Lessons from the street
By David Bornstein

Forty-five years ago, Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote that urban streets are safest when neighbors keep many "eyes on the street," because locals are always in the best position to spot and report unusual activity. Today, in New York City, many taxi drivers (of which there are 12,000) have been issued free cell phones to report street crimes. And the police department has initiated the "Cop-Shot" program, which offers $10,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest of individuals who have shot New York police officers. All these approaches are based on the same two assumptions: First, the knowledge necessary to combat street crime is local and widely dispersed. Law enforcement officers are not everywhere; but people are. Second, people need mechanisms that allow them to easily connect with law enforcement agencies, as well as incentives that encourage them to use their knowledge in society’s interest.

Of course, terrorism differs from street crime in that with terrorism planning occurs away from plain view. But terrorists cannot hide from everybody. They wire money around the world; they have families and friends; they purchase train, bus and airline tickets; they rent cars, book hotel rooms, dial in for pizza. Potentially valuable early warning information might therefore come from hotel clerks, travel agents, bank tellers, pizza delivery men -- ordinary citizens who are globally dispersed. Indeed, the terrorists who committed the attack on the World Trade Center, according to early reports, came from five or six different countries, received financing from others, and lived for a time in the U.S. and Germany. Did a German bartender serve one of them a beer and hear something important? Did an American pizza delivery man see something strange? Clues to the WTC attack are spread across the globe, but our tools to gather them are not. Interpol, the global police agency, has a budget of just $25 million. And the CIA and FBI, even with thousands of operatives or officers, cannot deploy them everywhere.

The highly-planned World Trade Center attack demonstrates that the job of preserving global safety demands a global solution. What is needed is a global immune system headquartered by a new permanent institution -- a World Protection Organization -- which would focus on combating the most dangerous forms of terrorism. This organization would cross national, ethnic and religious lines, amassing and coordinating intelligence from countless eyes around the world. One can imagine such an organization initiating a global equivalent to the Cop-Shot program: a Global Anti-Terrorism Program, capitalized with hundreds of millions of dollars from nation states, offering rewards, anonymity, witness protection and rights of citizenship, to anyone in the world who provides credible and verifiable information that leads to the arrest of a terrorist, or prevention of attack. The program could work in conjunction with a widely-circulated Global Most Wanted List.

Nations are reluctant to share intelligence. Building the global infrastructure to preserve world safety would require delicate relationship-building across nations and high-level diplomacy over years, backed up by economic incentives and punishments. Such an effort would have to be championed by talented institution builders with the ability and drive to overcome the practical obstacles and inevitable resistance that will arise. The U.S. is now in a position to initiate this process, but it must not dominate it. Success will require an unprecedented level of international cooperation. In the long-run, like the European Coal and Steel Community, which was created in post-WW II Europe to preserve lasting peace and which eventually evolved into the EU, the World Protection Organization would promote global stability by requiring nations to work side-by-side in the interests of collective safety. With terrorist nuclear or germ warfare attacks now far more plausible than last week, we must waste no time building it.

David Bornstein, a graduate of NYU’s Journalism Department, is the author of The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank (U. of Chicago Press), and is currently completing a book on Global Social Entrepreneurship, to be published by Oxford University Press.