Master of the Manhunt
Sixteen months ago Charles Moose found himself one of the world's highest profile police officers in the world, leading the largest manhunt in American history: the investigation into the Washington sniper attacks. 13 people were shot and ten died in those three weeks in October.
Charles Moose has since produced a book about it, Three weeks in October, written to dispel the "myth" of "bickering and un-cooperation" between different American security departments. It was necessary for him to quit the police to write the book, and it was apparent when I spoke to him that it was something he felt quite strongly about.
The attacks themselves came in the wake of a country scared by September 11th and wary of anniversary attacks. Suddenly people were being killed at random; no-one knew who was doing it or why, but "it seemed linked." At the same time media attention was constant: "because there's so much of it even if you didn't watch television you'd pick up on it". When asked if the intensity of media coverage of this kind of event in the US was disproportionate, he replied: "if you look at the crime figures and the gun numbers we have much more, so in that sense [it] isn't". Yet in that same period that ten people died at the hands of the Washington sniper, 18 more people were killed in the same Washington area: the point was that fear of terrorism sells newspapers.
Media intrusion into the case had not helped the investigation in the slightest, since Moose suggested, people who commit these types of crime may do so for the attention. "Copycat" killers were another fear for Moose as Chief of Police.
On larger issues, particularly the current US focus on external security, Moose said Europe and other areas of the world have dealt with terrorism for years without resorting to the panic America had experienced. He admitted concern and disappointment with the way the US had so far dealt with its security issues, and commented on the fact that British security was not the "glaring eye-sore" encountered back in Washington.
Regarding the coming election and its focus on security Moose said he hoped that President Bush would not win, and hoped that the electorate was sophisticated enough to realise that: "President Bush was doing a shoddy job before Iraq and he's been doing a shoddy job since". Yet he did express worry that Kerry, the Democrats' leading candidate, would not be strong enough to win the next election, an election so far reduced to "sound bites" about war and security, typical of politics these days.
When talking about the war, his obvious contempt for it came across. He said he considered war an event in which "both sides had a reasonable chance of winning," and that in both Iraq and Afghanistan there had been "no reasonable doubt".
When I asked why there is a continuing focus on external security and very little apparent action on internal security, he replied: "It's the easy answer: lets find some people with a different religion and [who] look different."
In reference to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, he added: "It's no fun chasing after someone who looks like the all-American boy."
Perhaps this is an indictment of the ongoing American obsession with pinning any threat outside themselves, as they continue to ignore the fact that someone like McVeigh can "get pissed off enough by the governments policies" to do what he did.
One of the main aspects to his book is the story of Charles Moose's own fight against racism within the police force. Asked whether the police force and other public institutions were still institutionally racist, Moose is emphatic - "definitely" - stressing that with regard to promotion and the internal system of governance within public bodies there is a deeply engrained bias against people from different backgrounds.
Although better than its ever been, the situation is "still nowhere near good enough". A major issue highlighted in the police force as a problem on racial grounds was continued racial profiling, in which specific racial groups are picked out for greater attention. Moose agrees in no way with the targeting of black people, for example as drug dealers, simply because their community has a slightly higher incidence of drug usage. In his words: "it doesn't exactly mean that just because they use it they're flying over to Iran and bringing it back." He admits to finding the prejudice tough; he'd been asked to defend police officers from accusations of assault and "could understand why [victims] were pissed off."
When I ask him again whether the coverage for the sniper attacks in Washington had been excessive, Moose recalls that for the amount of public fear generated, it was. "Their kids couldn't do after school activities" and they couldn't even go to the petrol station.
Asked how he thought home security could be improved Moose is clear on the value of education and common sense: "Nothing fancy, just people being responsible. If someone leaves a bag on a chair in a restaurant, go and tell the staff about it, kind of thing." Maybe that's the answer we're all looking for. "Eventually you might be able to afford enough of us [security forces] that you could just walk around in a daze, but what'd be the point in that?"
I asked Moose if he would return to the police force; although he would like to, his wife was concerned about the stress of being criticised for making decisions. Yet from his appearance during interview, he must have been pretty good at it. If not the police, maybe he would go into politics? Moose stresses the importance of a politician proving his worth in public service, and suggests that presidential candidate Wesley Clark had not done so, having held no public office. The same surely could not be said of Charles Moose: if my encounter with him is anything to by, he would certainly have my vote.
19th Feb 2004