Sitting on Suspect Photos a Chronic Reflex

The institutional, knee-jerk tendency to control information even when this becomes counterproductive is not unique to the authorities now sitting on photographs of suspected Boston Marathon bombers. What cements bureaucrats into such hoarding all the more is a time-honored tactic of cloaking any decision under the mantle of confidentiality of ongoing investigations. While there is some truth in the chanting of this confidentiality litany, this is not the whole truth. An analogous case deserves mention here.

Remember the DC sniper frenzy a decade ago? Muhammad and Malvo went on a shooting spree ranging across Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. While the FBI and ATF were intimately involved in the case, their executives positioned themselves behind a local Maryland community police chief, Chief Moose, as the nominal head of their joint task force. What made the killers particularly difficult to find was their random selection of targets and firing only a single rifle shot for each attack. Although the pair operated out of a dark sedan, with the shooter firing from a hole in the trunk, authorities and media became fixated on looking for a white van. Evidently, a witness report in the vicinity of at least one of the shootings pointed to a suspicious white van. Soon reflexive searches for white vans started to happen after every shooting. I remember this vividly from witnessing my 15-minute daily drive on the Beltway (from home in Virginia to office in Maryland) turn into a 2.5-hour crawl one morning after a shooting.

Notwithstanding white van sightings, though, Chief Moose et al repeatedly missed the opportunity to work smoothly with the press and take better advantage of public involvement. They scheduled news conferences that communicated little of substance and then delayed the start of those conferences. They caused a major traffic jam on another occasion in order to make a very showy presence at a shooting victim's funeral. Worst of all, though, they tried to sit on photos and identifying details of the two shooters -- under precisely the same pretexts now being offered for withholding similar details about marathon bomber suspects.

What happened in reality? Two news channels, Fox and CNN, released the details anyway. Within hours of this release, a truck driver spotted the shooting suspects and reported them to authorities. As a result, police arrested the snipers before they killed another random target.

Fast forward to the present day, and the scene playing out smacks of déjà vu. In Boston, once again, institutional inertia appears to be justifying sitting on information in possible hopes of controlling evidence for the perfect prosecution and exclusive handling of initiated experts. Instead, the photos and descriptions should be circulating so widely as to make it impossible for these suspects to elude scrutiny. At the same time, rapid dissemination of such information also brings exculpatory details to light, perhaps eliminating as many suspects as the process flags for scrutiny.

Are the ones sitting on this information bad people? Certainly not. They are sufferers of a malady that afflicts modern bureaucracies, ingraining patterns and inertia that make slow learners of some bureaucrats. The New York Post's April 18 release of suspect photos may offer the public an antidote.

-- Nick Catrantzos

A Small Bit of Luck at Boston Marathon

Today's defenders learn that mature terrorists increasingly plan a secondary strike. Why? To target first responders. To the attacker, a bomb timed to explode after responders have arrived on scene takes out the brave souls who are best able to save lives and limit casualties, thereby increasing the ultimate body count ascribed to the attack. A look at this photograph reveals precisely why terrorists find the secondary strike so attractive.



Look at the people in yellow vests and what do you see? With the exception of one individual in the foreground walking towards others, all the rest are bunching up. This is a natural reflex, and you see it not only among lesser trained event staff but among more seasoned public servants. In times of distress and confusion, even those trained to know better tend to stick together, sharing information, perhaps jointly working out triage and crowd control priorities in the absence of clear direction or working communications. Indeed, social attachment theory proponents could argue that this clustering is to be expected especally in disasters, when people seek the proximity of familiar persons and places (per Anthony R. Mawson, Psychiatry (68)2 Summer 2005, "Understanding mass panic and other collective responses to threat and disaster").

Only in the most disciplined units of combat-hardened troops do we find people with the capacity to resist the clustering impulse and to position themselves sufficiently away from each other to avoid making an easy target. As an old military sergeant once used to spout at unexpected intervals, "Don't bunch up. One grenade will get you all."

If there is a little good news to take away from all this, one bit is certainly that whoever was behind the bombing at the marathon's finish line did not carry out the kind of secondary strike that succeeded in targeting first responders. Otherwise, the death toll would have assuredly been higher.

-- Nick Catrantzos