Homeland Security: Institution Building and Agency Cooperation

This research investigates the development of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its efforts to have local law enforcement departments integrate the DHS goals into their agency missions. The DHS has evolved into a homeland security societal sector with partners at the federal, state, and local levels. As such, the societal sector requires the cooperation of state and local jurisdictions to detect, prevent, and recover from future terrorist attacks. Specifically, utilizing the concepts of police culture, bureaucracy, and neoinstitutional theory this research seeks to determine whether police are willingly cooperating and participating in the formation of the homeland security societal sector. Of particular interest is how successfully the DHS is in having its goals institutionalized by state and local police. To determine this, 36 state and local law enforcement agencies were asked to participate in this study with a total of five participating. Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews carried out with those agencies and a review of training records for each agency. Analysis of homeland security-related training data collected from the Law Enforcement Training Agency (LETA) was also conducted in order to determine how well the DHS goals were being institutionalized throughout the study state. Findings of this research reveal a societal sector in which some agencies are resisting institutionalization indicating only partial success for the DHS to get its goals adopted and institutionalized into police behavior