By Srinivasan, Siddarth

From the document: "Over the last year, generative AI [artificial intelligence] tools have made the jump from research prototype to commercial product. Generative AI models like OpenAI's ChatGPT [Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer] [hyperlink] and Google's Gemini [hyperlink] can now generate realistic text and images that are often indistinguishable from human-authored content, with generative AI for audio [hyperlink] and video [hyperlink] not far behind. Given these advances, it's no longer surprising to see AI-generated images of public figures go viral [hyperlink] or AI-generated reviews and comments on digital platforms. As such, generative AI models are raising concerns about the credibility of digital content and the ease of producing harmful content going forward. [...] There are several ideas for how to tell whether a given piece of content--be it text, image, audio, or video--originates from a machine or a human. This report explores what makes for a good AI detection tool, how the oft-touted approach of 'watermarking' fares on various technical and policy-relevant criteria, governance of watermarking protocols, what policy objectives need to be met to promote watermark-based AI detection, and how watermarking stacks up against other suggested approaches like content provenance."

Washington. DC. Brookings Institution. 2024.

By Joanna C. Schwartz

For decades, scholars have debated the extent to which financial sanctions cause government officials to improve their conduct. Yet little attention has been paid to a foundational empirical question underlying these debates: When a plaintiff recovers in a damages action against the government, who foots the bill? In prior work, I found that individual police officers virtually never pay anything toward settlements and judgments entered against them. But this finding prompts another question: Where does the money come from, if not from individual officers? The dominant view among those who have considered this question is that settlements and judgments are usually paid from jurisdictions’ general funds with no financial impact on the involved law enforcement agencies, and some have suggested that agencies would have stronger incentives to improve behavior were they required to pay settlements and judgments from their budgets. But, beyond anecdotal information about the practices in a few large agencies, there has been no empirical inquiry into the source of funds used by governments to satisfy suits involving the police.

In this Article, I report the results of the first nationwide study to examine how cities, counties, and states budget for and pay settlements and judgments in cases against law enforcement. Through public records requests, interviews, and other sources, I have collected information about litigation budgeting practices in one hundred jurisdictions across the country. Based on the practices in these one hundred jurisdictions, I make two key findings. First, settlements and judgments are not always—or even usually—paid from jurisdictions’ general funds; instead, cities, counties, and states use a wide range of budgetary arrangements to satisfy their legal liabilities. All told, half of the law enforcement agencies in my study financially contribute in some manner to the satisfaction of lawsuits brought against them.

Second, having a department pay money out of its budget toward settlements and judgments is neither necessary nor sufficient to impose a financial burden on that department. Some law enforcement agencies pay millions from their budgets each year toward settlements and judgments, but the particularities of their jurisdictions’ budgeting arrangements lessen or eliminate altogether the financial impact of these payments on these agencies. On the other hand, smaller agencies that pay nothing from their budgets toward lawsuits may nevertheless have their very existence threatened if liability insurers raise premiums or terminate coverage in response to large payouts.

63 UCLA L. Rev. 1144 (2016)

By City of Chicago, Office of Inspector General

The objectives of the inquiry were to determine the completeness rates of CPD response times recorded by CPD and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC), and to identify factors contributing to missing response time data for 911 calls for CPD service.

As a result of this inquiry, OIG found that CPD’s data collection of 911 response times is incomplete; the Department fails to record timestamps for various statuses throughout the dispatch and police response for a substantial number of 911 calls. Calls for high priority emergency events had a higher rate of recorded response times for all statuses that occur during a unit’s response (Acknowledge, Enroute, and On-scene) compared to calls for events with a lower priority classification. The timepoint in the police response process that is least often recorded is the On-scene time, or the time when the responding CPD unit arrives at the location of service; this remains true regardless of call priority level or geographic location. The On-scene status is the last time point in the sequence of events before responding members engage with an emergency event, which may contribute to the low On-scene time completeness rates. Additionally, the interface of the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, which records a timestamp when CPD members enter their response status, displays the response status buttons sequentially, and is dependent on the previous status in the process being entered.

Chicago: City of Chicago, Office of Inspector General, 2023. 30p.

By: Sean E. Goodison and Connor Brooks

This report provides data on authorized equipment and techniques, body-worn cameras, and K-9 units in local police departments. It also presents tables on training, policies, and procedures. Additionally, the report describes the prevalence of community policing plans.

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2023. 36p

By Tzipporah P. Dang , Bradley D. Mattan , Denise M. Barth , Grace Handley, Jasmin Cloutier, Jennifer T. Kubota

From social media to courts of law, recordings of interracial police officer-civilian interactions are now widespread and publicly available. People may be motivated to preferentially understand the dynamics of these interactions when they perceive injustice towards those whose communities experience disproportionate policing relative to others (e.g., non-White racial/ethnic groups). To explore these questions, two studies were conducted (study 1 neuroimaging n = 69 and study 2 behavioral n = 58). The fMRI study examined White participants’ neural activity when viewing real-world videos with varying degrees of aggression or conflict of White officers arresting a Black or White civilian. Activity in brain regions supporting social cognition was greater when viewing Black (vs. White) civilians involved in more aggressive police encounters. Additionally, although an independent sample of perceivers rated videos featuring Black and White civilians as similar in overall levels of aggression when civilian race was obscured, participants in the fMRI study (where race was not obscured) rated officers as more aggressive and their use of force as less legitimate when the civilian was Black. In study 2, participants who had not viewed the videos also reported that they believe police are generally more unjustly aggressive towards Black compared with White civilians. These findings inform our understanding of how perceptions of conflict with the potential for injustice shape social cognitive engagement when viewing arrests of Black and White individuals by White police officers.

NeuroImage, Volume 255, 15 July 2022, 119153

By National Police Chiefs’ Council (UK)

This Review was established to ‘identify ways in which forces across England and Wales can be more productive, improving outcomes’1 . In the three fnancial years to March 2023, Government funded the recruitment of an additional 20,000 police ofcers. This – together with additional resources provided by precept - is a considerable investment into policing. As new recruits build up experience and capabilities, we would expect to see its impact in terms of public safety. Compared to 2007, ofcer numbers have increased seven per cent whilst the population has increased by about 12 per cent (and with it, demand). However, like-for-like comparisons are not necessarily helpful: technology for example should have made police forces more productive since then. But to a large extent we have found that if the uplift has helped fll the most urgent capacity gaps (and improve performance), it has not taken away the need to prioritise and task resources effectively. A productivity drive is as necessary now as it was in the years of officer reduction. An environment of budget pressures suggests difficult choices ahead for public sector investment. Public agencies will need to evidence, more than ever, that they are providing value for money and becoming more productive. Pouring additional resources into a service might create more outputs but it does not per se increase productivity if these resources are not used wisely. Neither do officer numbers guarantee reduced crime2. Effective resource allocation is essential to deliver the greatest gains. Coordinated planning and multi-agency collaboration are vital to maximise the chances of better public outcomes. In this context, as a prerequisite to further investment demands and to strengthening public legitimacy, it is imperative that the policing sector is able to demonstrate how it is making best use of its resources and what direct benefits its activity delivers to the public. THE OPERATING LANDSCAPE OF POLICING IS SHIFTING Policing demand has changed. Since the mid-1990s, there have been long-term falls in overall crime levels but since 2014, offences have risen again (while still 20 per cent below their 2002/03 level). New technologies have created new criminal opportunities: the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports 3.8 million fraud offences and cyber-enabled, or cyber-dependent crimes, and even across “traditional” crimes, the Metropolitan Police Service assesses that two ffths of robberies and 70 percent of theft are for mobile phones. Technological advances can also give rise to investigative opportunities, and policing productivity (and its perceived effectiveness in using technology) can act as a deterrent to criminality. Some patterns of crime are less easy to read. Violent offences recorded by police increased, but the Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests a decrease. Recorded sexual offences have markedly increased . More victims are fnding the courage to come forward and report crimes such as rape, domestic abuse and the sexual exploitation of children. The recognition of vulnerability in victimisation has become a powerful element shaping policing since the death of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter in 2007. Because of these changes, policing today requires a very different skillset. In 2003, armed with a knowledge of three crime types (burglary, theft and criminal damage), a constable knew how to approach 80 per cent of the demand coming their way. In 2023, in order to manage the same proportion of their work, this constable has to be competent across six disparate and wider categories of crime: theft, fraud (including online), violence with injury, stalking and harassment, public order and violence without injury. Non crime demand on officers equally broadened in scope during that time.

London: Home Office, 2023., 85p.

By Thiago R. Oliviera

This thesis draws on procedural justice theory and work into legal socialisation and legal cynicism to investigate the dynamics of public perceptions of trustworthiness and legitimacy of legal authority over time. Illustrating how longitudinal data can be theoretically fruitful in studies on public-police relations, I rely upon several analytic strategies that exploit panel data to examine attitudinal change over time. To examine the development of legitimacy judgements during adolescence, the mutual reproduction of different aspects of police trustworthiness over time, and the degree to which police contact leads to attitudinal change, I draw on data from three longitudinal surveys, which are representative of the adult population living in selected neighbourhoods in S˜ao Paulo, Brazil, adolescents who live in S˜ao Paulo, and the adult population living in Australia. At the heart of the thesis are four empirical papers. The first paper suggests that perceptions of overpolicing and underpolicing undermine legitimacy judgements and mutually reproduce each other over time, with implications for people’s recognition of the ruling power of the law. The second paper focuses on the development of legitimacy judgements among adolescents, and shows that exposure to neighbourhood and police violence may damage the process of healthy legal socialisation. The third paper examines whether police-citizen encounters are teachable moments, with the potential of leading to either positive or negative attitudinal change depending upon the perceived appropriateness of the interaction. The fourth paper addresses the issue of causality – an important gap in the procedural justice literature. Analysis suggests that aggressive police stops (e.g., at gunpoint) have a shortterm effect on perceived police fairness and a long-term effect on perceived overpolicing. Overall, results indicate that reliance on coercive policing strategies have several social costs, including public detachment and alienation from from the law. Adolescents who witness cases of police brutality show diminished development in legitimacy judgements, and the experience or expectation that police officers repeatedly intrude in the lives of people (overpolicing) and fail to ensure public safety (underpolicing) undermine people’s recognition of the state’s monopoly of violence. Yet, there is room for improvement. Perceptions of procedural fairness seem to enhance police trustworthiness and legitimacy. In sum, results indicate that people develop legal attitudes throughout the life course, but police (mis)conduct can lead to attitudinal change over time.

London: London School of Economics, 2022. 276p.

By: Thiago R Oliveira, Johnathan Jackson, Renan Theodoro de Olivieria

Objectives: Examine the legal socialization of adolescents aged 11 to 14 years in São Paulo, Brazil, a city characterized by a high prevalence of police violence and organized crime. Assess the extent to which exposure to neighborhood and police violence and aggression influence adolescents’ developmental trajectories of beliefs about the legitimacy of the law.

Methods: A four-wave longitudinal survey of 2005-born adolescents living in São Paulo was fielded annually between 2016 and 2019 and measured respondents’ perceptions of legal legitimacy, exposures to neighborhood and police violence, and police contact. Adopting a life- course approach, developmental trajectories are estimated using quadratic latent growth curve models.

Results: Witnessing police officers assaulting a suspect, being involuntarily stopped by the police, and seeing people selling drugs on the street are all negatively associated with changes in legal legitimacy beliefs. Exposure to gunshots, gun-carrying, or robberies are not associated with changes in legitimacy beliefs.

Conclusions: Indicating that adolescents in São Paulo are socialized through violence, exposure to police violence and proximity to organized crime could undermine their development of legal legitimacy beliefs. Exposure to other episodes of neighborhood violence might be too frequent in this context and do not distinguish adolescents’ developmental trajectories of legitimacy beliefs.

Preprint, 2023.

By Brandon L Garrett

In the past three years, there has been a surge of lawmaking concerning policing at the federal, state and local levels, including in response to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and subsequent racial justice movements across the country. Unwarranted uses of force, including deadly force, are all too common in America, particularly for Black men. Unfortunately, legal barriers often prevent meaningful accountability in response to a crisis of poor police practices and actions. Some recent legislation has at times taken a more comprehensive approach towards the challenge of addressing injustices and rethinking public safety, while other legislation takes a targeted approach, and still additional legislation has addressed a range of newer issues concerning policing, including deployment of technology, data collection, officer wellbeing, behavioral health diversion, and funding. To better understand lawmaking in response to calls for reform, at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice, we began tracking the introduction of policing-related legislation in Spring 2020.1 Our database, which has been updated continually, includes over 3,800 bills — federal, state, and local — across a wide range of topics related to law enforcement from 2018 through 2022. This is the largest such database assembled.2 It is available here: policing legislation.law.duke.edu. The sheer breadth of the topics and the activity is remarkable, although only about 10 percent of these laws have been enacted. Further, we develop how counting legislation does not fully capture trends where some single pieces of legislation include wide-ranging provisions. In addition, legislation regulating police can accomplish a range of objectives and goals, including laws designed to both limit and empower local police, sometimes in the same legislation. We plan to update the database over time to track this legislation and also examine additional prior years.

Durham, NC: Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, 2023. 18p.

By Cecilia Low-Weiner, Kailey Spencer, Benjamin Estep

Attempts to reform the criminal legal system are often driven by calls to fix the pervasive racial and ethnic disparities within it. However, these reforms, despite their intentions, can fail to improve or even exacerbate the same disparities they sought to fix. Since 2015, cities and counties across the country have joined the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to develop and implement data-driven initiatives to reduce jail populations and eliminate racial and ethnic disparities within these jails. While prior analyses by the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance (ISLG) highlight major strides toward the first goal of reducing overall jail populations, the findings were less encouraging regarding reducing disparities: in many SJC communities, despite often dramatic reductions in bookings and/or jail populations across all racial and ethnic groups, disparities have persisted or even increased among these groups. Reducing these disparities continues to be a challenge within SJC communities, indicating that the benefits of SJC’s strategies aren’t being felt equally among all racial and ethnic groups. This brief seeks to further explore the disparities highlighted in Measuring Progress—an online tool developed by ISLG that measures jail trends since SJC implementation—and set a course for further analyses. 

United States, Cuny Institute for State and Local Governance, 2022. 5pg

By Alexander F. Roehrkasse

Recent research has documented negative associations between children’s welfare and mobility and their exposure to neighborhood incarceration. But inequality in such exposure among children in the United States is poorly understood. This study links tract-level census data to administrative data on prison admissions to measure 37.8 million children’s exposure to neighborhood incarceration in 2008, by race/ethnicity and poverty status. The average poor Black or African American child lived in a neighborhood where 1 in 174 working-age adults was admitted to prison annually, more than twice the rate of neighborhood prison admission experienced by the average U.S. child. Residential segregation and the spatial concentration of incarceration combine to create significant ethnoracial and economic inequality in the neighborhood experiences of U.S. children.

United States, Sage Journals. 2021, 5pg

By Andrew Jordan and Taeho Kim

We study how civilian complaint investigators affect officer behavior in Chicago. We exploit quasi-random assignment of complaints to supervising investigators and use variation in whether supervisors tend to acquire sworn affidavits that substantiate the complaints. When the assigned investigator opens more investigations through obtaining affidavits, accused officers accumulate fewer complaints in the first three months of the investigation. We find that, prior to a scandal, assignment to high-investigation supervisors causes officers to make more arrests. However, this reverses after the scandal. Our findings suggest that police watchdogs can improve officer behavior in ordinary oversight environments but may backfire in heightened oversight environments.

Unpublished paper, 2022. 46p.

By Kasey Henricks and Ruben Ortiz

The Irrelevance of Innocence” is a case study of Chicago that focuses on parking tickets that are written under false pretenses. We leverage multiple data sets against one another to demonstrate that more than one in eight tickets over a six-year span were written under conditions when restrictions did not apply. Then, we situate these findings within a multilevel framework to answer three questions: (1) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black or Latinx residents? (2) Are errored tickets more likely to be issued by patrol officers as opposed to parking enforcement officers? and (3) Does ethnoracial composition moderate the relationship between ticketing authorities and errored tickets? The implications of our findings (1) quantitatively trouble the ontological assumptions of data that are defined from a policing standpoint and (2) underscore an adjudicative process that routinely sanctions drivers without cause.

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, March 2023. 19p.

By Human Impact Partners and Fresno Barrios Unidos

This research brief, created in partnership with Fresno Barrios Unidos, intentionally centers the experiences and perspectives of students, who are most directly impacted by school policing. We evaluate the health impacts of divesting from police contracts and investing in healing-centered practices and spaces on school campuses in the Fresno Unified School District (FUSD) in Fresno, California by exploring the public health research on school policing and its alternatives, and by incorporating student voices via interviews with Fresno students on ways to best support their health, safety, and learning at school.

FUSD has a critical opportunity to join the movement for student wellness by removing police from Fresno school campuses. Given the experiences of students we interviewed for this brief, the hundreds of public comments submitted to Fresno City Council during the budget cycle, and the available evidence on school practices that harm student health and well-being compared to those that promote student health and well-being, we recommend that FUSD:

End Fresno Unified School District’s contract with the Fresno Police Department

Remove all police from school campuses in Fresno

Invest the funding from the school police contract into student wellness and support, including trauma-informed practices, restorative and transformative justice processes, and health and wellness centers, working in collaboration with students and community organizations

With this report and with the years of organizing that came before it, FUSD now has an opportunity to hear and respond to student perspectives, to prioritize the health of students in the district, and to invest in services that support and care for students.

Oakland, CA: Human Impact Partners, 2021. 29p.

United States. Department Of Defense. Office Of The Inspector General

From the document: "This special report provides insight into the common cybersecurity weaknesses identified in DoD Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit reports and through our support to the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the Department of Justice on Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative investigations related to DoD contractor compliance with Federal cybersecurity requirements for protecting controlled unclassified information (CUI). CUI is not classified information but is information created or possessed by the Government that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls according to applicable laws, regulations, and Government-wide policies as defined in Executive Order 13526, 'Classified National Security Information,' December 29, 2009. From 2018 through 2023, the DoD OIG issued five audit reports focusing on DoD contractors' inconsistent implementation of Federal cybersecurity requirements for protecting CUI that are contained in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-171. Since 2022, the DoD OIG has provided support for five investigations under the Civil Cyber Fraud Initiative, which targets government contractors and grant recipients suspected of fraudulently attesting their compliance with the NIST SP 800-171 cybersecurity requirements. The common cybersecurity weaknesses identified in this special report provide DoD contracting officers with potential focus areas when assessing contractor performance and DoD contractors and grant recipients with potential focus areas before attesting to their compliance with NIST SP 800-171."

Department of Defense, Office of Inspector General, Report No. DODIG-'2024-'031. 24p.

Chatham House

From the webpage: "Cyberspace is now established as an important domain of national and international security. Until recently, informed and open discussion on the responsible use of offensive cyber capabilities has been constrained by high levels of secrecy around national strategies for their use. Insights as to how individual states view the utility of offensive cyber, and how they perceive and manage associated risks of escalation and conflict, have been hard to access. A lack of open debate around the limitations of cyber operations has also led to inaccurate portrayals of cyber capabilities as versatile 'silver bullet' solutions which can address a widening variety of security challenges. This paper offers an in-depth exploration of new or revised national cyber strategies, authorization mechanisms and legislation in nine NATO states, and draws on interviews with national cyber experts. As well as aiming to promote more informed debate on the key issues, it presents important policy recommendations to support the responsible use of offensive cyber and to contribute to the achievement of a secure cyberspace for all."

Royal Institute Of International Affairs Skingsley, Charlotte . 2023. 37p.

By Toner, Helen; Ji, Jessica; Bansemer, John; Lim, Lucy; Painter, Chris; Corley, Courtney D.; Whittlestone, Jess; Botvinick, Matt; Rodriguez, Mikel; Shankar Siva Kumar, Ram

From the document: "AI is experiencing a moment of profound change, capturing unprecedented public attention and becoming increasingly sophisticated. As AI becomes more powerful, and in some cases more general in its capabilities, it may become capable of posing novel risks in domains such as bioweapons development, cybersecurity, and beyond. Two features of the current AI landscape are especially challenging from a policy perspective: the rapid pace at which research is advancing, and the recent development of more general-purpose AI systems, which--unlike most AI systems, which are narrowly focused on a single task--can be adapted to many different use cases. These two elements add new layers of difficulty to existing AI ethics and safety problems. In July 2023, Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) and Google DeepMind hosted a virtual roundtable to discuss the implications and governance of the advancing AI research frontier, particularly with regard to general-purpose AI models. The objective of the roundtable was to help bridge the gap between the state of the current conversation and the reality of AI technology at the research frontier, which has potentially widespread implications for both national security and society at large."

Georgetown University. Walsh School Of Foreign Service. Center For Security And Emerging Technology . 2023. 23p.

By Magdalena Domínguez

Worldwide, gang proliferation is fought mostly with tough punishment strategies such as sweeps. In this paper, I study their causal effect on crime for arrested individuals and known peers following a difference-in-differences strategy. I also take advantage of the network structure I retrieved to assess peer effects and identify key players. I perform such an analysis with novel administrative data from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, where Latin gangs expanded rapidly and where a stark policy change occurred. Results show significant reductions in crimes of arrested individuals and their peers, particularly in crimes against the person. The areas of the sweeps benefit from improvements in crime, health and education. I further conduct an innovative counterfactual policy exercise comparing sweep outcomes with theoretically predicted crime reductions when removing key players. This exercise indicates that sweeps could have achieved a 50% larger reduction in criminal activity had key players been removed. In this way, a network analysis provides insights on how to improve policy design.

IEB Working Paper 2021/03. University of Barcelona, Institute of Economics, 2021. 55p.

By Taryn A. Merkl PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2021 With a foreword by Eric H. Holder Jr

The protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing last year has forced a nationwide reckoning with a wide range of deep-rooted racial inequities — in our economy, in health care, in education, and even in our democracy — that undermine the American promise of freedom and justice for all. That tragic incident provoked widespread demonstrations and stirred strong emotions from people across our nation.

While our state and local governments wrestle with how to reimagine relationships between police and the communities they serve, the Justice Department has long been hamstrung in its ability to mete out justice when people’s civil rights are violated.

The Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction made it a federal crime to deprive someone of their constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity, a provision now known as Section 242. Today, when state or local law enforcement are accused of misconduct, the federal government is often seen as the best avenue for justice — to conduct a neutral investigation and to serve as a backstop when state or local investigations falter. I’m proud that the Justice Department pursued more Section 242 cases under my leadership than under any other attorney general before or since.

But due to Section 242’s vague wording and a series of Supreme Court decisions that raised the standard of proof needed for a civil rights violation, it’s often difficult for federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement accountable using this statute.

This timely report outlines changes to Section 242 that would clarify its scope, making it easier to bring cases and win convictions for civil rights violations of these kinds. Changing the law would allow for charges in cases where prosecutors might currently conclude that the standard of proof cannot be met. Perhaps more important, it attempts to deter potential future misconduct by acting as a nationwide reminder to law enforcement and other public officials of the constitutional limits on their authority.

The statutory changes recommended in this proposal are carefully designed to better protect civil rights that are already recognized. And because Black, Latino, and Native Americans are disproportionately victimized by the kinds of official misconduct the proposal addresses, these changes would advance racial justice.

This proposal would also help ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. I have immense regard for the vital role that police play in all of America’s communities and for the sacrifices that they and their families are too often called to make on behalf of their country. It is in great part for their sake — and for their safety — that we must seek to build trust in all communities.

We need to send a clear message that the Constitution and laws of the United States prohibit public officials from engaging in excessive force, sexual misconduct, and deprivation of needed medical care. This proposal will better allow the Justice Department to pursue justice in every appropriate case, across the country.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2021. 26p.

By Michael German and Kaylana Mueller-Hsia

The failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other law enforcement agencies to anticipate and prepare for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by far-right insurrectionists has elicited proposals to expand the bureau’s authority to investigate domestic terrorism.

The FBI already received expansive new powers after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and its current guidelines place few limits on agents’ ability to search broadly for potential threats. Confusion about the current scope of the bureau’s powers is understandable, however, as FBI leaders have regularly misstated their authorities in public testimony.

These misstatements deflect FBI accountability by focusing overseers on filling perceived gaps in its authority rather than examining how the bureau uses, misuses, or fails to use the tools it already has.

The real problem is not that the FBI’s authorities are too narrow, but rather that they are overbroad and untethered to evidence of wrongdoing. After 9/11, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reduced or eliminated reasonable evidentiary predicates to justify broader collection and sharing of Americans’ personal information. This new domestic intelligence process replaced evidence-driven investigations of suspected criminal activities with mass data collection and untriaged reporting of speculative harms unsupported by facts. The sheer volume of threat reporting resulting from this system suffocates effective intelligence analysis, flooding law enforcement leaders with thousands of specious threat warnings a day. In addition to unjustified invasions of privacy, the high rate of false alarms that this process produces naturally dulls the response, and the disconnect from evidence of criminality opens the door to bias-driven law enforcement responses. As they have in the past, the FBI’s unbridled authorities have resulted in abuses of civil rights and civil liberties without improving its ability to identify and mitigate real threats.

Misinformation from FBI officials has confused the policy debate. When senators investigating the January 6 attack asked Jill Sanborn, then the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, whether FBI agents monitored the multitude of threats made in public forums prior to the attack, Sanborn replied, “It’s not within our authorities.”

Sanborn claimed that the FBI cannot collect information involving First Amendment–protected activities without a predicated investigation or a tip from a community member or law enforcement officer. These statements are inaccurate, yet they featured prominently in the Senate’s report on the security, planning, and response failures regarding the attack on the Capitol.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, 2022. 21p.