COUNTERTERRORISM functions of FIRE DEPARTMENTS? Yeah.
- added October 09, 2008
- 3 responses
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- arcticspirit
- found it
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According to the FDNY, intelligence has a place in all three of its missions: prevention, preparedness, and response. For example, advance intelligence (foreknowledge) can alert firefighters responding to an incident to the proximity of volatile chemicals or potentially dangerous activities already under surveillance. Familiarity with surroundings increases firefighters’ situational awareness, improves their operational efficiency, and increases the safety of first responders and the public. Intelligence can also tell fire departments where best to deploy their limited resources on the basis of where threats are most likely to arise. And intelligence can help departments anticipate an event and thereby improve its chances of preventing it.
Collectors of Intelligence
The FDNY has identified the following as ways in which it can produce operational intelligence. Many of them can also be adopted by fire departments across the United States. Increased coordination, integration, and communication with other public-safety agencies enhance a fire department’s ability to fulfill its core mission of protecting life.
* Access to venues. During the course of routine building inspections, arson investigations, and responses to fire and medical emergencies, fire department personnel enjoy access to buildings generally denied outsiders. These firefighters are passive collectors, who are positioned in the normal course of their duties to observe the signs of terrorist activity and, assuming that the firefighters are properly trained, to recognize them as such. When properly shared with local law enforcement and local and national intelligence centers, this information can fill critical intelligence gaps and generate leads.
* Access to, and knowledge of, premises storing hazardous materials. Fire department personnel regularly inspect buildings and sites where hazardous materials are stored. Being familiar with such materials and their destructive potential, fire department personnel are in a privileged position to observe and report on suspicious or unusual conditions and to educate facility managers to do the same.
* Observation of suspicious activity. Firefighters may observe possible terrorist materials, such as equipment and planning documents, in the course of responding to an incident.
* Detection of possible weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Because many fire department units carry equipment, including radiation detectors, capable of identifying hazardous materials, fire departments can assist in discovering materials used in a WMD or dirty bomb. With proper training, firefighters and emergency responders can become alert to physical symptoms in humans that might indicate the occurrence of a biological or chemical attack.[8]
* Protecting critical infrastructure.
Users of Intelligence
Intelligence provided to fire departments can be a force and awareness multiplier in a heightened threat environment. Having access to intelligence about current threats allows fire departments to focus their limited resources on increasing their training and readiness for particular scenarios.
Intelligence Training and Sharing
The FDNY has conducted classes in identifying suspicious behavior and recognizing what might be indicators of terrorist planning.[10] Using faculty from the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy, the FDNY has created a graduate-level executive-education program—the first of its kind in the nation—to educate fire and EMS officers (who are under FDNY supervision) about the threat terrorists pose to first responders and the cities they protect.
Sure it's good to keep stuff on the down low so that terrorists don't know every move before we make it. Classified stuff should be classified... At the same time, it's on the internet. So should we feel more comfortable knowing there are more watching out for us?
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- arcticspirit
- 1 month ago
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There has long been a debate over where the duties of law-enforcement and fire/EMS personnel begin and end in relation to one another, especially in the past forty years or so with the rise of international terrorism.
On the surface, keeping first responders appraised of the latest threats in order to make them more effective on-scene sounds like a pretty logical idea. But the downside of this is the often powerful temptation to expand their powers and duties beyond a certain point to where they become something beyond their original mandate (...which, ironically, might make them less effective in the long term).
It is for this reason that firefighters and EMS personnel don't (...and shouldn't) carry guns or have broad powers to arrest or detain people. It's simply not what they're trained to do, and to burden them with those duties would be, at best, an inefficient use of time and resources.
The same is generally true for using firefighters and EMS to gather information and intelligence for other agencies that are "up the food chain" from the eyes and ears on the ground. Knowing what one is dealing with in order to mitigate or diffuse a given situation in the "here and now" is one thing, but any judgements or observations that are made in the heat of the moment often make it more difficult for professional analysts, who are well removed from "the front lines," so to speak, from putting the puzzle pieces of a much larger picture together.
