Localism in the Police Role

Scholarship about the police sometimes makes little of their territorial commitments, suggesting that police focus not on specific places but on specific functions such as order maintenance (Reference BantonBanton 1964; Reference WilsonWilson 1968), information-brokering (Reference Ericson and HaggertyEricson & Haggerty 1997), the situationally rational use of force (Reference BittnerBittner 1990), or crime control (Reference SkolnickSkolnick 1975; Reference BayleyBayley 1994). For example, Reference WestleyWilliam Westley concluded that police felt they got more credit for getting “a good pinch” than for keeping a “clean beat” (1953:35–6). From that perspective, what matters is whether offender search activities offer police the opportunity to make good pinches or perform any of their other defining tasks, not whether they improve the well-being of a particular place. As I will show later in this article, such occupational norms often did influence Dearborn's initial approach to homeland security. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to ignore the territorial commitments of police entirely.

At the level of individual officers, many studies demonstrate that police take responsibility for law and order mainly within their assigned beats, ignoring or even contributing to illegality and disorder elsewhere. Reference RubinsteinRubinstein captured this focus clearly, writing that a patrol officer “has no need to know about places beyond the district's limits. The first thing he learns about his district, after the location of the station house, is its boundaries. His knowledge of what lies beyond them is limited and his curiosity restricted” (1973:129). More recently, Reference HerbertHerbert analyzed police territoriality at length (1997a, Reference Herbertb). The bulk of his analysis examined how police use control of space to maintain order, but in places his work also suggested how geography defines the limits of police responsibility. In one anecdote, two officers near the eastern boundary of their beat frisked four suspicious youth:

Since police sometimes actively displace crime into other jurisdictions, it should surprise no one if they are reluctant to take costly and controversial steps to try to prevent it from arising there.

Policing scholars have said less about this territorial commitment at the organizational level, where the relevant questions are how and in what sense a police department becomes committed to the well-being of its city and how that commitment shapes its organizational and policy choices. When the literature has raised these questions, it has done so by investigating how local politics shapes police decisions. Such studies typically echo the broader literature in urban politics, and like that broader literature they can be classified according to whose influence they emphasize. For example, the view that a “power elite” controls local policymaking (Reference HunterHunter 1953) appears in Skolnick's earliest work, which refers to the demands of “the so-called power structure of the community” to explain why police emphasize crime control over legality (1975:242), and the view that the push and pull of interest groups shapes local policy (Reference DahlDahl 1961) dominates the community policing literature, which often treats the community organizations that partner with police as devices for bringing neighborhood interests to police attention (Reference HenigHenig 1978; Reference Skogan, Tonry and MorrisSkogan 1988; Reference BassBass 2000; Reference ThacherThacher 2001a). Other scholars imply that police decisions come from the preferences of the electorate as a whole (Reference Ostrom and WhitakerOstrom & Whitaker 1973), from police themselves (Reference WilsonWilson 1968:227–32; Reference LyonsLyons 1999), or from a mix of pressures from all these actors (Reference HeinzHeinz et al. 1983). Finally, Wilson's seminal study of the politics of policing suggests that in those rare cases when the local polity influences police decisions at all, it typically does so through party politics and interest group pressure (1968:236–71), which enforce a “zone of indifference” within which police exercise discretion (1968:233).

These studies have made valuable contributions to knowledge about the politics of policing, but they share an important limitation with the broader urban politics literature that they echo. In an influential critique of that literature, Peterson described it as an “internal” perspective on local policymaking that looks for the factors that influence policy choices by examining political forces within the city—“the rivalry among groups, the patterns of coalition formation, the presence or absence of competitive political parties, the power of local elites, or the vagaries of political campaigns” (1981:3). Peterson argued that this overt drama offers only a surface view of local policymaking because the roles its actors play are partly shaped offstage.

In making this argument, Peterson emphasized that local governments have only a fraction of the federal government's powers—“they cannot make war or peace; they cannot issue passports or forbid outsiders from entering their territory; they cannot issue currency; and they cannot control imports or erect tariff walls” (1981:4)—and he suggested that the implications of these limits pervade local policymaking. For example, local governments' inability to set monetary policy, forbid businesses and wealthy households from leaving, or prevent influxes of unskilled workers puts them in a precarious fiscal position that limits their policy choices; in particular, it makes redistributive policies nearly hopeless at the local level.

Peterson suggested that politicians, bureaucrats, and even interest groups all tend to become aware of these limits, at least implicitly, so they influence the positions that rational political actors take in the overt drama the internal perspective examines. For example, he criticized community power studies as follows: “When ‘power-elite’ theorists identified a small group of power holders, they regarded the decisions this group made as the primary factors determining local policy. In fact these leaders were largely responding to factors external to the community that were quite beyond the control of the ‘power elite’” (1981:5). City politicians and bureaucrats have even more reason to adapt their preferences to those limits: if they do not, they risk driving dissatisfied residents away and ultimately going bankrupt (1981:29). Aware of these risks, city officials deflect political pressure to make bad policy choices (1981:182–3), and they embrace outside groups whose interests align with the city's (1981:141). In this way, “reputation, respectability, popularity, and power flow to those who take the city's interests as their own, or who are fortunate enough to have special interests that converge with those of the city” (1981:145).

In offering this critique, Peterson did not claim that analysts should ignore the push and pull of local politics entirely. He simply argued that to interpret the meaning of that visible drama, scholars should consider how structural features of local government shape it (1981:131–83). For example, where much of the policing literature has treated the expressed demands of political actors as brute, un-analyzable facts about the world (e.g., Reference SkolnickSkolnick 1975:242; Reference WilsonWilson 1968:228; Reference ThacherThacher 2001a:776), Peterson directed attention to the features of local governance that shape these preferences in the first place, recognizing that the limits of local government constrain the kinds of policy preferences that political actors can sensibly pursue and city officials can reasonably accommodate. This analytic strategy may give some coherence to an otherwise ad hoc review of arbitrary political demands.

To conceptualize the constraints on local government concisely, Peterson proposed to treat cities as a particular kind of social structure that, like all social structures, have interests determined by “their place in the larger socioeconomic and political context” (1981:4). “Just as we can speak of union interests, judicial interests, and the interests of politicians, so we can speak of the interests of that structured system of social interactions that we call a city” (1981:17). While recognizing that there exist diverse roles within a city, Peterson defined city interests as the component of individuals' overall interests that they have by virtue of their residence or movement in a particular legal jurisdiction—one whose powers are limited in the ways noted above (1981:21). Peterson went on to argue that local governments have reason to pursue just those policies that advance city interests defined in this way.

This argument does not imply that city interests determine policy choices. In many cases it is debatable whether a policy will serve a city's interests, so the ideal of serving city interests shapes the kind arguments that political actors make without determining the conclusions they reach (Reference PetersonPeterson 1981:22, 132–3). In other cases, policy decisions have little effect on the interests of the city as a whole but simply allocate a fixed pie of benefits to various groups, so the preferences political actors express will more obviously reflect group interests (1981:150–66). Finally, in later work Peterson argued that local governments occasionally act against the city's interests, particularly when highly professionalized occupational groups implement federal programs (though even here, professionals may be reined in if an issue attracts publicity or political leaders exercise especially rigid control) (Reference PetersonPeterson et al. 1986). This last idea is very relevant to the local role in homeland security, since I have already noted how occupational norms in policing may support offender search activities.

Peterson's theory remains one of the most influential analyses of local government in political science, but like any influential theory it has been subject to incisive criticisms (e.g., Reference StoneStone 2004). This is not the place to review those criticisms in detail, since the most significant focus on details of Peterson's framework that are not relevant for my purposes (such as his claim that what he calls “developmental” policies inspire little political controversy) or details I will challenge myself (such as his claim that the city has a unitary interest in enhancing its economic position). Instead, I propose to ask what follows for our understanding of local policing—and particularly the local role in homeland security—if we pursue Peterson's basic idea that it can be useful to treat cities as social structures with interests of their own.

City Limits Revisited

Peterson developed his theory of city interests by applying a more general argument from Weber, who argued that all social actors have interests in their economic position, social honor, and political power (1978:926–40), but he quickly set aside honor and power as matters of little importance for cities to focus on their economic interests—in particular, their “attractiveness as a locale for economic activity” (Reference PetersonPeterson 1981:22). This perspective works reasonably well for policy issues such as infrastructure, land use, and economic development, where costs and benefits are primarily economic, but a conception of city interests that focuses mainly on economic interests does not adequately capture the interests implicated by legal institutions. Police efforts to maintain order and control crime do help local economies to function, but police also play a role in a system of punishment that maintains the moral order as much as the economic order. More important, the costs of policing are only partly economic costs. Legal institutions distribute not only financial benefits and burdens; they also, and more distinctively, distribute the benefits and burdens associated with the use of governmental coercive authority—notably the surveillance and information-gathering used to identify deviance (Reference MarxMarx 1988) and the coercive force used to stop it (Reference BittnerBittner 1990). The challenge is to conceptualize the city's interests in a way that connects with these features of legal institutions.

It is more difficult to meet that challenge than it may first appear (Reference ImbroscioImbroscio 2003). Since the goal is to treat the city as a social actor in its own right, it will not suffice to incorporate individual interests as they relate to police surveillance and coercion; instead, one must adequately define the interests of the city itself. I propose to meet this challenge by returning to the two Weberian interests Peterson set aside.

The first is the interest status honor. Since police surveillance implies that the object of surveillance cannot be trusted, and the use of coercion stigmatizes its object as outright blameworthy, policing implicates the interest in status honor. A few scholars have recognized how officers' street-level decisions can confer honor and stigma on individuals (Reference Oberweis and MushenoOberweis & Musheno 1999; Reference Ericson and HaggertyEricson & Haggerty 1997:443; Reference Applebaum and KleinigApplebaum 1996), but the Dearborn case illustrates how police policy decisions can confer honor and stigma on groups—particularly the city's large Arab American community (as Weber noted, status honor attaches especially to racial and ethnic groups [1978:390–3]), and also on the city as a whole. To be sure, surveillance does not always have this consequence. If surveillance targets a generic and abstract class of suspected criminals, no identifiable social group need be singled out for suspicion. But when surveillance focuses heavily on an identifiable group, the group's honor may be damaged, particularly if it is already precarious. This distinction is important in the context of homeland security because of the ethnic overtones of current discussions about terrorism. Since most Americans assume that offender search focuses on Arabs, new efforts may threaten that group's honor by implying that its members are untrustworthy. In a city such as Dearborn, whose public image is tied closely to its ethnic composition, effects on Arab honor carry over to the city's own reputation, and to preserve its honor it must either preserve the reputation of the relevant ethnic group or disentangle its public image from that of the group. The Dearborn case illustrates how these conflicts over ethnic honor and city reputation are partly fought out in, and therefore shape, homeland security decisions.

Second, policing also implicates a city's interest in the legitimate use of authority, since its political power depends on perceptions of local government legitimacy (Reference WeberWeber 1978:213).Footnote ¹ If police use their authority recklessly, they may undermine public cooperation (Reference TylerTyler 2004) and suffer instability and interference from their overseers (Reference Crank and LangworthyCrank & Langworthy 1992). In extreme cases, local agencies have been placed under the oversight of state commissions or court receivers because they misspent their authority rather than their money (Reference MooreMoore 1995:209)—incidents that vividly illustrate how the limited sovereignty of local government shapes cities' policymaking freedom. A desire to avoid this fate gives city officials reason to worry about the legitimate use of authority, just as a desire to avoid fiscal bankruptcy (Reference PetersonPeterson 1981: Ch. 10) gives them reason to worry about economic interests.

The challenge facing both scholars and political actors is to define what makes the use of authority legitimate. That challenge is particularly difficult today because, as recent scholarship demonstrates, modern policing relies less on outright coercion than on surveillance and information-gathering (Reference Ericson and HaggertyEricson & Haggerty 1997; Reference MarxMarx 1988). Since those techniques do not obviously involve coercive authority (Reference Ericson and HaggertyEricson & Haggerty 1997:133; Reference FoucaultFoucault 1977:177), some observers worry that it may be difficult to define legitimate boundaries for their use. Thus Foucault, whose ideas partly inspired this scholarship about policing, argued that there is a mismatch between the concepts of modern political theory and the practices of modern power—that the juridical language the Enlightenment developed to regulate the exercise of power cannot do the job adequately because disciplinary power evades its categories (1977:223, 303; 1980:107–8). There are reasons to question Reference FoucaultFoucault's bleak conclusion, since his analysis of resistance to disciplinary power suffered from serious empirical (Reference BrennerBrenner 1994) and normative (Reference FraserFraser 1981) gaps; indeed, even his specific argument that modern political theory cannot regulate modern power seems overdrawn, since it is not clear that traditional juridical ideas about the legitimate use of state authority (such as those that emphasize individual rights and the procedural regularity required by the rule of law) have outlived their usefulness (Reference WalzerWalzer 1983b:489). Still, Foucault's analysis contains the kernel of a valid concern, so there remains a need to study the reasons for resistance to disciplinary power.

The Dearborn case contributes to such study by illustrating how surveillance and information-gathering can have chilling effects on a city's social life that may undermine trust and cooperation with police. As Nagel argued, the degree to which our private and community lives are exposed to the watching eyes of a broader public affects our ability to maintain trusting social relationships. As “interpersonal spheres of privacy protected from the public gaze” erode (Reference NagelNagel 1998:20), many of our relationships may become untenable. If they persist at all, we enter them burdened by a need to conform to the expectations of the wider society that watches us, unable to speak and act in ways that give expression to our own sense of who we are and how we fit into the local social milieu. Thus police surveillance and information-gathering may undermine trusting relationships between police and the community, so cities have a reason to want to minimize it (though of course other interests may give them countervailing reasons to increase it). Even procedurally well-regulated police surveillance threatens this city interest, so this analysis supplements recent literature that mainly associates police legitimacy with procedural fairness.

These extensions to Peterson's theory offer useful conceptual tools for the analysis of legal institutions, which Peterson himself mostly neglected. As I demonstrate, interests in honor and the legitimate use of authority particularly influence the local role in homeland security, driving local police to embrace community protection while contributing to controversy about offender search.

Protecting the Community Against Retaliation

The DPD displayed its orientation toward community protection in its immediate reactions to 9/11. In its first significant response, the city convened a series of community meetings with local Arab leaders to learn about community concerns during this unprecedented time. As Mayor Guido explained, “It was a very unsettling time—if there's anything we learned it's just that everybody in town just felt uncomfortable, so we were unsure about what might be on the minds of Arab community leaders.” Consequently, staff from the mayor's office and the police department used their newly forged community networks to contact several community leaders immediately after the attacks, inviting them and anyone they wanted to bring to a series of informal meetings in the DPD's training room. The initial meetings, held weekly, were standing-room only, with several dozen city officials and community leaders attending. “We just wanted information about what they were thinking and how they were feeling so that we could react to the issues that we felt we needed to,” Guido explained.

That is not to say that city officials internalized all the views they were exposed to. Community leaders who attended the meetings said they focused mainly on two themes: protection from hate crimes and concerns about their civil liberties. Some believed police were responsive to both sets of concerns, but others suggested that police listened more closely to the first set. One explained:

Indeed, some DPD members remembered only part of the concerns community leaders said they raised. “It was usually about safety issues,” one police official remembered of the meetings. “About extra patrol and how we can secure and make their community feel a little more safe, because they were certainly concerned about retaliatory action.” Notably absent in this account is any mention of the concerns that community members said they raised about respect for civil liberties, and the accounts of other police (though not all of them)Footnote ² are similar in this respect. It is not that police actively resisted the community's civil liberties concerns. Frank discussion of civil liberties did take place later around specific issues such as the Justice Department interview project. It is just that police seized more quickly on concerns about public safety because they resonated more easily with their own sense of their professional responsibilities.

In keeping with this view about its primary mission, city government responded quickly to concerns about retaliation. Mayor Guido appeared on local television the afternoon of September 11 to warn viewers against committing hate crimes, and the DPD deployed patrol cars near potential Arab targets by early afternoon. On September 12, the DPD put officers on 12-hour shifts for the first time in many department veterans' memory to offer extra patrol around mosques, the Arab business district, and local schools with large Arab populations. One police commander explained these efforts as follows:

This account, echoed by other police, suggests how easily the community calls for protection resonated with the core concerns of police—the sense that “that is what we do for a living.” In particular, this commander expressed a hope to provide a level of protection that would enable the city's business life to return to normal. So although the department's community networks ensured that it was exposed to the concerns of Arab leaders, that dialogue was filtered through the lens of the police's sense of their primary role as the guarantors of public order; police internalized and acted most readily on community concerns that spoke to that self-image.

As the DPD stepped up patrol to protect Arab institutions and neighborhoods against hate crimes, it also tried to prevent them by discouraging large demonstrations that could become targets. City officials did ultimately approve all demonstrations that community members proposed, but they also appealed to community leaders to exercise restraint. For example, during an early meeting between city officials and community leaders, a Yemeni leader indicated that his community wanted to organize a demonstration to express support for America and condemn the terrorist attacks. City officials, however, asked him not to. “Because other people are going to interpret that as a protest so soon after,” a DPD manager explained. “It could cause some serious mob rioting type problems. So they listened to us and there was never a march. … I think we prevented a lot of people from getting hurt.” Instead, he suggested, community members might show support for the United States by writing newspaper articles and letters. Other city officials raised similar concerns about marches. Mayor Guido explained:

Here the city's concern about hate crimes was not just a response to community sentiment. To the contrary, in this example it arose out of officials' own sense that maintaining public order was their primary goal. Eventually, however, many Arab community members came to share city officials' viewpoint, as discussed below.

In any case, the DPD's focus on public safety concerns was evident in these two ways: by the rapid steps it took to provide security for potential targets, and its discomfort with public demonstrations that might call attention to the city and make it a target for retaliation. Dearborn's quick response to the threat of hate crimes after 9/11 earned it praise in a report from Human Rights Watch (2002), which singled out Dearborn as the only city among six studied nationally that responded adequately to the threat. That quick response was made possible by two converging factors: the city's pre-existing relationship with the Arab community, which gave police information about where concerns about retaliation were most debilitating, and police views of their role as guarantors of public order in the city. In this case, police concerns and community knowledge reinforced one another to single out an important interest for local government to pursue.

Shrinking From the Spotlight

Discomfort with political demonstrations also had another dimension, one that illustrates concerns about the city's national image. In the months after 9/11, city residents and officials became concerned about the level and type of media attention Dearborn was receiving. In a widely circulated e-mail, one Arab resident vented frustration about the recent surge in demonstrations:

Mixed in among a number of pragmatic concerns, such as the drain on city finances for crowd control, was a concern about “the continual negative publicity and spotlight on Dearborn.” The ADC's Imad Hamad responded sympathetically, writing, “I hear you very well and I do not think that you are out of track here. I personally not a fan of demonstration period except in very rare occasions.” Elsewhere, Hamad himself had raised concerns about what he ruefully called “the Dearborn Syndrome”—the prominent place Dearborn had unwillingly come to occupy in national discussions about terrorism and 9/11 (Reference NiemiecNiemiec 2002). Thus even the region's most politically active Arab organization, which might be expected to resist any attempt to temper public demonstrations, ultimately echoed city officials' concerns.

Both residents and city officials saw two subtexts to what they viewed as the excessive coverage of Dearborn in local and national media. First, they felt that many media stories implied that Dearborn might be home to Arab terrorists or sympathizers. (At times the implication was explicit, as when radio talk show host Howard Stern repeated false rumors that Dearborn Arabs had rioted in the streets to celebrate the attacks—rumors that also plagued other Arab centers such as Paterson, New Jersey [Reference MoritzMoritz 2001].) The implication was worse than troubling, for it questioned the patriotism and loyalty of city residents at a time when that aspect of Arab American identity was under siege. As one Arab American from Dearborn told a reporter a year after September 11, “To say things changed is an understatement. All of a sudden, we had to prove how American we are” (Reference CohenCohen 2002:S-8). Lebanese immigrant Abed Hammoud, who challenged Mayor Guido in the city's 2001 mayoral election, felt the need to print up a flier denouncing the terrorist attacks and indicating his loyalty to the United States. In this context, the explosion of media coverage about Dearborn seemed to reinforce the idea that the city's Arab population might be less than patriotic.

The second concern about media coverage, more important for the city's image in Southeast Michigan than at the national level, was what city officials saw as overdrawn media interest in stories about hate crimes in Dearborn. In reporting these stories, city officials felt, the media portrayed Dearborn's white residents as intolerant holdovers from the segregationist days of Mayor Hubbard. Where stories about local support for terrorists defamed Dearborn's Arab community, stories about hate crimes defamed its non-Arab community.

City officials believed the media attention to both issues was unfairly damaging the city's reputation. “All this stuff—that they're rioting, that they [Arab residents of Dearborn] hate the police department or the city, and that the police department hates them—that's what the media wants to think,” one DPD member insisted. “We were very concerned over retaliation and hate crimes and things like that. We were trying to prevent all that, [but the media was] trying to embellish it into a big problem that really we didn't even have. … Other towns were having more trouble than we were” (emphasis in original). Another police official echoed the point, insisting that “there weren't any threats—we got more media calls about it than any actual threats.” As they responded to media inquiries, police officials tried to counteract the negative light being cast on Dearborn. One member of the DPD command staff recalled:

Arab leaders echoed these sentiments. “It is a tireless and continuous effort to connect negative events to Dearborn,” Hamad said of the media attention. “The reality is that Dearborn, as of Sept. 11, prevailed to be a role model city with a good working relationship with law enforcement. It is beyond images that may have portrayed it as a place of residence of many people linked to acts of terrorism” (Reference LewisLewis 2002:S-10).

The DPD's wary relationship with the media reflected these concerns about Dearborn's reputation. Just as Arab American identity was under siege after 9/11, so was the reputation of a city with one of the nation's largest concentration of Arabs. To defend against the stigma that threatened to taint Dearborn's image, police officials repeatedly stressed the patriotism of city residents and their condemnation of the terrorist attacks, and they became more attentive to the symbolic implication of their words and actions in ways I describe shortly. These responses to media attention illustrate the important interest that the city developed in defending its honor after 9/11—an interest that a wide range of community groups and city officials shared. Even when the urge to shrink from the spotlight led police to take the potentially controversial step of discouraging public demonstrations, community leaders who might be expected to object never did.

Justice Department Interviews of Recent Immigrants

Concerns about police surveillance and information-gathering—which were always prominent in the Arab community but were initially less central for city officials—took shape in a more complex and uncertain way as city government began to define its role in homeland security. That process is best illustrated by the DPD's response to a federal request to help interview recent immigrants about international terrorism. Because this episode clearly illustrates the limits of local offender search efforts, I examine it at greater length than the previous two episodes.

On November 9, 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a plan to interview about 5,000 temporary visa-holders who had recently entered the United States from countries reputed to have a substantial Al Qaeda presence to gather information that might be useful in the war on terror. The Justice Department described the interviews as voluntary, but a November 9, 2001, memo from the Deputy Attorney General indicated that the law enforcement officials who conducted the interviews “should feel free to use all appropriate means of encouraging an individual to cooperate” (Office of the Deputy Attorney General 2001). Of the 5,000 men initially targeted for interviews, more than 500 lived in Southeast Michigan, and more than 200 were in Dearborn. By the end of the project, the Eastern District of Michigan would conduct 330 interviews—by far the most of any district in the nation (U.S. GAO 2003:29–31).

Because of the scope of the initiative, the Attorney General looked beyond the Department of Justice for help. “Thousands of individuals have been interviewed,” he wrote in a separate November 9 letter that announced the new plans, referring to earlier post-9/11 investigations. “Federal resources have their limits, however, and we are finding that there are many more people to be interviewed than there are federal agents to conduct the interviews” (Office of the Attorney General 2001). Consequently, the Justice Department planned to enlist help from the regional Anti-Terrorism Task Forces (which were led by the 94 U.S. Attorneys and included federal and local law enforcement officials as participants). FBI representatives initially suggested that state and local law enforcement would primarily conduct the interviews, while federal agents would play a supporting role (Reference HakimHakim 2001). In this respect, the interview project is an especially clear example of the opportunistic view of the local role in homeland security.

Local reactions to the interview project in Dearborn ranged from wary to outright hostile. Many Arab community members denounced the interviews as unjustified ethnic profiling, and they worried that interviewees would face heightened scrutiny from immigration authorities. One explained that he felt the initiative “challenged [Arab Americans'] civil rights,” stepping over the “dividing line” that separated legitimate law enforcement from illegitimate harassment. At the same time, since Arab Americans' patriotism and support for the war on terror were under suspicion, Dearborn Arabs had reasons to avoid unqualified opposition to homeland security efforts. One response to this dilemma was to try to distinguish the innocent “us” from the guilty “them.” For example, one Arab American interviewee implied that too much fuss had been made about the interviews, explaining, “If you didn't do anything, you don't have to worry.” Even this man, however, complained that federal investigators sometimes continued to press interviewees after they had established that they knew nothing about terrorism, and he worried that the list of interviewees was riddled with mistakes—a concern echoed by other Dearborn residents, police, and even a GAO report (2002). “A lot of the names are pretty similar in Dearborn,” he explained. “You know, there are a lot of people with names like ‘Hussein’.” Since 9/11, he felt, the FBI had become more suspicious of Arabs in the United States and, as a result, such cases of mistaken identity would be harder to resolve. So although he did not oppose the interviews in principle, in practice he worried that Arabs who had done nothing wrong might fall victim to overzealous policing. Many of the men contacted by the Justice Department for interviews apparently had similar concerns. “When they got these letters they freaked out,” one social service provider who spoke with several of the men recalled. “They didn't know what was going on and they [thought police] were taking them to jail. And [they said], ‘I didn't do anything!’” Other Arabs worried that police might misinterpret innocuous statements the interviewees made.

These fears focused on the risks posed by the interviews themselves, but the idea that Dearborn police would help the Justice Department conduct them raised additional concerns. In particular, close collaboration between local police and federal agents might instill everyday police-community interactions with sinister undertones, as local Arabs wondered whether Dearborn officers were passing information to federal agents. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many members of Dearborn's Arab community say they became suspicious of local police in this way. For example, when asked how her views about local police changed after 9/11, one Dearborn Arab explained, “I think there will always be in the back of your head, like, ‘Oh, he could be working with the FBI, this guy’.” Such suspicion infected the most mundane interactions. For example, as part of the city's increasing attention to neighborhood government, the mayor's office decided to begin sending police officers to meetings for all the city's neighborhood associations in 2002. But when the city contacted the associations to make arrangements, it aroused suspicion among some neighborhood groups. One member of a group in a predominantly Arab neighborhood explained:

Such concerns were particularly salient after 9/11, as widespread concerns that Arabs were under heightened suspicion had already made many of them more reticent. For example, two Arab interviewees reported that many local Arabs had begun to feel self-conscious about expressing controversial political views (such as their opinions about Palestine) in public places. In this context, Dearborn police had good reason to distance themselves from federal surveillance efforts, which threatened to stifle their relationship with local community members who already felt they were being watched.

In contrast to the predominantly critical view of the interviews in the community, police initially seemed inclined to support the effort. Some police did question whether the interviews would be effective, and one viewed them as a resource drain for the DPD, but none of those I spoke with suggested that Dearborn should not have participated. In part, their support arose out of a sense of patriotic duty. “You've got to help your country,” one DPD member explained when asked why the DPD assisted the Justice Department with the interviews, echoing the language of other police officials. In part, the support arose out of a sense of shared law enforcement mission with federal investigators. “The chief had no problem with it at all,” another manager explained. “He's an FBI academy grad. He knows the process, he's a street cop.” Most police and city officials did say that they understood and sympathized with community concerns about the interviews, but many thought those concerns were overdrawn, insisting that the interviews were voluntary and nonthreatening and, therefore, a reasonable law enforcement tactic. “They were concerned about profiling and losing their rights,” one member of the DPD member recalled. “Which of course none of us would ever condone. But I mean there's still such a thing as—everybody calls it things like racial profiling … I call it criminal profiling. It's so simple.” One Arab American police officer explained:

A few months after the interviews ended, Mayor Guido publicly questioned whether there was too much concern about profiling. “There is a fine line between safety and political correctness,” he told a reporter. “Sometimes there's an oversensitivity in terms of profiling. We're all learning what is the right way to do things” (Reference PierrePierre 2002:A-3).

Despite their own views, police and other city officials were aware that the interview project was controversial in the Arab community. The controversy made their role in the interviews problematic, since police officers continued to worry about their precarious reputation in the Arab community. One police commander described the conflict he felt when reporters asked him about the interviews. “What can I say? I mean, I'm not going to say that I'm not going to support our federal government. I'm not going to say I'm going to take away the rights of the Arabic community.” In the end, Dearborn officials (unlike their counterparts in cities such as Portland, Oregon) did decide to assist the Justice Department with the interviews, but community concerns visibly affected the way the city participated.

In particular, while Dearborn police agreed to help federal agents locate interviewees and accompany them as they conducted interviews, they declined the U.S. Attorney's request to conduct the interviews themselves. Mayor Guido, who was directly involved in the decision, explained it as follows:

Several police officials echoed Guido's views. So although local police did participate in the interviews, they did so as supporting partners, and they emphasized that fact by noting that the federal government had spearheaded the effort. One DPD member explained, “[People asked me], are you for these interviews? I didn't start or initiate these interviews. The federal government initiated them and we will assist them.”

Community concerns about the interviews also led police to think of themselves as something other than just assistants to the federal agents. Local police did help federal agents locate interviewees, and in some cases they served as translators because federal agencies had a shortage of Arabic speakers. But they also tried to help reassure the interviewees and make their experiences as nonthreatening as possible. City officials said they pursued these goals in two ways.

First, during the interviews, Dearborn police viewed their role partly in terms of monitoring federal agents to ensure they acted professionally. “We were present if [the interviewees] had an issue or problem,” Mayor Guido explained. Reflecting this idea, the officer who assisted federal agents with most of the interviews in Dearborn explained that at the end of each one, he asked the interviewee whether he had found the questioning “offensive.” A police manager elaborated on the DPD's role:

He went on to say that no such complaints arose, and the officers who participated in the interviews concurred with that assessment. “You know they were very professional, the federal investigators, and hopefully our officers were too,” the manager continued. “I have not received any complaints about [the] officers, which is good. Especially in this sensitive area like interviewing immigrants. So I think it worked out well. It was a good idea to have the locals involved.”

Second, at a broader policy level, local police reported that they worked with and reinforced the message of Arab leaders who had formed a working group designed to urge Jeff Collins, the U.S. Attorney for Eastern Michigan, to modify the Justice Department's plans in his district. The DPD had an important mechanism for relaying those concerns because one of its officers served on the local Anti-Terrorism Task Force, which had the authority to decide how the interview plans would be implemented. A Justice Department spokeswoman told reporters that the U.S. Attorney's Office welcomed such input from local police (Reference WilgorenWilgoren 2001).

After several discussions, Collins agreed to a number of changes, including sending letters before visiting the interviewees' homes, arriving in plainclothes, and emphasizing the voluntary nature of the interviews. The most significant change was the method of contacting interviewees. At first federal agents planned to contact the interviewees by knocking on their doors unannounced, but Collins agreed to first mail letters asking each interviewee to contact his office to schedule a meeting. The letters stressed that “we have no reason to believe that you are, in any way, associated with terrorist activities. Nevertheless … it is quite possible that you have information that may seem irrelevant to you but which may help us piece together this puzzle” (Letter from Jeffrey Collins to prospective interviewees, November 26, 2001; emphasis in original). Arab leaders hoped that by sending letters about the interviews before federal agents knocked on anyone's door, the would-be interviewees would be less intimidated by the agents' visits and have an opportunity to contact a lawyer before deciding whether to cooperate. (ACCESS and the ADC reported referring dozens of clients to lawyers for this purpose.) Collins seemed to endorse these aims, explaining that the changes his office made to its interview plans “represent a conscious decision by law enforcement to initiate contact in a manner that is the least intrusive” (Reference SchaeferSchaefer 2001:A-1). In the end, Collins's district made more concessions to community concerns about the interviews than any other district in the country, and its changes to the interview protocol eventually served as a model that other U.S. Attorneys copied.Footnote ⁴ With these assurances, a number of local Arab institutions—including ACCESS and the bilingual Arab-American News—asked those contacted to cooperate with the government during the initial round of interviews. (Most withdrew their support, however, when the Justice Department announced plans for a second round of interviews with a larger group of immigrants in March 2002.)

Despite these steps by local police, many community leaders remained critical of the DPD's decision to participate in the interviews. Rumors reportedly began circulating that the DPD community policing officer who assisted federal agents with the largest number of interviews was deporting immigrants. At the same time, these rumors eventually died down, and the officer reported no change in his rapport with the community. In any case, the city's decision to assist federal agents with the interviews never became a major source of tension between Dearborn police and local Arab leaders. While some Arab residents continued to object to the interviews, they directed disapproval mainly at the federal government, not local police.

In the end, it is hard to gauge how well the city's efforts to attend to community concerns mitigated the damage the interviews might cause to police-community relations, though it is clear that community leaders appreciated the fact that police discussed the initiative with them at length. The important point here is that concerns about community trust did seem to influence the way the city participated in the interviews, despite the police's own inclination to view the effort as a legitimate law enforcement tool. Local police declined to conduct the interviews themselves, they went to great lengths to explain their participation in a qualified way, and they ultimately adopted the role (at least in part) of monitors for the federal agents and representatives of community concerns. In that way, the role the DPD played in the Justice Department interviews was shaped by the interest local police had in establishing legitimate boundaries around the use of new surveillance and information-gathering efforts, which could otherwise undermine the trust and support they had worked so hard to develop in the Arab community.

Dearborn's Office of Community Preparedness

Early in 2002, Dearborn announced that it would establish a local Office of Homeland Security to spearhead its anti-terrorism efforts. Organizationally, the office would be located in the police department, and a police lieutenant would direct it. Its evolution demonstrates how the three interests described separately so far came together to shape the city's main anti-terrorism initiative.

Community reaction to the announcement was mixed, as many community leaders and media commentators questioned the city's reasons for establishing the office. “People … responded very negatively to it,” one Arab leader in Dearborn explained. Another concurred: “When the office of security homeland [sic] came out, there were a lot of mixed feelings about it in the city … People thought that you had to be careful.” In particular, this community leader felt that the office's name had overtones of a police state. “I hate that word,” he explained. “‘Homeland’ to me sounds like Nazi Germany.” Others worried the office would do more damage to Dearborn's reputation by sending the wrong message to the regional and national audience that seemed to watch the city's every move. The ADC's Imad Hamad expressed this concern succinctly to a reporter at the time: “I don't see that it's needed,” he said of the new office. “It might send the wrong signal … that a high number of Arab-American people makes Dearborn a dangerous community” (Reference NiemiecNiemiec 2002:B-1). He went on to suggest that the announcement might reinforce the negative attention Dearborn had been subjected to in the national media, and he indicated that he did not want the city to apply for homeland security funds on the grounds that it had a large Arab population (Reference NiemiecNiemiec 2002).

The city quickly responded to these concerns by renaming the office. Instead of an office for homeland security, Dearborn would establish an office for community preparedness. Community members expressed approval for the change. “That's a good sign,” one commented, and another described the new name as “more palatable.” One city official remembered the episode:

Thus although police themselves had not initially recognized how a new office of “homeland security” might exacerbate concerns about the city's reputation, they did not hesitate to rename it once community members brought that concern to their attention.

Naming the office was only a symbolic act, but the city's symbolic statement that police would pursue “community preparedness” rather than “homeland security” can serve as a metaphor for the priorities the office has adopted. On that point, DPD command staff, the mayor, and the coordinator of the new office all offered similar accounts, insisting that the office was not designed to support new surveillance efforts focused on Dearborn residents but to coordinate and extend existing community preparedness tasks. So far, the makeup and operation of the office support that claim. For example, in selecting the first community preparedness coordinator, the police chief did not choose an investigator but a former head of the training division who had extensive budgetary experience. That choice apparently reflected the view that one of the role's core responsibilities would be to apply for federal grants to fund emergency response activities. Discussing the kind of grants he plans to pursue, the coordinator focuses on resources that can help the department cope with the aftermath of terrorist attacks. For example, to illustrate the kind of activity he will try to secure grant money for, the coordinator mentioned a regional consortium of law enforcement agencies mobilized after a 1997 plane crash to gather evidence and manage the crash scene. In this respect, the coordinator views the city's anti-terrorism needs in the same terms as its needs for other kinds of disasters—an analogy that holds for the community protection side of homeland security but not offender search.

Other city officials echo this perspective. When asked which homeland security activities he asked the new office to pursue, Mayor Guido focused on first response: “For us emergency preparedness—whether it's a tornado, a flood, or some sort of bombing—requires that proper procedures be put in place. It's all about determining the best way to react in order to protect and save lives. Whether it's a tornado or a bombing, we need to be ready.” Guido went on to emphasize functions such as the acquisition of technology to handle hazardous materials and the development of protocols for handling bodies in large disasters (compare with his similar account in Associated Press 2002). Once again, by comparing the city's role with regard to terrorism to its role with regard to natural disasters, city officials place offender search activities outside the scope of their homeland security efforts.

Other aspects of community protection round out the main functions of the office. One of the coordinator's duties is to investigate reports of hate crimes in the city, and he oversees efforts to prevent hate crimes. He also has responsibility for organizing the city's response to terrorist threats. In particular, when the federal government announces that it thinks the risk of an attack has risen, those warnings are routed to the coordinator, who in turn communicates with the rest of the force to indicate how officers should tighten up security. For example, when federal officials raised the nation's color-coded terrorist alert level during one holiday weekend, the coordinator received the alert and distributed an announcement throughout the DPD indicating that officers should be especially vigilant for unusual activity, such as suspicious cars parked in city lots over the weekend. Finally, the coordinator follows up on more specific threats when officers become aware of them. For example, on the day I interviewed the coordinator, he had just finished questioning a young Arab man who had allegedly made threats against the police department during an argument with a businessman. In this case, after talking with the young man and the business owner, the coordinator concluded that if the man had made threatening statements at all, they were probably idle. Asked to speculate what he would have done if they had not been, the coordinator said he would hand the case off to federal investigators. Thus local police involvement in offender search is limited even when the investigation is reactive and even when Dearborn itself might be a target.

As important as what the community preparedness coordinator does is what his office does not do. Throughout the evolution of the community preparedness office, the city has emphasized that it will not be engaged in proactive surveillance. City officials took this position early on, in the first of its regular meetings with Arab leaders after a new homeland security office was announced. “‘Why are we doing it?’” Mayor Guido remembered community leaders asking. “‘Because there's a lot [of] Arabs in this city and they think there are people in the Arab community that are [involved in terrorism]? Are they here to spy on us?’” In response, Guido and other city officials say they denied that the office would be involved in “spying,” and that the new office only existed to coordinate the community preparedness functions described so far. “I said, ‘We're not here to spy—we're not in that business,’” Guido remembers. “The feds have their own setups, the CIA and the FBI and all those people. Ours is to respond and to react and that's what we've been doing.” When asked specific questions about whether the DPD might proactively investigate potential terrorist cells in the city, either on its own initiative or in response to requests from the federal government, city officials uniformly expressed doubts. “We're not, you know, the FBI,” one police manager explained.

Several other city officials offered similar answers to this question, indicating a widespread reluctance to have Dearborn officers engage in offender search activities. A concern that such activities would undermine community trust seems to animate this reluctance, as the previous quotation indicates.

There is one major exception to this barrier against local involvement in offender search efforts. Dearborn police have assigned one officer to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which draws membership from federal agencies (notably the FBI and the INS) and local law enforcement. The main function of the task force is to coordinate investigations of potential terrorist activity in the region. For example, an investigation coordinated by the task force led to the arrest of three former Dearborn residents in Detroit in late September 2001. After 9/11, in its most significant commitment of resources to offender search efforts to date, Dearborn assigned one officer to the task force, and its community preparedness coordinator attends many task force meetings.

As might be expected, the city approached this relationship with trepidation. Mayor Guido, for example, emphasized the city's hands-off relationship with the officer who serves as their primary liaison to the task force:

Indeed, for some time the community preparedness coordinator did not have security clearance, so he was not privy to much of the information received by the officer his department had assigned to the task force—an officer who ostensibly reported to him. So the city does contribute to proactive investigations of terrorism by assigning an officer to the federal JTTF, but the officer operates under federal direction, and the city maintains considerable distance between him and the rest of city government, as if to insulate itself from the contaminating effects of offender search activities.

That still leaves the question of why the city maintains any relationship with the task force at all. No doubt one reason is the sense of occupational purpose and national duty that played a role in other offender search activities, such as the Justice Department interviews. But involvement with the JTTF also has direct benefits to the city, by both enhancing its capacity for community protection and—paradoxically—minimizing its offender search responsibilities. First, the relationship with the task force gives police access to federal intelligence about possible terrorist attacks. As one police manager explained, “They [the task force] can share information with us knowing that if there's something that's going to happen, at least we can prepare the department and the city.” Second, the relationship relieves local police from the need to investigate terrorist activity by establishing a simple channel they can use to pass information to federal agents. If officers become aware of potential terrorist threats, they can alert the JTTF and return to their regular duties. For example, when the young man mentioned above allegedly made terrorist threats against police, Dearborn's community preparedness coordinator explained that if the threats had not turned out to be idle, he would have turned the matter over to the JTTF rather than investigate the incident himself. In that respect, the DPD's relationship with the JTTF reduces rather than expands its own responsibilities for investigating terrorist activity.

Dearborn's Office of Community Preparedness is the city's central institutional vehicle for homeland security, and it bears the imprint of the three concerns introduced earlier. After some initial turmoil, city officials shied away from statements about the office that might exacerbate negative perceptions of Dearborn. Moreover, because of concerns about “violating that police-community relationship” and about the consequences of “looking at anybody with suspicious eyes,” the office has shunned new offender search activities, trying to pass them on to federal investigators. Finally, city officials have placed special emphasis on the role the office will play in emergency preparedness and protective security.