Critical Releases in Homeland Security: June 22, 2016

From the Preface: "In November 2015, Jeh C. Johnson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (the Department), directed the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), to establish a subcommittee (Subcommittee) that is focused on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). The Subcommittee was stood up to act as an incubator of ideas for the new Office for Community Partnerships (DHS/OCP), and has worked to leverage outside expertise and new thinking to support and enhance as well as assist in reframing and re-envisioning, where necessary the Department's CVE efforts. [...] This report focuses on the spread of violent extremist ideology and the recruitment of American youth to extremist groups, and how the Department can be a platform and and engine to leverage partnerships in the technology, health, education, communications, cultural, philanthropic, financial, and non-government sectors to counter such recruitment. While recognizing previous efforts - from those of the Spring 2010 Countering Violent Extremism Working Group to the more-recent Foreign Fighter Task Force - this report seeks to focus on discrete areas, separate and distinct than those undertaken in other efforts. "

"Analysis of publicly available information on homegrown violent jihadist activity in the United States since September 11, 2001, suggests that the Islamic State (IS) and its acolytes may pose broad challenges to domestic law enforcement and homeland security efforts. […] Since 2014, the Islamic State (IS) has become the focal point for the bulk of homegrown violent jihadist terrorist plots. This includes instances in which people in the United States wanted to travel to Syria to fight with extremist groups in the nation's civil war as well as plots to strike domestic targets. Regarding the former, in early 2016, U.S. government officials estimated that about 250 Americans had traveled (or tried to travel) to Syria to fight in the civil war--about 25 had been killed. Regarding the latter, in recent congressional testimony, the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper noted that homegrown actors 'will probably continue to pose the most significant Sunni terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland in 2016.'"

"Unfortunately, a predictive model for preventing all future mass victimization incidents cannot be provided-- all situations and individuals involved pose complex and variable environmental factors and contextual details to consider. Therefore, any promising avenues for prevention must include specific considerations to be made and questions to be answered. Each community and jurisdiction throughout the country is likely to be different, and the viability of any given preventative strategy must be determined locally. As such, this document is focused on identifying strategies that contribute to preventing, not predicting, incidents of targeted violence that result in mass casualty events. In order to achieve this end, perhaps an appropriate course of analysis is to examine these incidents through a common lens of threat assessment. Typically, the term 'threat assessment' in this context is used to 'describe the set of investigative and operational techniques that can be used by law enforcement professionals to identify, assess, and manage the risks of targeted violence and its potential perpetrators'. Of course, one of the critical issues is separating those who 'make' idle threats from those who 'pose' legitimate threats. Managing this distinction and responding appropriately may be a significant cultural shift for some law enforcement agencies. That is, participating in a threat assessment team and taking proactive steps to prevent violent incidents departs significantly from a reactive strategy that does not generally mobilize until the threat has been realized. Creating relationships with the community so that individuals feel more comfortable reporting concerns to law enforcement or some other authority is perhaps the single most important step toward effective prevention."