DHS to fund local police counterterrorism squads

During a visit Friday to the Los Angeles port area, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff said he was proposing dedicated federal funding to allow local police departments to beef up counterterrorism squads. Chertoff said his plan to pay the salaries of counterterrorism officers would allow the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies to hire more. “For international terrorism, the federal government has the major tools and responsibility to detect terrorism. But when you talk about homegrown terrorism … we are not going to uncover that in all likelihood with spies and satellites,” he said. “That is going to be uncovered by police who are trained to look for certain things and then go and disrupt something before it happens.”

Chertoff also defended the federal government’s decision this week to reduce antiterrorism funding for the Los Angeles-Long Beach region, saying the nation has spent more than $13 billion on homeland security since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Chertoff said the proposed 10 percent cut from last year’s funding levels was necessary because of demands from communities across the country. “There’s only one pie, and the way we’ve decided to slice the pie is to put most of the money where most of the risk is,” Chertoff said during comments in the Port of Los Angeles. “But I’ve got to balance and look at the big picture. Los Angeles gets the second-most amount of money to New York, but it’s also right that San Diego, Las Vegas, and dare I say, Oklahoma City, gets a reasonable amount of money commensurate to risk.”