National capabilities for terrorism prevention — options other than traditional law-enforcement action to respond to the risk of individual radicalization to violence — are relatively limited, with most relying on local or non-government efforts and only a subset receiving federal support, according to a report from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC), a federally funded research and development center operated by the RAND Corporation for the Department of Homeland Security.
To address the gaps in capability, the most effective path for the federal government would be to strengthen, broaden and sustain this local and non-governmental capacity, researchers found. But such efforts will be hampered because past counterterrorism and countering-violent-extremism (CVE) efforts have significantly damaged trust in some communities. New terrorism prevention initiatives will need to respond to concerns that those efforts infringed on constitutionally protected activities of individuals who had not broken any laws. To be effective, approaches must be acceptable to the communities they are intended to protect.