1
Editorial
Policing Terrorism
Editorial by P.A.J. Waddington
This inaugural issue of Policing: a Journal of
Policy and Practice launches with a bang. First,
it is devoted to the topic that is at the top
of policing agendas throughout the world: the
response to global masscasualty terrorism,
epitomized by, but far from restricted to, the
attacks of September 11 2001. Secondly, it sets
a precedent for what we hope will be the defin-
ing characteristic of this journal: an informed
conversation between practitioners and aca-
demics. That conversation is builtin to the
editorship of this journal: I am delighted to
share the editorial role with Peter Neyroud,
not only a successful former chief constable of
two significant British police forces and now
Chief Executive of the British National Police
Improvements Agency, but also an intellec-
tualthe author of a highlyregarded book
on police ethics (Neyroud, 2003). Largely as a
result of Peters efforts, this issue is fortunate to
have secured contributions from very distin-
guished and knowledgeable police officers and
members of the intelligence and security ser-
vices. I take credit for having persuaded some
of the most prominent scholars working in this
*Professor of Social Policy, University of Wolverhampton. E-mail: P.A.J.Waddington@wlv.ac.uk
Policing, Volume 1, Number 1, pp. 18
doi:10.1093/policing/pam007
The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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area to contribute a variety of academic per-
spectives to the debate. We want to extend the
conversation as far as possible across the police
community and to encourage contributions
from those less exulted than the contributors
to this issue. To facilitate this for those who
might feel intimidated in putting pen to paper
or who simply dont have the time, we extend
the offer of their being interviewed by the
editors and for the interview to be published.
Truth is no respecter of rank and contribu-
tions from all police officers are encouraged.
Anyone considering doing so is free to contact
me at p.a.j.waddington@wlv.ac.uk to discuss
their contribution.
It is not common for police officers of any
rank to reflect, appraise and analyse upon
their professional practice. Quite why this is
so is unclear, but may have something to do
with a point made in passing in Professor
Brodeurs review (in this issue) of the litera-
ture on high policing: police intelligence, he
observes, focuses upon individual wrongdoers
and is directed to establishing their guilt of spe-
cific offences, whereas the security services are
often less concerned with the prosecution and
2 Policing Editorial
conviction of individuals than they are with
disrupting and undermining activities that
threaten the state. This casespecific approach
of policing not only focuses on individuals
rather than wider patterns and processes, it
terminates with the verdict of the court. Skills
and knowledge are experientialbeen there,
done itrather than reflectively analytical.
However that impedes the professional devel-
opment of policing policy and practice. For
police do not only deal with specific cases that
go before the courts, policing involves general
deployments based upon some notion of what
the task is and how best it can be achieved.
What is that task? Too often it is unquestion-
ably assumed that the task is crimefighting or
law enforcement. Sometimes it is dimly recog-
nized that it also embraces crime prevention,
but this is equally unquestionably assumed
to be the outcome of crimefighting and law
enforcement. Genuine reflection on policing
policy and practice involves being prepared to
question these verities and that is the mission
of this journal.
In questioning fundamental assumptions
there are few better places to begin than
with terrorism, security and intelligence, for
not only are these matters of intense pub-
lic and professional concern, but they raise
acute issues and problems as the article in this
issue attest. For these are all matters of high
policing. Twenty five years ago JeanPaul
Brodeur published his corrective to the then
emerging academic consensus that policing
was the social and moral equivalent of street
cleaning: the routine business of petty crime,
drunkenness and drug addiction, domestic
violence, and the rest (Brodeur, 1983). He
pointed to another higher level at which the
police operatethe defence of the state. It is
P.A.J. Waddington
a comforting myth (that police do little to dis-
pel) that policing serves the public, whereas
in fact everywhere police forces are state insti-
tutions ultimately serve their paymasters. In
Britain, the symbol of the Crown adorns virtu-
ally every police uniform and any threat to the
Monarch and her heirs acquires unparalleled
concern. Thus, when an intruder (Michael
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Fagan) gained access to Buckingham Palace
in 1982 and police guarding the palace were
slow to respond to the Queens call for help,
the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police, Sir David McNee, felt obliged to tender
his resignation (albeit that it was not accepted).
Yet, Fagan had committed only the most petty
of criminal offences, and posed no threat to
the life or well being of the Queen. It was not
the criminal seriousness of what he had done
or even might have done, but the violation
of the sanctity of the Monarchy, the symbol
of the British state, that provoked the offer
of resignation from the Commissioner. More
seriously, whilst terrorism can inflict signifi-
cant loss of life (most notably on September
11 2001), it is not the scale of the atrocities
committed in its name that gives terrorism
its special status, it is the threat that it poses
to the state, for it undermines the basis of
state legitimationthe capacity to protect its
citizens.
Whilst it is currently fashionable for intel-
lectuals to pour scorn on President George W.
Bushs characterization of American foreign
and domestic policy as the pursuit of a War
on Terror, there is reason to consider seri-
ously the distinction between criminal acts,
on the one hand, and warfare, on the other.
For this distinction mirrors that between the
police and military as the joint custodians
of the states monopoly of legitimate force.
P.A.J. Waddington
Implicit in the distinction is that the mili-
tary fights wars, whereas the police enforce
the law and pursue criminals. Terrorism blurs
that distinction: it differs significantly from
the generality of crimes: it is committed by
those who believe themselves to be dedicated
to a higher cause, in pursuit of which they are
often willing to suffer the risk (or in the case of
suicide bombers, the certainty) of grievous
injury or death. Those killed, maimed, injured
and traumised by terrorism are not selected for
reasons of individual animosity, but because
they serve or are citizens of the state that the
terrorist wishes to influence or destroy.
Yet, if terrorism is distinguishable from
crime, it also fails to fit standard definitions of
warfare that reflect the kind of armed conflicts
between Westphalian states. There is more
to this than simply conceptual confusion: as
combatants in an armed conflict, terrorists
behave like military combatants in war. They
employ the basic tactic of warfaredeception.
Just as soldiers wear disruptive pattern cam-
ouflage battle fatigues to blend into their
surroundings, so terrorists disguise themselves
amongst the civil population. Not only do they
do so physically (wearing clothing and adopt-
ing lifestyles that do not draw attention to
themselves), but also legally by exploiting the
gap between the dichotomous opposition of
crime and war. If terrorism truly is war by of a stealth attacker. The computers aboard
other means (to misquote Clauswitz), then
there is no obligation on the security services
to arrest rather than kill their enemy. When
two Provisional IRA active service units unwit-
tingly drove into an SAS ambush at Loughgall
in 1986 there is little indication that they were
invited to surrender. In traditional military
style, the concealed ambushers open fire, rid-
dling a van the terrorists had used to convey
them to the location with gunfire and killing
Editorial Policing 3
occupants whom they could not possibly have
seen (Urban, 1992). This is how war is con-
ducted: before opening fire, A10 tankbuster
crews dont call upon the occupants of enemy
armoured vehicles to surrender. Yet, crim-
inals are afforded more generous treatment:
the onus is upon the police to demonstrate that
use of lethal force is necessary as a last resort.
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Simultaneously laying claim to both combat-
ant status and the rights afforded to criminal
suspects, injects ambiguity into the relation-
ship between terrorists and agents of the state.
Hence, the successful appeal to the European
Court of Human Rights by the relatives of
those killed at Loughgall.
The response of police and security services
worldwide has been to deny terrorists invisibil-
ity by increasing surveillance and intelligence.
Like an AWACS aircraft, the aim is to identify
enemy threats against the background clut-
ter of the terrain in which they operate. This
entails being alert to telltale signals and rec-
ognizing their significance. Intelligence directs
the gaze of the security services towards those
amongst the civil population amongst whom
threats are most likely to emerge. However,
this is a venture prone to two types of deeply
damaging errors: first, there is the inevitabil-
ity of failure, for the terrorist is the epitome
an AWACS aircraft spot attacking low flying
aircraft by ignoring the clutter of, say, wave
motion on the open sea. They are able to do
this because the motion of waves is sufficiently
well understood that it can be discounted,
leaving the attackers revealed and vulnera-
ble to counterattack. The security services
cannot so easily discount the clutter of infor-
mation coming from the behaviour of the
population. Until the moment they launched
4 Policing Editorial
their fateful and fatal attacks on 11 Septem-
ber none of the alqaeda terrorists had done
anything to distinguish themselves from the
background clutter of thousands of others.
Learning to fly aircraft without paying atten-
tion to taking off and landing is bizarre, but
temptingly discounted as the indulgence of a
bunch of rich kids with time on their hands.
Yet, in retrospect, however, it is regarded as
a flagrant intelligence failure to be officially
denounced, and thus epitomizes the inability
of the state to protect its citizens. Hence, state
institutions dutifully inflict upon their own
state the ideological damage that terrorists
desire.
Secondly, in order to prevent such an intel-
ligence failure, the security services become
hypersuspicious. Insofar as that suspicion
alights on everyone then its intrusiveness can
be regarded as oppressive and a denial of
privacy. Yet, if suspicion is directed at those
belonging to particular sections of the popu-
lation (such as Muslims), then it can readily
be characterized as prejudicial and discrim-
inatory. Either way, it is a violation of the
social contract between the citizen and the
state. When the stakes are as high as they
have become in an era of mass casualty ter-
rorism, the security services and police feel
duty bound to intervene at a lower thresh-
old of suspicion than they would otherwise
consider justified. Increasingly, the innocent,
along with the guilty, experience the fright-
ening reality of antiterrorist operations and
the social contract is undermined even fur-
ther. To this dilemma there seems only one
practical answer: to increase surveillance and
obtain intrusive intelligence in the hope of
distinguishing terrorists from the population
at large. Often this is at the behest of public
P.A.J. Waddington
opinion led by parliamentary and media crit-
ics. Nevertheless, it too represents an intrusion
into privacy that undermines the value of the
liberty that the state is sworn to defend.
Just as terrorism obscures the binary opposi-
tion of crime and war, so the states response
also blurs the distinction. Fake identity is the
stock in trade of subversives and of fraudsters
alike, and technologies designed to authen-
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ticate identity have burgeoned. Surveillance
is normally equated with ubiquitous CCTV
cameras, but as several of our contributors
point out, it extends far beyond the camera
lens. The ability of state agencies to monitor
legitimate private transactions also intrudes
into privacy.
In conclusion, allow me to note that the
blurring of the crime/war dichotomy is not
only the accomplishment of the state. In order
to pursue his illegal corporate interests in
cocaine supply, Palo Escobar reputedly assas-
sinated state officials who he failed to corrupt,
detonated bombs in public places, destroyed
a passenger aircraft in flight, and commit-
ted many other actions commonly described
as terrorism (Bowden, 2001). In a world of
global commerce, increasingly hosting failed
and failing states, the prospect that criminal
networks will learn the lessons of their terrorist
counterparts should not be discounted.
References
Bowden, M. 2001. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the Richest,
Most Powerful Criminal in History, London: Atlantic.
Brodeur, J.-P. 1983. High Policing and Low Policing:
Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities. Social
Problems 30: 507520.
Neyroud, P. 2003. Policing and Ethics. In Handbook
of Policing, Newburn, T. (ed.). Collumpton: Willan;
578602.
Urban, M. 1992. Big Boys Rules, London: Faber and Faber.