Abstract
This paper presents a theory of agency decision-making regarding homeland security policy over the last decade in the United States and inquires about appropriate modes of study to test its potential effectiveness. The key hypothesis is that the staple strategy of agency decision-making during the last decade has been ‘hypervigilance’; defined here as: a state in which agency policy is rationally structured to maximize the pursuit of false positives and gravitate aggressively toward security threats. The related research question is ‘How can we study hypervigilance and false positives in all matters regarding policing terror threats?’ We argue that increased security measures tend to err toward pursuing false positives. However, we do not claim to understand the overall economic costs and benefits of recent homeland security policy decisions, in tangible financial or other realms. We contend that such an understanding is presently unattainable, considering the lack of raw data availability of how many terrorist attacks have been halted by increased security measures within the last decade. We do argue however, that the signal detection model is an appropriate starting methodology for study of such policing strategies.
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Notes
Most contemporary literature has political leanings on the issues and this is a key problem for various reasons.
It is assumed that acts that were passed after 9/11 tremendously empowered the executive branch. This is a trend that dates back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early nineteenth century.
Many of these are freely available as pdfs on the Internet, including declassified White-House press releases and FBI reports. Some of the latter indicate that there was a growing concern about Osama bin Laden before 9/11.
It is helpful to compare the mission statement of ICE which is focused on terrorism http://www.ice.gov/about/index.htm to the old Customs bureau whose key goal was to regulate trade imports or to that of the INS whose objective was the investigation and handling of illegal immigrants attempting to defraud the government.
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The authors thank Diana Ferguson and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments related to this paper.
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Kilburn, J., Costanza, S., Metchik, E. et al. Policing terror threats and false positives: Employing a signal detection model to examine changes in national and local policing strategy between 2001 and 2007. Secur J 24, 19–36 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2009.7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sj.2009.7