State and local police never report many of their encounters with people on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist, the government’s chief watchdog said Monday, blaming the feds for failing to give better guidance on how to use the watchlist.
Police in every state, the District of Columbia and four tribal governments reported encounters with people on the watchlist from 2019 to 2024.
But the Government Accountability Office, the investigative division of Congress, asked 21 police officials and more than half of them said their officers don’t always call to report the encounters to the FBI, even when they should.
The watchlist, better known as the Terrorism Screening Dataset, contains people the government has confirmed to be terrorists, suspected of terrorism or associated with terrorism suspects. They are dubbed “known or suspected terrorists,” or KSTs in Washington-speak.
When nonfederal police make a traffic stop, for example, they run an identity through their systems and the watchlist is supposed to be queried as part of the National Crime Information Center check. If there’s a potential match, the officer receives an alert and is told to contact the FBI’s Threat Screening Center to confirm the identity.
But 12 out of 21 state, local and tribal police officials asked by GAO said their officers don’t consistently make those calls to the screening center “in instances where it was warranted.”
“Officers may not have seen the instructions in the NCIC automated message or may not have been familiar with the purpose of the watchlist and therefore may not consistently and appropriately report encounters,” GAO said in the report.
That means the screening center may not be getting good data on who’s being encountered, and it “may limit the usefulness of terrorist watchlist information for investigations,” GAO investigators said.
The FBI uses the feedback on encounters for its own national security intelligence operations, GAO said. So unreported encounters may be depriving the bureau of valuable data points.
“While terrorist watchlist encounters are low-frequency events for individual nonfederal law enforcement entities, their high-risk nature makes it critical for FBI to provide those entities with the appropriate information for their preparedness in managing such encounters,” GAO said.
The new audit is a public version of a report completed last year.
GAO said that original version contained the total number of encounters from state, local and tribal police from 2019 to 2024, but the FBI said that information was too sensitive to be released. The FBI also directed GAO to omit the 10 jurisdictions with the most encounters.
GAO did report that 2,198 non-federal agencies recorded encounters during that time.
In interviews with 26 officials from those entities, half told GAO their officers weren’t adequately prepared for the encounters.
Sixteen of the officials weren’t aware of any training for how to handle the watchlist.
The FBI’s screening center used to have a unit that would look at non-federal agencies’ reports and try to figure out what was being flagged and what wasn’t, and why. That unit closed down five years ago, though the FBI couldn’t exactly say why.
GAO recommended the FBI try to do something to figure out why some agencies aren’t properly handling encounters. Auditors said more outreach would help.
The report said the FBI agreed with those ideas.
The FBI declined to comment on the report.
Federal authorities are tight-lipped about the watchlist’s operations, and don’t report the number of names, though CBS News in late 2023 said there were about 2 million names.
The number could be significantly higher now after the Trump administration designated some Mexican cartels and several international gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.
GAO said only about 5% of law enforcement encounters with watchlisted people are from state, local and tribal authorities.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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