Lansing - Jay Leno’s jokes were falling on silent ears the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“If you don’t laugh, the terrorists have won,” Leno jokingly said to the silent audience.
This story was told by David Carter, professor of criminal justice and director of the National Center for Community Policing at MSU, on Tuesday during the Homeland Security Seminar.
Carter, who put the seminar together, discussed the future of community policing and the importance of maintaining a working relationship with private individuals to fight crime and terrorism.
“It’s important to get this message across to the community,” he said. “A lot of community members look at this and just don’t see it. We need to educate the community to understand the role here that they have.”
Carter, compared building relationships to fight terrorism to how the police have used the community to gain intelligence about gangs.
But Carter said it is important community members do not feel like their rights are being invaded. He said officials need to be careful with new ways to fight terrorism, including technology that detects lying by measuring heat around a person’s eyes.
“It’s an unproven technology,” he said. “We know that that happens, but we don’t know that’s a way to indicate lying.”
The seminar, held at the Sheraton Lansing Hotel, 925 S. Creyts Road in Lansing, was attended by more than 60 people, mostly law enforcement officials, from several agencies including MSU and Lansing police departments and the FBI.
Also in attendance were several academic officials.
“Terrorism is theater,” said Richard Holden, chair and professor of the department of criminal justice administration at Central Missouri State University.
Holden discussed tactics of terrorists. He said terrorism has changed because of Sept. 11.
“One of the things that has occurred as a result of Sept. 11, is that you do not want to try to rush the cabin of a pilot in an airplane today - the passengers will kick your butt and they will do it right now.”
He said targets of terrorists are often symbolic, such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. One way to stop the attacks is to train police on how to stop terrorism - including building relationships with the community.
Ed McGarrell, director of the School of Criminal Justice, said MSU has formed several committees to deal with biomedical and food-safety issues.
“We thought a basic course on homeland security was an important first step,” he said.
McGarrell said the responsibility to keep a secure community has shifted after Sept. 11.
“We’ve usually thought of these issues as matters for federal law enforcement and some of the international security agencies at the federal level,” he said. “What’s changed now is realizing that the threat to domestic security is that there’s now a shared responsibility in local and state law enforcement.”
