I reckon
he's done research.
Ron Haddad is Dearborn’s chief of police, and he says he gets one question a lot when he travels around the country. “Someone will come up to me and put their finger in my face, and they’re already angry,” he says. “They say, ‘Will the people in your community report acts of terror to you?’“
What they mean is: Will Muslims turn in other Muslims?
Haddad has a ready answer. “Not only would they, they do,” he says. “They’ve done it.”
Dearborn and Mollenbeek, in fact, could not be more different, which says a lot about the very different ways that the United States and countries like Belgium and France have approached the problem of radicalization. In a city where nearly a third of the approximately 95,000 residents are Arab-American or of Arab descent, Haddad’s department has a deep network of contacts in the community and makes regular visits to Dearborn’s 38 schools and its many mosques. He sponsors a program called “Stepping Up,” which includes an annual awards ceremony (the next is April 12) for residents reporting crime. At least twice in the past several years, fearing influence from ISIL or online propaganda on their children, Haddad says, Muslim fathers have turned in their own sons. In another case, it was students at a largely Muslim high school calling about a troubled peer.