MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A Pack, Not A Herd, Revisited.
Earlier observations here.
So the snipers that paralyzed and terrorized the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area are caught now. But it’s worth thinking about how they were caught. After repeatedly slipping through the fingers of law enforcement, John Muhammad and Lee Salvo were caught because leaked information about the suspects’ automobile and license number was picked up by members of the public, one of whom spotted the car within hours and alerted the authorities – blocking the exit from the rest area with his own vehicle to make sure they didn’t escape. “You can deputize a nation,” said one news official after the fact.
Yes. With proper information, the public can act against terrorists – often, as we found on September 11, faster and more effectively than the authorities. The key, as Jim Henley noted, is to “make us a pack, not a herd.”
The problem is that this goes against the very grain of intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and so on. Within bureaucracies in general – and doubly within intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies – information is power, and power isn’t something you want to share. And if you deputize a nation, doesn’t that make the official deputies just a little bit less special?
The problem with this mindset is that it’s all about bureaucratic turf, and not about getting the job done. Otherwise we’d have learned the lesson long ago.
And we still haven’t. Or maybe I should say, they still haven’t.
Plus: “In fact, it seems pretty clear that the authorities, overall, view the citizenry as a herd, not as a pack. They see ordinary people as sheep, with themselves in the role of shepherd. Without close supervision, they assume, people will erupt into mob violence, or scatter in fear. The evidence, however, doesn’t support this approach.”
Follow the link for a David Brin take, too. And read this as well.
UPDATE: I wish I’d know this before my column went to bed, but it certainly supports my thesis: American Professor Mark Moogalian ‘Rushed’ Train Gunman, Was Shot.
A French-American professor who was hailed by President Francois Hollande for his “courage” was shot while trying to to disarm a gunman wielding an AK-47 aboard a high-speed train, according to his wife.
Mark Moogalian, who is reportedly a 51-year-old academic originally from Midlothian, Virginia, spotted a suspicious passenger while traveling on the Amsterdam to Paris train Friday. “My husband told me that he had seen someone strange because he had entered the toilets with his suitcase and it lasted a long time,” Moogalian’s wife Isabelle told Europe1 radio Monday. “A little while later the guy came out and that’s when he saw that the guy was carrying a gun.”
Isabelle Moogalian, who was also aboard the train, said her husband spotted the gunman “being grabbed from behind by a different person” — thought to be a 29-year-old French banker who has chosen to stay anonymous. Mark Moogalian told his wife to “go” and then “rushed towards the gunman to remove … the Kalashnikov.”
She added: “I did not see my husband get shot, it happened too quickly and I was pretty much hiding behind seats. But I look at my husband through the seats at an angle and he looked straight at me and said, ‘I’m hit!’ … There was blood everywhere. I ran towards him and I could see that he a wound on his back, I then saw another wound by his neck.”
I hope he makes a full recovery.