MANAGEMENT AND SUPERVISION

Management and Supervision in Law Enforcement

Management and Supervision in Law Enforcement

The Approach

The 21st Century has brought complex, global threats to the doorsteps of American police departments. These include converging threats such as terrorism, gang activity, narcotics trafficking and organized crime - age-old problems that require new approaches in the era of globalization and sophisticated, transnational criminal networks.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is at the forefront of a nationwide effort to evolve local police counter-terrorism strategies and capabilities. We recognize that policing is not what it used to be. The police of today must be capable of both strategic and operational thinking and they need to have the tools - intellectual, technological and organizational - to quickly adapt to the myriad of threats they face.

This focuses our efforts and better equips us to partner with communities in the pursuit of a safer America.

The Initiatives

The LAPD created its Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau in 2003. It now has close to 300 officers dedicated to counter-terrorism, criminal intelligence gathering, and community mobilization efforts. It is the LAPD's goal to institutionalize the idea of counterterrorism throughout the Department and the communities it serves - not to make it the priority, but a priority.

The CTCIB's mission is: to Prevent terrorism by effectively sharing information aimed at disrupting terrorist's operational capability and addressing the underlying causes associated with the motivational component; to Protect the public and critical infrastructure by leveraging private sector resources and hardening targets; to Pursue terrorists and those criminal enterprises that support them; and to Prepare the citizenry and the city government for consequences associated with terrorists operations against the city.

The following programs and capabilities demonstrate just some of the areas in which we have concentrated our efforts.

1. Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC): Partnered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) to lead this multi-agency, multi-disciplined counterterrorism intelligence center. National, best practices model. Prepares products to provide a richer terrorism threat picture to all law enforcement agencies, fire agencies, health agencies, and critical infrastructure partners in the seven county region. Serves 166 police agencies and 18 million people.

2. SAR: The LAPD developed and implemented the Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) process for reporting suspected terror-related incidents and tying them firmly into information collection procedures, tracking systems and intelligence analysis. This is considered the first program in the U.S. to create a national standard for terrorism-related modus operandi codes.

This initiative, which fit nicely with the federal government's National Strategy for Information Sharing, is in the process of being rolled out nationally. Once SAR is institutionalized throughout the nation, local, state, and federal agencies will have a common standard for collecting, measuring, and sharing information about suspected terror-related incidents. This process has the potential to become the bread and butter of U.S. fusion centers and it can inspire the so-called boots on the ground and the community to get involved in the counter-terrorism ...