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On Wednesday, December 10, 2014 START Director Gary LaFree and Executive Director William Braniff briefed current Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson on research projects funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Science & Technology Directorate.
“The Secretary’s confidence in our research has already provided us with several opportunities to help inform law enforcement training and counterterrorism policy formation, and those opportunities will continue to multiply,” said Braniff. “This is a very important part of our ethos, to improve the science-based understanding of terrorism and counterterrorism, and then to help professionals put that information to use in the real world.”
With the help of each project’s respective research teams, LaFree and Braniff briefed Secretary Johnson on Clark McCauley’s work on radicalization, Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS), Jarret Brachman’s work on extremist use of social media, Gina Ligon’s work on ISIL, and Steve Weine’s work on countering violent extremism in Minneapolis and St. Paul, all projects funded by DHS or the Department of Justice.
Additionally, a DHS Science and Technology representative briefed self-funded research on terrorist disengagement from violence which was conducted by Dr. John Horgan at the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies. In response to questions from the Secretary and his staff, LaFree and Braniff also drew on work from the American Terrorism Study and the Extremist Crime Database.
Both Secretary Johnson and DHS Undersecretary for Science and Technology Dr. Reginald Brothers expressed personal interest in hearing more about countering violent extremism. Due to the Secretary’s busy schedule, the meeting was a long time in the making, but well worth it for START’s representatives. Braniff most enjoyed getting to connect with a broader audience at DHS.
“By far the best part about briefing the Secretary was when he asked his staff to make sure we were able to brief the leadership of the various DHS components, and to gain access to state and local homeland security audiences,” Braniff said. “That is quite a third-party endorsement; it speaks volumes for the quality of the work done by our researchers, and more personally, it means we didn’t flub the opportunity!”