Carter F. Smith

Dr. Carter F. Smith teaches security and criminal justice courses in the Department of Criminal Justice Administration at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) in Murfreesboro, TN. He was in the U.S. Army CID for over twenty-two years, serving fifteen of those years at Fort Campbell, KY, where he identified the growing gang problem in the early 1990s and later started the Army’s first Gang & Extremist investigations team. While in the CID, Dr. Smith also provided and directed the security of several U.S. Army bases, supervised multi-national fraud and theft investigations, and conducted various criminal and cyber-crime investigations in Germany, Korea, Panama, and the United States. He investigates and researches topics like security issues caused by spontaneous gang formation, the threat to the community caused by military-trained gang members, gangs and their use of technology, and the presence of gang members in colleges and universities.

Dr. Smith received a Ph.D. in Business Administration from Northcentral University, a Juris Doctorate from Southern Illinois University, and a Bachelor of Science Degree from Austin Peay State University. In addition to MTSU, since 2004, he has also taught at Austin Peay State University and the Florida Institute of Technology. Smith has taught classes for many Gang Investigators Associations, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the American Society of Criminology, the National Crime Prevention Council, the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, the National Gang Crime Research Center, the Southern Criminal Justice Association, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Army. He has been interviewed about gangs by several news sources, and has appeared twice in the History Channel’s Gangland series.

He is a member of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), The American Society of Criminology, the Southern Criminal Justice Association, the American Criminal Justice Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, Infragard, and ASIS International. He was a founding (and still serving) board member of the Tennessee Gang Investigators Association, and is a recipient of the Frederic Milton Thrasher Award of the National Gang Crime Research Center.