Abstract
Inquiries into the purview and role of homeland security have come to the forefront of national debate amid rising public outcries against police brutality and use of deadly force, indignation over the invasion of privacy granted by secretive government and telecommunication partnerships, and suspicion regarding the nature of homegrown terrorist threats, given the growing percentage of cases involving governmental informants. Homeland Security: Policy and Politics, by criminal justice academics Nancy E. Marion, Kelley A. Cronin, and Willard M. Oliver, serves as a comprehensive backgrounder to some of the hotly contested issues born out of the post-9/11 security environment. Although the authors’ broad focus curtails the attention to certain central subjects (e.g., threats stemming from extremist groups beyond Al-Qaeda, homegrown terrorism, domestic intelligence collection, and biothreats and public health preparedness), they demonstrate how changes to homeland security operations and structures must be critically evaluated to determine which are necessary and reasonable for protecting the country and its population.
Marion, Cronin, and Oliver show how alterations to disaster response operations, law enforcement mandates, and tactics, and terrorism and border security risk assessments have led to a critical junction in assessing the current state of homeland security. The organization of the book does not follow any type of theme or chronology, nor is there a unifying introductory chapter that provides the reader with an understanding of what is entailed by homeland security. However, each chapter is devoted to outlining the main tenets and arguments to a particular policy question. Chapters 1 and 7 focus on issues related to disaster response—Should Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) be reorganized? and what should be the role of citizen volunteers in disaster response?—one of the main mandates of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 cover issues related to law enforcement, including the role of local police in fusion centers, the size of federal law enforcement, and the use of intelligence-led policing by local security forces. The central cause for the creation of DHS—terrorism—and its related policies, such as those concerning Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act, are charted in Chapters 6, 8, and 9. A final group of three chapters take on a mix of subjects that account for both traditional and emerging concerns. These include border security and cybersecurity. Overall, the authors cover a large scope of homeland security issues, placing attention on the historical underpinnings of each policy question and showcasing official and popular sentiment at each stage of the issue’s development over time.
Homeland Security: Policy and Politics adds to the security and justice literature by highlighting the controversies over national security entities and directives. One such controversy centers on the fact that since its inception, the DHS, and the federal law enforcement bodies it encompasses, has grown in budget and personnel. With increased public attention, the investment of federal funds into homeland security has been heavily watched. In one example, the authors note that as the Secret Service has grown, it has also come under public scrutiny for the behavior of its agents and their ability to protect the president (p. 78). Readers can build on these discussions through the various angles from which to evaluate such an issue (i.e., How much of this scrutiny is novel and how much of it is due to some aspect of the digital age?).
Some of the policy questions the authors pose are relevant to current contentious criminal justice issues. In their coverage of local police within fusion centers, Marion, Cronin, and Oliver draw attention to the matter of mission creep and the use of national security intelligence to investigate local, routine crimes (p. 54). While the access to additional resources may lead to more closed cases, the ability of local police to easily track an individual and gather personal information in manners they would otherwise not be able to implement adds to the public’s frustration over police intrusion into civil liberties. With the current focus on police use of unnecessary deadly force, this issue plays into the larger debate surrounding the need to reconfigure how police are recruited and trained.
Although the authors have provided context to current security issues through a series of policy questions, the book lacks a unifying concept of homeland security. As such, each chapter is actually a stand-alone backgrounder piece. Furthermore, it is riddled throughout with chronological and subject errors. The authors also miss an opportunity to unify the issues they presented into a conclusion that provides some type of forward assessment regarding the future of homeland security. What will homeland security look like 10 years out? Will the issues addressed in the book continue to be relevant?
While the authors cover multiple issues within the scope of homeland security, they fail to provide readers with an understanding of what homeland security is and what is its purpose, how it has evolved, and what are its main components. The issues covered are limited within the broader homeland security field, and some are minor in comparison to the issues not presented. Homeland Security: Policy and Politics however does present concise summaries of important policy topics and would be most suitable as supplementary reading for students or instructors wishing to become familiar with some of the general arguments surrounding such topics.