.

Strom et al. (2010) estimated that 80 percent of foiled terrorist plots in the United States were discovered because of observations by state and local law enforcement or by the general public. Discoveries of terror plots during routine law enforcement investigations of seemingly ordinary crimes and criminally suspicious activity constituted the fourth-largest source of initial clues (Strom, Hollywood, and Pope, 2016).

Project Hummingbird seeks to support law enforcement officers and other first responders to detect potential threats from international terrorist groups, domestic extremist groups, and particularly anti-government and criminal sovereign citizen elements who seem to disproportionately target law enforcement authorities. Our 12-hour program combines the latest in academic research with practical investigative skills that can directly support and advance CT investigations for law enforcement practitioners.