As the nation's new suspicious activity reporting fusion centers come online this year, observers are beginning to notice a major problem: there is a significant gap between the demand for and supply of experts able to train local police officers who will be charged with the difficult task of sniffing out terror suspects in their communities.

Unmet demand means lucrative teaching and training appointments for those who are able to fashion themselves as CT experts. But it also seems to mean that local police forces are taking what they can get in terms of tutelage, even if the curricula on offer are inaccurate or unhelpful.

According to an NPR story, Army Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, a career intelligence officer who heads the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, "has been watching with alarm the phenomenon of officials with limited experience selling themselves as terrorism instructors."

"You've got a lot of individuals who are not academically qualified to be instructing in these venues, and more importantly they are speaking with authority, which empowers the audience with knowledge that is not necessarily accurate," said Sawyer, adding that these short courses tend to stereotype Muslims in a way that just isn't helpful as officials redouble their efforts to fight homegrown terrorism and radical Islam."

A more detailed interview study by Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze, published in the Washington Monthly, highlights the mentality of some of the (mostly) men making the rounds training local law enforcement. For instance, "the trainer Joe Bierly, based in Riverside County, California … doesn’t think American law enforcement is ready for the next terrorist attack. At the end of the day, he said, the question is this: 'Can you run fifteen yards on a blood-slicked floor, take aim, and still hit the target?'”

"Richard Hughbank, another counterterrorism trainer, is a fourth-generation combat veteran on his father’s side. 'Honestly, I kinda fell into it,' Hughbank told [Stalcup and Craze] when [they] interviewed him in November 2009.'“I think most of us did.'”

Another self-made CT trainer, John Giduck writes, “'I think the first thing we need to do is pass federal legislation exempting law enforcement from any civil or criminal prosecution, any liability at all, for what they do if there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.' … 'In attempting to prepare the American psyche for the worst possible terrorist act—the taking and killing of children—we must all shed the veil of civility and luxury in which we conduct our lives.'”

"Despite their different backgrounds, the counterterrorism trainers [Stalcup and Craze] interviewed have a remarkably similar worldview. It is one of

total, civilizational war—a conflict against Islam that involves everyone, without distinction between combatant and noncombatant, law enforcement and military. 'Being politically correct inhibits you,' Hughbank said. 'I know Islam better than my own religion. Some things need to be called a spade.'”

Stalcup and Craze's poster-child for this mentality is Sam Kharoba, who they suggest is perhaps most open with his disdain for Islam because he believes his Jordanian heritage excuses him from charges of political incorrectness. "'Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace,' he [says], 'is either ignorant or flat out lying.' … 'The best way to handle these people is what I call legal harassment.'"

Many experienced and thoughtful law enforcement officers and intelligence officials are not buying into the trainers self-proclaimed expertise, though. Interviewed by NPR, Sam Rascoff, "a law professor at New York University who used to run intelligence analysis at the NYPD," said such training curriculum is "'not the kind of information that is going to make our cops or federal officials smarter about terrorism. That's the sort of stuff that is going to paint the wrong sort of picture and cause them to go looking in the wrong places for the wrong sorts of things.'"

“'The former military guys [working as trainers] are always looking at this thing from a battlefield perspective,' explains Jack Cloonan, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who worked in the Osama bin Laden special unit from 1996 to 2002. 'They are always looking at it as a U.S. military operation. But what does that have to do with sitting in the Bronx? Or trying to blend into society to carry out an attack? It’s just not related.'”

"And yet these trainers reach a considerable swath of law enforcement personnel. Of the half-dozen instructors [Stahlcup and Craze] spoke to, most estimated that they had individually trained between 10,000 and 20,000 students over the course of the past five to six years. There are about 800,000 police officers in total in the United States."

"The very idea of integrating local police into the nation’s counterterror intelligence efforts is a subject of debate among security experts. People at the highest level of law enforcement and intelligence—to say nothing of civil liberties groups—have concerns about the strategy. While the premise is perhaps intuitively appealing […]one danger is that the system will be flooded with bad leads. An increase in incidents like the mistaken arrests on Alligator Alley would only degrade police work, obscure real threats, and spoil relations between America’s cops and America’s Muslims—who have thus far volunteered some of the most fruitful leads in preventing domestic terror attacks."

"This is a civil liberties issue, but it is also a matter of police effectiveness. As Bill Bratton, who headed up the police departments of both New York and Los Angeles, explains, 'There is a real risk as you educate people that you do not, in fact, educate—whether it is law enforcement officers or community—to the degree that you misinform or create a fear or bias that should not be there.'”

"Indeed, having a bunch of ill-trained local cops sleuth around for jihadists could jeopardize the very counterterrorism efforts the government is supposed to be conducting. For one, it is likely to generate a lot of white noise, forcing analysts to spend precious time sifting through useless information. It could also 'dry up important sources of information, warns Matthew Waxman, an associate professor of law at Columbia University, who has written extensively on the role of local and state law enforcement in counterterrorism."

"In counterterrorism, as in most areas of intelligence and law enforcement, vital information often comes from those closest to the suspected perpetrators—from neighbors, friends, even family members. It was an anonymous handwritten note from an Arab American in Lackawanna, New York, a small city outside Buffalo, that led the FBI to arrest six men accused of comprising a sleeper terrorist cell in that city in 2002. In another case last fall in Portland, Oregon, a tip from the Muslim community led federal authorities to arrest in a sting operation a nineteen-year-old Somali-born American for intent to set off a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Ham-handed and overly aggressive behavior by local police toward the Muslim community could break the trust necessary for this kind of information to flow."

"Paradoxically, the best thing the police can do in the struggle against terrorism may be to not do 'counterterrorism' but simply perform the duties they are already mandated to perform: serve the communities they live in, keep their eyes open for suspicious activities of all sorts, and build the links that result in tip-offs like the one that led to the arrest of the men in Lackawanna."