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Justice Inspector General on Task Forces

Justice OIG has just released a lengthy analysis of "Task Forces" in federal law enforcement. BIG pdf file here.

A quick read indicates that some such units cooperated well, but many did not. The report calls for increased coordination to avoid overlapping investigations, decreased rivalry (fat chance: as the report notes, it found many cases where two different task forces each reported the same arrest as having been made by them without help) and "deconfliction," coordinating efforts to avoid conflict.

Lack of the last was illustrated by several gun cases where FBI made an illegal gun sale and busted the buyer, only to find he was an ATF agent, who was planning on busting them, or vice versa.

Interestingly, when they assigned a numerical score to how well each task force was internally coordinated, ATF got the highest scores, beating FBI, Marshals' Service, DEA, etc.