More of Same Yields More of ... Same

When the ethically flexible Frenchman who commands the police under Nazi masters in Casablanca appeases the ranking Nazi du jour by announcing he is rounding up TWICE the usual suspects, is he anticipating future grant dispensers and homeland security experts who demand equal satisfaction on the heels of every spectacular attack? It certainly looks that way. Else why do last Monday's Moscow subway bombings trigger the usual knee-jerk reaction at home? This reflex compels earnest homeland security critics to remark that America lags in anti-terrorist defenses of our own subways and surface transportation. This is how one accounts for the significance attached to pointing out that we have spent only $21 million of $755 million allocated for transportation security grants, per a June 2009 GAO report (at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09491.pdf).

The conventional wisdom is that this lag in spending reflects insouciance on the part of defenders. The corollary is that these slackers should be spending with gusto on risk assessments and detection technologies to demonstrate their competence. But is this round-up of twice the usual suspects really wise? Or is it ill advised?

Consider: TSA has deployed viper teams and carried out exercises at transit hubs already. I witnessed one myself at Union Station a few years ago. Hundreds of responders participated, sharing lessons across jurisdictional lines. But they had to run their exercise early on a Saturday morning to avoid complicating already unbearable commutes in a large metropolis. There lurks a lesson here for anyone who uses trains and subways infrequently: You cannot harden such a target sufficiently without paralyzing its capacity to perform. Anyone who had to rely on the train to go from Washington D. C. to Manhattan while air traffic was grounded immediately after 9/11/01 will likely remember how adding one more complication to normal business travel would have easily halted that travel altogether.

There are times when institutions do their best by not disbursing public funds with feverish abandon. This is one if those times.

Transit security on the scale necessary to thwart a terrorist attack like Moscow's lends itself poorly to American freedom of maneuver without undue personal invasions. Otherwise, costs become prohibitive, lines crawl, and defense remains uncertain. A better approach would be to invest in citizen involvement, empowering and one day enabling fellow commuters not only to spot attackers but to also intervene to stop them, with the same assurance of Good Samaritan protections they would receive if performing CPR or a Heimlich maneuver.

Otherwise, we fool only ourselves and engage in security theater by calling for more spending, more cops on trains, more bomb-sniffing dogs, more security patrols, more interagency coordination -- more everything -- except feasibility and proof of results. We round up twice the usual suspects with little danger of catching the most deadly one before he or she strikes. We also force TSA into the role of the French police in Casablanca, a force reduced to appeasing petulant masters more than doing a tough and necessary job within available resources.

-- Nick Catrantzos