Competence and incompetence

[chickenfeet]

I've been doing some thinking about the Mall Ninja Terrorist Wannabee incident here in Ontario and the latest Metropolitan Police balls up. My principle conclusion is that the elephant in the room is competence. I suggest that the biggest obstacle to defeating the current range of terrorist threats is not lack of legislation, Islamic fifth columns or weird lefty conspiracies, it's the unfortunate fact that the agencies fighting terrorism are made up of not very bright people who aren't particularly good at this kind of work. It's pretty much axiomatic that the reason most criminals get caught is that they are stupid. This is really helpful because so, by and large, are the police. Ask yourself, how many of the brightest people you knew at school and university went into the police. I knew one person who joined the Hong Kong police. She was a not very bright thug.

Add to this that police work tends to be self selecting. Cops who like a punch up on a Saturday night get themselves stationed downtown, the bent ones find their way onto the drug squad, the decent guys who want a quiet life end up in the suburbs and Rambo wannabees who enjoy kicking a person with gunshot wounds in the head while shouting "shut the fuck up" end up in "tactical units". It's only natural but like most simple truths no-one in authority wants to hear it. If there are intuitive, insightful cops you won't find them in the macho environment of anti-terrorist work.

Does it matter? Well it should to anyone who is genuinely concerned to defend our society and its values. Poor diagnosis rarely leads to correct treatment. The police/government reaction to terrorism and, frankly, their inability to deal very effectively with it is to demand more power, new legislation etc. (Legislation is of course the politicians' panacea). The trouble is what is really needed to beat terrorism is good intelligence work and public co-operation. One doesn't need legislation for that. One needs imagination and brains. Let me give an example. In WW2 British Military and Naval Intelligence was surprisingly extremely competent. (I say surprisingly because anyone who has looked at the record in the earlier war would not have predicted it). Why? Well it wasn't legislation. It was the drafting of first class brains to the job at a number of levels from Bletchley Park to field formations and it was most certainly helped by a considerable degree of social solidarity. I note that the entire Abwehr network in the UK was rolled up without the kind of smash and grab operation the Met seems to like so much and without the self-congratulatory theatrics of the RCMP and CSIS.

Unfortunately, not only is very little brainpower being applied to the actual business of catching terrorists but the PTB seem to be going out of their way to alienate sections of the community thereby making the real task that much harder.

What's to be done? Here are a few suggestions:

• The police and politicians might actually try and learn from their mistakes. Fucking up and excusing fuck ups is not good policy even if it makes politicians look tough.
  
• Try using brains not brawn. A few secondments of really bright people to intelligence work might make a huge difference. If some of them actually understood the nuances of the different groups and tendencies that would help. We are, after all, talking about agencies which couldn't tell the difference between a Maoist and a Trotskyist so I doubt that they are any smarter about Islamic groups.
  
• Quit the grandstanding. It doesn't help. If the police can catch the buggers the courts will put them away without all the self congratulatory drama that so often backfires.
  
• Recognize that the constituency for terrorism is very small indeed but there are a lot of people who will be reluctant to cooperate with the police if the consequences of their cooperation are the kind of bungled raid the Met made last week.

Comments

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

For that matter, we need to cultivate more civic-mindedness among the educated to furnish these agencies with the nuanced thinkers of which you speak. It's hard to imagine today's British intelligentsia staffing a Bletchley Park. In the US, of course, we have the Massachusetts Institution of Technology, the Pentagon of the North (and, richly, the employer of Noam Chomsky); this is where we tend to look for security solutions.

Good intelligence work and public co-operation. Yeah.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

DARPA only gives a moderate fraction of its money to my fair alma mater. A very large amount also gets given to CMU, Stanford, and many others. Moreover, in the past few years, DARPA has changed its focus away from funding research at universities, and now tends to fund development at companies more often.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

I apologizing for maligning MIT and thank you for the warm, wholesome bath of truth.

So if DARPA is funds development at companies, and companies still outsource some research to universities, I suppose it all comes all right, yeah?

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm certainly not going to claim MIT doesn't do tons of this sort of work; google searches for "draper lab" and "lincoln lab" will be helpful. But lots of other places like to line up at the gravy train, too; it's just unfair to give all the credit/blame to the 'Tute.

It actually is a real change; in fact, the kind of work you're talking about, if done by companies, will be mostly done by startups. So in fact, by switching from funding research to funding development, DARPA is funding one enitre generation of work, while not funding (as consistently as it once would) the next generation of work. They've had this pointed out to them several times, and it does seem to [finally] be sinking in.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

"Dear Scientists (Pure Research Division) of the Advance Research Projects:
We thank you for decades of devoted service, but as we now enjoy full spectrum dominance through existing technologies, your services will no longer be required. We also canceled your pension. Here. Have a flag.

Crapfully yours,
The Government"

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

I think that a fair number of TPTB know that we desperately do need smarter cops, and also much better intel. The funny thing is that even when they exist, they tend to get marginalized or move on; after 9/11, there was that marvelous clusterfuck when DoD fired a bunch of its Arabic translators because of don't ask/don't tell.

But you're right that cops aren't really well suited to understanding terrorism. And, there is the basic fact that it has a low societal standing, and requires the willingness to get shot at, which is never going to help. It took me a long time to get used to my nephew's other uncle switching from being a Lucent researcher to being a cop. He now works for the FBI; I have no idea how many other PhDs who speak six languages they have, but he's at least one.

[knirirr.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a reasonable summary of the situation.
I get the impression from this blog (http://coppersblog.blogspot.com/) that the promotion officers into bureaucratic positions above their competence may have something to do with police inefficiency also.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Yep ... with the glut of solid History PhDs on the market (not to mention other academic types, but hey -- best training by far in both analysis AND context!), you'd think they'd recruit. But apparently independent thinking is not all that valued.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Well, the UK intelligence services now advertise openly, as do the CIA; but I think you are right - the candidates will still be self-selecting (I can imagine all those guys who think they look like Sean Connery applying... Actually, I'd better get my application in!).

According to current news reports - which of course I can't find on the BBC - the police undertook surveillance operations in Forest Gate before they burst in, which makes one wonder what they found (or didn't).

You are absolutely right that all the police have to do is catch the terrorists and put them in front of a court. I guess it is the "catch" bit they are having problems with.