From paper trails to fusion centers: How 9/11 transformed policing in Las Vegas

Terry Hulse knew when he watched the horror of airliners crashing into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, that the months ahead were going to be challenging for the FBI in Las Vegas.

“It’s going to be all-out boots on the ground,” said Hulse, a Henderson resident who was the assistant special-agent-in-charge of the Vegas FBI office at the time.

The FBI’s Las Vegas Special Agent-in-Charge at the time, Grant Ashley, knew the same. Both were shocked by the magnitude of the tragedy.

“I was not a big terrorism guy at all as far as being an expert or anything, but I just said to my wife, ‘This has got to be bin Laden,” Ashley said. “There’s no way airplanes like that, even smaller aircraft, are going to be hitting the World Trade Center.”

That morning, the men mobilized the Las Vegas employees of the FBI to work with the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement across Nevada to investigate the hijackers and their connections to Las Vegas.

The work was fruitful.

They documented the terrorists’ stays at small, off-Strip hotels and what Ashley described as multiple summit meetings between some of the terrorists in Las Vegas just a month prior to the attacks.

The investigation at the time was heavily dependent on old-school gumshoe police work as opposed to what investigators would turn to today: technologically advanced fusion centers with hundreds of camera feeds or automated license plate readers to document the groups’ movement in town.

In 2001, the terrorists stayed at hotels without surveillance cameras or computerized motel registration records, so police had to knock on doors, secure handwritten hotel registration records, and rely on financial and cell phone data to track the terrorists’ actions.

“We were on mostly a paperwork trail back then,” Hulse recalled of the investigation.

Changes in Policing

Alex del Carmen, dean of Westfield State University College of Professional Studies in Massachusetts, has been a criminologist for 28 years and extensively studied the impacts of the 9/11 attacks on policing across the nation.

He said 9/11 was the most important event in American history when it comes to transforming law enforcement in America.

In the three years following the attack, both the Department of Homeland Security and the position of Director of National Intelligence were created. The number of joint terrorism task forces jumped from 35 to more than 100 in the United States, and policing technology hubs, usually referred to as fusion centers, sprouted across the nation.

“Doctrinally, the patrol officer was reconceived as an intelligence collector — that’s the foundation of intelligence-led policing,” del Carmen said.

There were also huge increases in federal grant funding for police and the creation of the 1033 surplus program, which allowed for the U.S. military to transfer excess military equipment from what is now the Department of War to local authorities.

The 9/11 Commission’s findings on radio failures during the attacks prompted police agencies to develop advanced, “interoperable” communication systems in which public safety agencies can share information with one another in real time, del Carmen said.

“The legal wall between criminal and intelligence investigators came down, which is both the reform the moment demanded and the source of nearly every civil liberties objection that followed,” del Carmen said.

Metropolitan Police Upgrades

The Metropolitan Police Department has implemented huge technological upgrades and made the sharing of information with other law enforcement agencies a continual, top priority when it comes to terrorism, according to recent interviews with Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill and Undersheriff Andrew Walsh. Walsh is a Staten Island native and former New York City police officer who worked in the city from 1992 to 1998.

“You are bound by profession and oath,” he said, adding “it definitely struck home for me.”

Walsh said the terrorism threat is complex and constantly changing. For example, the 9/11 attacks were years in the making and planned by sophisticated operatives. Now, he said police see terrorism threats often coming from perhaps one or two people who are coordinating online over a short period of time.

“Those things don’t take much,” Walsh said. “You don’t have to go overseas, live in a cave for three years and get radicalized in order to carry out a terrorist attack. We’ve had juveniles in our community pledge their loyalty to ISIS while never leaving their home.”

Metro’s Fusion Watch and Drone Operations Center is now considered a marvel of policing technology. Dozens of workers monitor screens showing real-time feeds from cameras around the Las Vegas Valley at the center. More than 300 police cameras, many of them license plate readers, capture images of license plates and vehicles, while other cameras provide live feeds at busy intersections across Las Vegas.

Police also rely on images from more than 300 cameras in place via private companies, apartment complexes and neighborhood watches to help them solve crimes.

In January, police announced a drone program that uses a fleet of 60 drones to track suspects and help solve crimes. This is a far cry from September 2001, when the most extensive camera monitoring systems available to law enforcement were mostly found at large Strip casinos — the types of properties that the terrorists didn’t frequent, according to Ashley and Hulse.

Metro’s Reality-Based Training Center in the eastern Las Vegas Valley enhances partnerships with other law enforcement via shared training throughout the region, Walsh said.

McMahill said the Southern Nevada’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has evolved into an efficient operation that is continually facing unique threats.

“The world we live in today, the terrorism that I investigated as a young guy on the Police Department is far different than the way we look at it today,” he said. “You have left-wing ideologies, right-wing ideologies, combined with hate groups that we’ve never seen come together before. Never.”

For example, on the morning of Feb. 19, just outside Boulder City, police said Dawson Maloney, a student at Albany Law School in upstate New York, attempted to ram the Nissan Sentra he was driving into a substation. It is not entirely clear what he was intending to do, but the case was described as terrorism related, and the plan appeared to be thwarted when he slammed into a set of industrial wire reels, police said, and then he shot and killed himself.

Police said he had multiple guns, a trove of ammunition, two flame-throwers and other explosive materials in his possession.

McMahill said the Terrorism Task Force relies on extensive communications and shared information between federal, state and local police agencies. He said this is exemplified in the July case of Allison Howlett, 36, who is charged with making threats of terrorism in what authorities allege was a planned mass shooting in Henderson. Police said Howlett, who has denied wrongdoing, was in possession of a stockpile of weapons.

McMahill said teamwork across agencies led to the arrest.

“Henderson has an individual within our Fusion Center as well as our Joint Terrorism Task Force with the FBI,” he said. “Any one of these things that happen in Southern Nevada, it doesn’t matter which city — they all have Fusion Center opportunities. The relationship with the feds and the use of the systems to conduct these investigations. … Its worked really seamlessly. I am really proud of them.”

Looking Back on the Investigation

Ashley and Hulse are proud of the work the law enforcement team did in Las Vegas on the Sept. 11 attacks at a time when law enforcement didn’t have the technology that authorities have today.

In the fall of 2001, the FBI was also managing a complex Clark County Board of Commissioners corruption case, and the office would soon be taxed by a spree of anthrax threats.

“People were still robbing banks,” Hulse said. “Fugitives were still running through town and they needed to be arrested. People were still trying to scam people out of money. … So it was very, very rewarding. It was hell at the time, but I didn’t crash and burn and we got everything handled.”

Hulse said the Las Vegas Valley offered law enforcement hundreds of tips a day from the public, with some placing the terrorists at a Strip Club or at a Strip resort. None of those tips were credible. There was also no evidence to support theories that the terrorists were scoping out Hoover Dam or the Stratosphere, which was in close proximity to a motel where one of the terrorists stayed.

Ashley said the terrorists did law enforcement a favor because they “weren’t operating under aliases. They were operating under their true names. The bureau identified it very quickly as to who the involved people were.”

There was a pattern to the terrorists’ behavior, Ashley said. They would fly from the East Coast to the West Coast while scoping out airport security, airline procedures for cockpit access, flight attendant behavior and the volume of passengers per flight, then backtrack to Las Vegas.

It was a stop of convenience with many direct flights and offered at least some anonymity given the volume of tourists coming and going daily, Ashley said.

The 9/11 attacks highlighted serious needs for improvement for law enforcement: shortfalls in communications, technology and the sharing of information across agencies.

Ashley said 9/11 also prompted a change in mindset for law enforcement in that local beat cops are some of the most important weapons when it comes to stopping terrorism. They are on the ground daily, gathering information and interacting with people who might be plotting an attack.

“There were quantum moves forward,” Ashley said. “We created a stronger net for gathering information, turning that information into useful intelligence and, most importantly, sharing it broadly so it can be used.”

Contact Glenn Puit at gpuit@reviewjournal.com.