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Security program slammed by Senate report for improperly collecting info on innocent citizens

by Matt Apuzzo and Eileen Sullivan

WASHINGTON - A multibillion-dollar information-sharing program created in the aftermath of 9/11 has improperly collected information about innocent Americans and produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism, a Senate report concludes. It portrays an effort that ballooned far beyond anyone's ability to control.

What began as an attempt to put local, state and federal officials in the same room analyzing the same intelligence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining software, flat screen televisions and, in Arizona, two fully equipped Chevrolet Tahoes that are used for commuting, investigators found.

The lengthy, bipartisan report is a scathing evaluation of what the Department of Homeland Security has held up as a crown jewel of its security efforts. The report underscores a reality of post-9/11 Washington: National security programs tend to grow, never shrink, even when their money and manpower far surpass the actual subject of terrorism. Much of this money went for ordinary local crime-fighting.

Disagreeing with the critical conclusions of the report, Homeland Security says it is outdated, inaccurate and too focused on information produced by the program, ignoring benefits to local governments from their involvement with federal intelligence officials.

Because of a convoluted grants process set up by Congress, Homeland Security officials don't know how much they have spent in their decade-long effort to set up so-called fusion centers in every state. Government estimates range from less than $300 million to $1.4 billion in federal money, plus much more invested by state and local governments. Federal funding is pegged at about 20 percent to 30 percent.

Despite that, Congress is unlikely to pull the plug. That's because, whether or not it stops terrorists, the program means politically important money for state and local governments.

A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee reviewed more than 600 unclassified reports over a one-year period and concluded that most had nothing to do with terrorism. The panel's chairman is Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

"The subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot," the report said.

When fusion centers did address terrorism, they sometimes did so in ways that infringed on civil liberties. The centers have made headlines for circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights.

One fusion center cited in the Senate investigation wrote a report about a Muslim community group's list of book recommendations. Others discussed American citizens speaking at mosques or talking to Muslim groups about parenting.

No evidence of criminal activity was contained in those reports. The government did not circulate them, but it kept them on government computers. The federal government is prohibited from storing information about First Amendment activities not related to crimes.

"It was not clear why, if DHS had determined that the reports were improper to disseminate, the reports were proper to store indefinitely," the report said.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Matthew Chandler called the report "out of date, inaccurate and misleading." He said that it focused entirely on information being produced by fusion centers and did not consider the benefit the involved officials got receiving intelligence from the federal government.

The report is as much an indictment of Congress as it is the Homeland Security Department. In setting up the department, lawmakers wanted their states to decide what to spend the money on. Time and again, that setup has meant the federal government has no way to know how its security money is being spent.

Inside Homeland Security, officials have long known there were problems with the reports coming out of fusion centers, the report shows.

"You would have some guys, the information you'd see from them, you'd scratch your head and say, `What planet are you from?"' an unidentified Homeland Security official told Congress.

Until this year, the federal reports officers received five days of training and were never tested or graded afterward, the report said.

States have had criminal analysis centers for years. But the story of fusion centers began in the frenzied aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The 9/11 Commission urged better collaboration among government agencies. As officials realized that a terrorism tip was as likely to come from a local police officer as the CIA, fusion centers became a hot topic.

But putting people together to share intelligence proved complicated. Special phone and computer lines had to be installed. The people reading the reports needed background checks. Some information could only be read in secure areas, which meant construction projects.

All of that cost money.

Meanwhile, federal intelligence agencies were under orders from Congress to hire more analysts. That meant state and local agencies had to compete for smart counterterrorism thinkers. And federal training for local analysts wasn't an early priority.

Though fusion centers receive money from the federal government, they are operated independently. Counterterrorism money started flowing to states in 2003. But it wasn't until late 2007 that the Bush administration told states how to run the centers.

State officials soon realized there simply wasn't that much local terrorism-related intelligence. Terrorist attacks didn't happen often, but police faced drugs, guns and violent crime every day. Normal criminal information started moving through fusion centers.

Under federal law, that was fine. When lawmakers enacted recommendations of the 9/11 Commission in 2007, they allowed fusion centers to study "criminal or terrorist activity." The law was co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the driving forces behind the creation of Homeland Security.

Five years later, Senate investigators found, terrorism is often a secondary focus.

"Many fusion centers lacked either the capability or stated objective of contributing meaningfully to the federal counterterrorism mission," the Senate report said. "Many centers didn't consider counterterrorism an explicit part of their mission, and federal officials said some were simply not concerned with doing counterterrorism work."

When Janet Napolitano became Homeland Security secretary in 2009, the former Arizona governor embraced the idea that fusion centers should look beyond terrorism. Testifying before Congress that year, she distinguished fusion centers from the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces that are the leading investigative and analytical arms of the domestic counterterrorism effort.

"A JTTF is really focused on terrorism and terrorism-related investigations," she said. "Fusion centers are almost everything else."

Congress, including the committee that authored the report, supports that notion. And though the report recommends the Senate reconsider the amount of money it spends on fusion centers, that seems unlikely.

"Congress and two administrations have urged DHS to continue or even expand its support of fusion centers, without providing sufficient oversight to ensure the intelligence from fusion centers is commensurate with the level of federal investment," the report said.

And following the release of the report, Homeland Security officials indicated their continued strong support for the program.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_21687851/security-program-slammed-by-senate-report-improperly-collecting

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Georgia

Help APD be Better in the Community, Participate in the Community Policing Self-Assessment

The Atlanta Police Department wants our community input to make better decisions and choices when policing our communities.

(The following is a message from the Atlanta Police Chief, Georgre Turner)

Our agency has chosen to participate in the Community Policing Self-Assessment Tool (CP-SAT), an online survey which collects information about our practice of community policing. I strongly encourage you to complete this assessment, which you may access by clicking the URL below. Through your participation in this assessment, our agency will be able to gather valuable data allowing us to enhance our community policing practices and identify community policing strengths and areas for improvement. The assessment is sponsored by the COPS Office and is administered by ICF International.

Your responses to this survey will be kept confidential. There are no individual identifiers in the data that the agency will receive, and the agency will not be able to link an individual's data to their email address. This is not a test, so there are no right or wrong answers. Please answer each question honestly. The assessment will take you approximately 15 minutes of your time.

Assessment URL: https://survey.icfsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=04BD76CC552D21AD

Agency Pass Code: GAAPD00-C1

(You will be prompted to enter your agency pass code when you click the above URL. Please copy and paste the above pass code to ensure accuracy ).

Please complete the assessment by October 22, 2012. If you have any questions, please contact the Atlanta Police Department Community Liaison Office at 404-546-2677 (404-546-COPS).

Thank you,

George Turner
Chief of Police
Atlanta Police Department

http://cascade.patch.com/articles/help-apd-be-betterin-the-community-participate-in-the-community-policing-self-assessment

http://www.policeone.com/community-policing/articles/6002461-Cops-and-bars-collaborate-to-reduce-crime-in-Md/

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California

Firefighting cops: How police can SWARM

During the past two years, the Joint Counterterrorism Awareness Workshop Series (JCTAWS) Project has been conducting tabletop exercises in selected urban areas

by Doug Wyllie, PoliceOne Editor in Chief

Dr. Smith was among the panelists on a Sunday afternoon session, which was made up of individuals from FEMA, DHS, FBI, NCTC, and several local police and fire agencies, who convened to discuss the lessons learned from a series of regional workshops held in the past two years.

Each tabletop exercise — conducted in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Sacramento, Indianapolis, Honolulu, and Houston — was designed to improve the ability of local jurisdictions to prepare for, protect against, and respond to complex, coordinated terrorists attacks specific to that particular city.

The program is called the Joint Counterterrorism Awareness Workshop Series (JCTAWS), and it has yielded some pretty interesting results.

Dr. Smith's Prescription for Training

The 90-minute session contained entirely too much information to disseminate in a single column, so for now, I want to focus in on the comments of just one of the panelists — Dr. Smith.

Smith is a board-certified emergency room physician, currently practicing at one of the local hospitals in Northern Virginia. He's a full-time employee for the Arlington County Fire Department, serving as their Operational Medical Director. In that role, he's also a consultant to the Arlington County Police Department and is a medical responder for Arlington County SWAT.

As we all know, fire, EMS and police routinely converge on the same scene — whether that's a traffic collision or some other “regular” call — but we also all know that there are gaps in training for all disciplines to work together in a coordinated fashion during a major terrorist attack.

Listening to Smith, you get the impression he thinks about those gaps rather a lot.

What police, fire, and EMS personnel all need to have in order to be prepared for a coordinated attack, Smith says, is at once simple and not.

“What we have to do is change our response paradigm. We have to adapt conventional roles — the conventional police, fire, and EMS roles — to this new threat," he said.

"We have to accept new roles in response. It's not ‘I do my part, you do your part.' It's an understanding of all the operational roles and how and where they overlap, and when they transition.”

The First Responder SWARM

During the session, Dr. Smith dropped on the audience perhaps the very best tactical acronym I've ever heard — SWARM.

That stands for Syndicated, Water-Enabled, Anti-Siege Response Matrix Teams and it's attributed to Theodore Moody, apparently from his Naval Postgraduate School thesis (although it could also be from Sean Newman, in another Naval Postgraduate School document).

Here's SWARM in a nutshell: We must prepare our response to the fact that fire has been and will forever be used as a weapon.

That's just a fact, and we're way behind the curve in planning for it (sadly, another fact).

In the event that a coordinated attack involves fire as a weapon — and, again, there's a damned-high likelihood that a sophisticated attack will involve fire as a weapon — it will mean pre-event planning and pre-event training for fire and police alike.

It will mean that fire and police personnel will have to work together to use armored vehicles to deploy fire hoses and fireground equipment downrange to the area in which the battle is still very much under way.

It will mean that cops be able to operate in tactical environments which are ablaze. It will put firefighters in a fire fight (the kind with bullets flying).

It will mean giving police officers basic knowledge in simple fire behavior — fire doesn't shoot back but it does have behavior.

“We have to blur the lines,” Smith said. “You hand a firefighter a ballistic vest, he'll drop it on the ground and say ‘I'm not a police officer.' Same thing will happen if you hand a police officer a turnout coat."

So, how do we actually blur those lines?

“What about having police officers or contact teams carry hand-deployed smoke-extinguishing grenades? They're made. They're about the size of a hubcap, they weigh about five pounds.

"You can knock down a fire in a pretty-large-size room. You can Molle them on the back of your gear. Why don't we teach those guys going into the fight to — as they go by those areas — to start to knock that fire back for life rescue? At that point we don't care about property damage, we care about life rescue.”

Smith concedes that there is risk involved in this concept. Police departments doing first-responder medical care are opening themselves up to certain risk. Fire departments putting firefighters into places where a gunman — or many gunmen — have not yet been neutralized are an equally absorbing risk.

But the threat we may face may require precisely that type of risk-taking, and as Smith — and others — have said, game day is not the time to be figuring this stuff out.

Responding to the 'Normal Calls'

In addition, Smith outlined coordinated responses during day-to-day “normal” calls.

Let me give you an example. In an incident not far from Smith's home AOR, Smith had trained a PD with officer-down care, and equipped those officers with a simple blow-out kit, including a tourniquet.

One night, there was a call of a fight in progress, and when officers arrived, they discovered it was actually a multi-casualty incident with numerous stabbing victims, one of whom could have been mortally wounded with a cut at the brachial artery.

“Unfortunately, in this area, there's about a four- to five-minute response time. In those four to five minutes, the responding officers who were trained did the right thing. They quickly triaged and initiated care on the sickest of the patients — the one with that brachial artery injury.”

Good story so far, right? Here's the best part.

“When the fire department showed up, they didn't just push those police officers away, saying, ‘It's our job now.' What they did was they supported those police officers, transitioned the patient for transport, and took over the care in a seamless way.”

That is the result of training prior to action. That is breaking down traditional barriers. That is a truly-coordinated response.

Point-of-Wounding Care, and TECC

“Napoleon's surgeon in the 1700s said that the fate of the wounded lies in the hands of the first person to render care,” Smith remarked. “That kind of still holds true.”

Smith saliently observed that as a nation we are sitting on more than a decade of data related to Tactical Combat Casualty Care — life-saving tactics that have been employed by our military brothers and sisters in the Long War overseas.

“This is data,” Smith said, “that in my opinion was earned by the blood of American soldiers. We shouldn't let this data go to waste. We have data that shows the success of point-of-wounding care by non-medically-trained responders.”

Smith was quick, though, to add that Tactical Combat Casualty Care as we know it in the armed forces is probably not an exact fit for police on the street.

“The problem with Tactical Combat Casualty Care is that it's written for a healthy, 18- to 25-year-old soldier, in downtown Kabul. It's not written for a 65-year-old with high blood pressure, is on blood thinners, and is in downtown Houston.”

Good point.

A couple of years ago, Smith was part of the effort to begin rolling out a civilian-appropriate version of TCCC called TECC — Tactical EMERGENCY Casualty Care.

“It's T-triple-C-based guidelines that are appropriate for civilians that accounts for populations that T-triple-C doesn't account for — pregnant women, kids, elderly, chronically ill, special populations. To me, that's the simple answer to the question. To me, we need to train first responders in TECC and give them the right equipment to do it.”

This cannot be training limited to your tactical medics. The scale of attack about which we're talking is too big for the five or six tactical medics you might have at your PD (if you have even that many!).

The aim of point-of-wounding care is to get the training and equipment into the hands of the first responder on the scene. In this type of situation, that's almost certainly going to be a patrol officer.

About the author

Doug Wyllie is Editor in Chief of PoliceOne, responsible for setting the editorial direction of the website and managing the planned editorial features by our roster of expert writers. In addition to his editorial and managerial responsibilities, Doug has authored more than 500 feature articles and tactical tips on a wide range of topics and trends that affect the law enforcement community. Doug is a member of International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), and an Associate Member of the California Peace Officers' Association. He is also a member of the Public Safety Writers Association, and is a two-time (2011 and 2012) Western Publishing Association "Maggie Award" Finalist in the category of Best Regularly Featured Digital Edition Column. Even in his "spare" time, he is active in his support for the law enforcement community, contributing his time and talents toward police-related charitable events as well as participating in force-on-force training, search-and-rescue training, and other scenario-based training designed to prepare cops for the fight they face every day on the street.

Read more articles by PoliceOne Editor in Chief Doug Wyllie by clicking here.

Contact Doug Wyllie

http://www.policeone.com/police-products/less-lethal/projectiles-launchers/articles/5999879-Firefighting-cops-How-police-can-SWARM/