In August of 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department pioneered a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) program that enabled local,
state and federal law enforcement agencies to, for the first time, gather and share information about suspicious activities
with a possible nexus to terrorism. The SAR program established an information platform at the local level that previously
didn’t exist and had the potential to connect many of the country’s police departments, thus shifting local law enforcement’s
approach to terrorism from a reactive to a preventative model. It also essentially flipped the age-old paradigm in which information
was pushed from the federal to the local level. Now local police departments are valuable players in the information sharing
process and are increasingly relied on to provide their federal partners with an accurate picture of what is happening at
the local level.
Keywords Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) - Institutionalization - Standardization - Measurement - Paradigm Shift