The recent “Rethinking Radicalization” report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, about law enforcement training and methods to combat Muslim radicalization, raises important questions about both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of those efforts. The report surveys social scientific studies to present broad-based evidence of the complexity and varied character of the processes by which a person becomes a terrorist, concluding that such persons are commonly only marginally “religious.”
Available research indicates that what law enforcement often frames as a “conveyer belt” toward radicalization is anything but a linear, one-dimensional process (if it can even be described as “a process.”) Summarizing the sociological literature, report author Faiza Patel finds no consensus that there is such a “conveyer belt.” She also finds that this faulty assumption serves as the basis to legitimize surveillance and infiltration of Muslim communities in ways that violate their rights to freely practice their religion. Perhaps more important, those tactics also undermine effective efforts at bridge building between law enforcement and American Muslims. Patel writes:
Radicalization is complex. Yet a thinly-sourced, reductionist view of how people become terrorists has gained unwarranted legitimacy in some counterterrorism circles. This view corresponds with—and seems to legitimize—“counter-radicalization” measures that rely heavily on non-threat-based intelligence collection, a tactic that may be ineffective or even counterproductive.
Moreover, assumptions in law enforcement strategies that purport to allow officers to readily identify “signs of radicalization” often amount to little more than scrutiny of religious behavior. According to the report:
One particularly noteworthy (example) involves the head of Homeland Security in Kansas City, who, developed a Patrol Guide, which included a section on the Recognition of Indicators/Interdiction of Potential Terrorist Threats. Upon completion of this training, a patrol officer purportedly would be able to identify a Muslim “extremist” during a car check, a pedestrian check, or a business or residence check. Despite near-unanimity about the difficulty of identifying signs of radicalization, it seems a Kansas City cop would be able to do so in the course of a writing a ticket.
According to the Brennan Center study, 40% of the terror plots that have been thwarted by law enforcement have been discovered, at least in part, thanks to tips from Muslims. Yet surveillance, infiltration, and even what community members consider entrapment has left them feeling targeted as criminals and suspicious of law enforcement. This seriously inhibits trust and undermines the cooperation that has a proven track record of effectiveness.
Until recently, guidelines prohibited the FBI, for example, from collecting information on political or religious activities on Americans unless they were investigating a specific crime. But that has recently changed and now broad latitude to investigate has become permission to infiltrate based, essentially, on religion. Rather than focusing on actual threats, law enforcement is too often looking for “clues to radicalization” such as growing beards or suggesting women should wear hijab, as well as other behaviors that would as easily characterize Muslim religious practice in general.
The takeaway: current efforts to combat terrorism are built on faulty assumptions about the process of becoming a terrorist, assumptions contradicted by the social science available. Those efforts violate religious freedom and actually undermine the very outcomes they seek to accomplish.
