Counterinsurgency against the gangs of Salinas

Washington Post:

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Since February, combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been advising Salinas police on counterinsurgency strategy, bringing lessons from the battlefield to the meanest streets in an American city.

"This is our surge," said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. "When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas."

In fact, the cavalry arrived in civvies, carrying laptops rather than M-16s and software instead of mortars. In this case, the most valuable military asset turned out to be an idea: Change the dynamic in the community, and victory can follow.

"It's a little laboratory," said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students, mostly naval officers taking time between deployments to pick up a master's degree. Their effort in Salinas counts as extracurricular and is necessarily voluntary, given the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders.

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... The thrust of the plan relies on winning the trust of people. In Salinas, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, the uniformed forces patrolling "are still viewed as an occupying force," said Police Chief Louis Fetherolf.

Gangs and police compete in the aftermath of gang shootings, where witnesses in a position to see everything share nothing with police. Their silence is so absolute that after an August killing, a department spokesman told the local paper that police were "absolutely begging" for witnesses.

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The military's software tracks crimes and links suspects and their associates by social, geographic and family connections. "It looked pretty wazoo," said Fetherolf, impressed.

Certain adjustments were required: "Commander's Intent" became "Mayor's Intent." But parallels leapt out immediately to Maj. James M. Few, who on smallwarsjournal.com wrote: "The frightening realization is that I've walked this dog before."

Few, a veteran of three Iraq tours, said in an interview that he sensed in the grievances of poor Latinos some of the air of disenfranchisement Sunnis felt toward the Iraq government dominated by Shiites. In a visit to the Salinas courthouse, he watched a gang member charged with fighting who appeared almost eager to get to jail.

"What was strange was the look on his face was very similar to a bunch of the insurgents we'd captured" in Diyala province, Few said. "Stone-cold face. Eyes are very deep set and very cold. It's one of defiance, almost."

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To secure Salinas, the mayor wants more boots on the ground, though finding the money to hire 84 officers became more problematic after local voters recently rejected a one-cent rise in the sales tax, billed as "a penny for peace." More officers would mean less dashing from call to call and more time to demonstrate that police work for residents.

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For a counterinsurgency effort to be successful you have to find a way to get an adequate force to space ratio. More police is one way to do so. Neighborhood watch programs might be effective in some neighborhoods, but it does not appear such a program would be effective in Salinas.

The computer programs will help the police develop a pattern analysis that will enable them to focus their efforts. I think the mayor is on to something. Many of the principals of counterinsurgency warfare came fromt eh study of gangs.