Officer.com Police Blogs & Podcasts

Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com

I’ve been in Toronto (the one in Canada) since last Thursday, attending the annual conference of the Police Futurists International. PFI is associated with the much larger World Future Society, which has been meeting here as well. As with most educational experiences, I have learned things I didn’t expect. Among these:

1. If you come to Toronto, bring money. Lots of it. Can you say “CN$27 cheeseburger?” The current exchange rate is about 95%, so that translates to US$25.65.
2. I am relieved to report that there are a significant number of people my age who are even geekier-looking than me.

I’ll be writing about some of the issues we discussed these last few days, but one of the sessions I attended today was presented by Bernard “Bud” Levin and Shawn Herron. Bud is a psychology professor at a community college in Virginia, and a policy and planning commander with the Waynesboro (VA) Police Department. Shawn is an attorney (but seems to be a nice person, in spite of it) who trains law enforcement officers for the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training. Their topic was “Is It Possible for Public Safety Officials to Proactively Anticipate and Prevent Human-Created Disasters?” The conclusion I came to at the end of the session was “Yes, but we usually don’t do it.”

The Hurricane Katrina disaster was the example in the forefront of everyone’s mind. It’s a very good example, for several reasons. It was no secret that New Orleans and the area surrounding it were going to be in big trouble during a major hurricane, and it was inevitable that the major hurricane would come. The problem was that there wasn’t any local money to fund reinforcement and raising of the levees that protected the city, and the problem wasn’t nearly sexy enough to attract much state or federal money. New Orleans could have gotten some more money if they had made a case for keeping jihadists out by raising the levees, but apparently there wasn’t anyone that creative on the city’s staff.

In the shorter term, there was ample warning that the hurricane was coming. This is an area where technology has really helped us. Weather satellites and multimedia communications systems make it possible to alert citizens to hazards long before they become life-threatening. The problem here wasn’t that the warnings weren’t given, but rather that people either decided not to evacuate, or were physically incapable of doing so.

When the hammer did fall, the local government was immediately overwhelmed. There was the much-publicized problem of police officers abandoning their posts and leaving, and they were demonized for doing so. This problem could have been avoided, or at least minimized, had the city prepared to care for the families of their emergency workers when they were called to duty. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s still a problem in most communities. The cops, medics, firefighters, sanitation and public works employees, and others that would be needed to stay behind have to be provided for with first-priority shelters for their families, and redundant methods to ensure they get there.

But a larger problem is that the citizenry expected that someone would take care of the things that they could have easily provided for themselves. When the storm cleared, they expected to see the sky filled with helicopters to lift them to shelters pre-stocked with hot food, cold water, and clean clothes. There were probably some people that had laid in stockpiles of water, non-perishable food, sanitary goods, and other necessities, but we didn’t hear about them.

The notion of self-sufficiency has been largely lost to the Age of Entitlement. Most everything that is inconvenient or unpleasant is considered to be the other guy’s job. A small bit of advance planning and neighbors talking to each other (now there’s a concept) could have resulted in some small-scale sharing of transportation or even creation of mini-shelters that would function until the local infrastructure could come together again.

These emergencies, and a lot of other day-to-day functions, could use the assistance of trained volunteers. The police volunteers wouldn’t necessarily need police powers and firearms. Volunteers with a reliable pair of eyes and a radio could alert the regular troops to looters and other problems, and serve as information points. The fire service is way ahead of us in this area. In fact, in some ways you’re better off in a small community with a volunteer fire department than in a big city with a career department. There are usually more volunteers than are needed to staff the equipment, so as to provide for people out of town, ill, or otherwise unavailable. The volunteers usually have multiple methods of receiving alerts, such as pagers and sirens or horns that can be heard city wide. These will still work if the power and telephones go out. The volunteers carry their gear in their cars, and they all have first aid, EMT, or paramedic training. All told, not bad people to have around, even if they can’t get to their fire station.

The next “big one” can occur anywhere, but you can make an educated guess as to which kind of threat is the most likely for your town. Prevention is usually something for big government to handle, because you probably don’t have the resources to build a stronger dam, track the movements of terrorists, or keep Godzilla from stepping on your house. But you do have the resources to take care of yourself and your family for the short term, and can work with your neighbors to protect them, too. Neighborhood watch programs can be the basis for this kind of community action, and it won’t hurt the image of your police department to be the catalyst that makes this happen.