From: A Cop’s Watch
Police Officers as Grassroots Defenders
By Scott Stewart
Last week’s Security Weekly discussed how an alert citizen helped prevent a Columbine-inspired school shooting in Waseca, Minnesota. In that case, an alert citizen noticed John LaDue behaving suspiciously near a storage space and called the police. Responding officers found that LaDue was manufacturing pressure cooker bombs during what is known as the weapons acquisition phase of the attack cycle.
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Other examples include the August 2007 case in which two men stopped by a sheriff’s deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., were found to be in possession of a large pipe bomb, and the July 2005 case in which police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted a grassroots terrorism plot during the investigation of a string of armed robberies. Furthermore, a sharp North Carolina sheriff’s deputy uncovered a multimillion-dollar cigarette smuggling operation being run by Hezbollah.
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The threat from the grassroots is real and deadly. Because of this, the importance of grassroots defenders has never been greater. Police officers, whether on patrol or conducting investigations are a critical component in the grassroots defense network. As the West faces the continuing danger of jihadists returning from battlefields in places such as Syria, police officers will play a significant role in helping to mitigate that threat.
