How US cities are thinking about and dealing with terrorism

Last weekend’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris have reverberated across Europe and the United States.

On Monday, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced the formation of a new counterterrorism unit, the Critical Response Command team.

"The world is changing, even as we stand here," Bratton told his new recruits. "The world changed dramatically over the weekend, and the assignment for which you have volunteered … there is no more essential assignment in the world of policing."

Michael Downing, Los Angeles Police Department deputy chief and commanding officer of LA’s Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, has spent more than three decades with the LAPD and nearly 10 years in counterterrorism.

While Downing argues that terrorist threats exist, he also says that Americans must build up community partnerships to fight terrorism, instead of pursuing responses and strategies that are cloaked in anxiety and paranoia.

“I think that’s what we need to do in America,” he says. “Our optic is 2,200 miles between the West Coast and the East Coast, and what happens on the other side of the landmass 9,000 miles [away] impacts us everyday. I think we just have to have a better appreciation of that.”

As in other large cities, Downing and his team at the LAPD have a list of so-called “soft targets” that they are watching, and they’re constantly reassessing at-risk locations like stadiums, and shopping malls, bus and rail stations.

“With those [locations], we try to sure up the vulnerabilities, so we educate our private sector partners and partner with them,” he says. “In a few hours, I have a meeting with the heads of a private security [group] that represent 45,000 private security guards in Los Angeles just to leverage that resource.”

When it comes to the new debate over refugees, national security, and terrorism, Downing says that Syrians are “absolutely not” at the top of his watch list, but he’s not totally against additional caution.

“There is a risk that, as happened in France, that people may come in under the radar or come in with that wave,” he says. “I think that we have to be very sophisticated in our approach to vet that properly.”

Downing was part of a joint delegation from the NYPD and LAPD that travelled to France in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks to study what happened and what went wrong. He argues that Muslim populations in France and the US are fundamentally different.

“Our Muslim population feels American,” Downing says. “There is an American-Muslim identity — 99 percent of our communities feel just as responsible for protecting the values of our country as we do.”

While Downing views these communities as an ally, he does say that the number of “homegrown violent extremists” living with the US has increased more in the last 12 months than in the past several years.

“It’s something that this country is faced with and we have to deal with it,” he says. “But I wouldn’t say that it’s a Muslim problem, and it’s not a Jewish problem, or a Christian problem — it’s a human problem that all the interfaith and entire whole of community needs to get involved in and deal with.”

When it comes to fighting extremism, Downing says that prevention needs to be as heavily emphasized as interdiction. One successful model he points to is the LAPD’s strategy in fighting gangs, which involved diversion programs, youth development initiatives and job placement plans.

“There are still behavioral patterns that we can look out for,” he says. “We ask communities to be aware of suspicious activity, which has a nexus — whether it be pre-operational planning, surveillance, the purchase of products that are unusual, those types of things. … We need eyes and ears. Not to be paranoid, and not to profile and stereotype people, but certainly to profile criminal behavior. And that’s what we’re asking for.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.