July 2009 Archives

Emergency response can be short term and reactive in face of looming disasters. And so linking up with the science for understanding how to respond to worrying long term trends like climate change that suddenly seems to be speeding up has become very relevant.

These thoughts came from Shane Roberts, a futurist and forecaster whose day job lies with the Canadian federal department of Public Safety Canada. But in a recent interview he stressed he was speaking personally. 

"We have to be careful not to get too absorbed in just today's headlines and today's problems. Watch out for those things that can sneak up on us because they have long cycles."

He notes that scientists have "heightened" our awareness of potential catastrophes facing the planet, whether it is the ongoing destruction to the environment or decades old stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

"Science and technology helps us to understand forces and processes and their trends and cycles which spawn, shape and reshape factors in risks."

Shane ranged over a wide range of disaster scenarios including both the realistic and apocalyptical at a panel during at the World Conference on Disaster Management in June in Toronto.

He talked about the threats like fires, floods, storms and flu epidemics that have been with us for some time and appear to be occurring with greater frequency because of a host of factors, as well as new and unforeseen hazards and threats.

Shane offers a list of different kinds of risks -- emerging (i.e. synthetic life forms or nanotechnology), persistent (human violence), re-emerging scourges (malaria, tuberculosis) and old but an emergency (asteroids, solar storms, super volcanoes and mega earthquakes).
Roberts offered four strategic questions for emergency planners in the area of evolution of society, risk and preparedness.

One is that emergency planners have to apply science and historical analysis to determine trends and potential surprises that could reshape the world, as well as what that the future might entail.

Also, there are new sets of risks (human made/natural threats and vulnerabilities) that will affect public security in one's own country and the wider world?

Then, what new or enhanced capabilities for emergency management can reduce these risks of threat and vulnerabilities?

Finally, how can current and foreseeable advances in science and technology assist emergency planners to develop new capabilities?

With greater scientific knowledge emergency response, planners should have the ammunition to convince the politicians of the seriousness of a particular scenario such as extreme weather, melting glaciers and droughts stemming from climate change in some regions and the necessity to invest in mitigation and prevention strategies.

One might say that approach may be easier said than done for predicted rising sea levels along the California coast that could happen over the next century well past most people's lifetimes versus a more immediate flu epidemic that has already taken some lives.
Nevertheless, Shane Roberts is an optimist, suggesting that human societies have come a long way in terms of responding to some emergencies because of better planning and technical expertise.

"I have 15 nieces and nephews and in a way I fear for them with the challenges they face. But at the same time when you look at how far we have come on a daily basis and how much we are able to protect ourselves, there is a room for cautious optimism."

The Canadian province of Manitoba, for instance, managed to escape spring flooding of the north-south Red River basin because of local diversion strategies undertaken.  In contrast south of the US Canadian border in North Dakota along the same river the lack of precautionary actions culminated in local cities like Grand Forks being covered by water and 50,000 people fleeing their homes.

Photo Chris Dessaigne. CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic




 

Recent revelations that officials in the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney debated, and thankfully turned down, an internal suggestion to have U.S. troops arrest terrorism suspects and US citizens residing in Buffalo should not be a surprise to those who have observed and are alarmed at the growing militarization of the domestic police.
 
Ronald Reagan's initial success in having Congress whittle away at the clear demarcation between police and military functions under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 got the ball rolling as a major component of the so-called war against drugs, reveals Peter Kraska, a professor in criminal justice and police studies at Eastern Kentucky University.
 
"The trend has definitely intensified," the academic told me over the phone, since he helped edited the book, Militarizing the American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and the Police, which was published in 2001 before the events of 9/11. Alleged terrorism has since its publication become an additional rationale for what the academic calls an "unprecedented" amount of training and weaponry that the military has handed over to law enforcement since the early 1990s.
 
Helping to facilitate this, two Canadian academics, Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty, argue in one of the essays in the Kraska book (The Military Technostructures of Policing) is a 1994 agreement between the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense that involved the development of technology of benefit to both the police and the military. One result was the creation of five law enforcement technology centers designed to apply advanced war-fighting technology to criminal justice, they wrote.
 
The most high-profile example of this convergence is the increased usage of "no knock" warrants by police SWAT teams dressed in military-style uniforms on even routine calls at people's homes that have frequently resulted in tragic results for those inside. The officers involved may receive their training from U.S. Navy Seals or U.S. Army Rangers, explains Kraska.
 
Yet sadly, the American public in some cities appear to have accepted the introduction of military-style equipment and technology into law enforcement, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a daily newspaper in Texas. These include in some cases armed personnel carriers, assault rifles, noise-flash devices and grenade launchers.
 
The dangling of federal money under various presidential administrations, including the latest, as an incentive to purchase this equipment (some of which had to find new customers outside the military with the end of the Cold War with the Russians) is one reason why this ramp-up of might has occurred at the local domestic level, says Kraska, even though "a good percentage of the police institutions don't care for this whole militarization trend,"
 
So, why is a blogger reporting on this for an IT publication devoted to local government? Well, there have been media reports of the military serving as "the central organizing force" (Kraska's words) in the collection of data on civilians in joint police/military projects.
 
"These are programs where the military and local police forces work in conjunction with one another to collect data and put that data into a centralized military database."
 
As Haggerty and Ericson explained in 2001 and which is even more valid today, much of what police officers do involves the documentation of a myriad of events and situations.

Yet for institutional cultural reasons, the police have resisted taking full advantage of sophisticated database systems and tools after they have been installed on their premises, relates Peter Manning, who holds the Elmer V. H. and Eileen M. Brooks chair in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston. He is also the author of the book Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the Rationality of Crime Control which was published in 2008.

"No police department (that I know of) has refined a systematically integrated collection of technologies to facilitate problem solving, crime prevention, policy analysis or community interfaces."
 
So, why shouldn't the police turn to the military which, after all, has the computer, communications and surveillance technology smarts since they invented and developed much of this stuff?
 
The obvious answer is that that a key role of the military is to kill enemy's forces as effectively as possible, while the mission of law enforcement is to protect society while applying the minimum amount of force necessary. It would be a shame if military technology and practices are applied as overkill (both literally and figuratively) to domestic populations with the ostensible aim of creating safe communities.

Photo by Trung Nguyen. CC Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic

 

Please President Obama, re-evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's fusion centers because they aren't providing anything of value for policing.

So, urges Peter Manning, sociologist and author of the Technology of Policing: Crime Mapping, Information Technology and the Rationality of Crime.

He is commenting on a $254-million George Bush post9/11 initiative that has resulted in the setting up of 58 local and state centers across the US. Here, national, country and municipal police agencies are expected to collect and share crime data. 

Fusion centers also include representation from the Homeland Security customs and immigration division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco.

Earlier in the spring DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the role of the fusion centers at the National Fusion Center Conference in Kansas City. She told reporters that "information and intelligence sharing is a top priority, and fusion centers play an important role in helping to make that happen."

Furthermore, she added, "In the world we live in today, it's critical for federal, state, local and tribal entities to know what the others are doing so each can operate effectively and efficiently."

But Peter Manning counters that fusion centers are primarily "reactive" and "redundant" networks which are gathering information that member agencies already have.

Talking to people in the fusion center in Boston where he teaches at one of the universities, he reports mixed feelings among law enforcement types for the concept.

"Because [the fusion centers] were put together very quickly and they are really not systematically evaluated I don't think there is wide enthusiasm. On the other hand it is federal money. It offsets other costs; it offsets other obligations.  And so, it is welcome, to be cynical about it."

Plus, Manning continues, the investigatory and case orientation of the participating police agencies in the fusion centers makes them totally unsuitable for anti-terrorism work, supposedly the catalyst for their coming together in the first place.

"Most terrorism isn't easily identified by law breaking, because it is planned and talked about and organized [by the perpetrators] prior to the event," Manning explains.

He maintains that the fusion centers lack the capacity to carry out the kind of monitoring (i.e. the reliance of informants in suspect groups) that could lead them to prevent acts of terrorism in the US.

Does the absence of terrorism by al Qaeda or related groups with the US following the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington mean that the fusion centers have been a success? We may never know the answer, except it is unlikely from the sounds of things that they have played any significant role. 

Furthermore, the fusion centers' lack of a mission statement or mandate makes it very hard to evaluate their success or failure in the first place, Manning argues.

These facilities, he reports, are staffed by young people who are sitting at their computer screens separately gathering information on items like gang activity, gun shots and other typical areas of police interest for their respective member agencies.

"They might meet every couple of weeks, something like that. But they don't share much information. What they share is verbal, trivial, of very little interest, because the particular knowledge that they have, they are not willing to share."

Oops, the traditional cops' reluctance to collaborate permeates the very facilities which were set up to help break down those barriers in the first place.
 
Also, the data being gathered at the fusion centers is similar in content to what the individual police centers represented here are already collecting on their home turf, says Manning.

The professor isn't calling for the elimination of the fusion centers, appreciating that no administration in Washington will want to conduct wholesale layoffs of a federal government financed function at this time. Instead, he urges the following. 

"I'd like to see them reorganized massively and the funding be shifted over to other aspects of security where identiable goals could be set."

He wants the US inspector general to "radically re-evaluate" the fusion centers to determine their actual contribution to national security.

Manning suspects the Obama administration will take a second look at the fusion centers.
"I think it is going to be slowly cut back. But what will eventually happen is some way of institutionalizing the functions without the vast federal money going into it."

 

Panic and false rumors can accompany disasters during and after an event, probably more so with the advent of social media. I hesitate to be contrary about social media because I happen to be attracted to the idea of emergency responders receiving an earful on an impending disaster like a flood, hurricane or brush fire from the digital public. Just say two words -- Katrina and FEMA -- and you know what I mean.

Yet, Tim Hickernell, an analyst at Info-Tech Research, bears listening to, although I don't know if I accept his entire argument.

He echoes comments that social networks can be a useful channel to deliver the latest developments about an emergency including evacuation orders and pleas for assistance from the general public.

And Hickernell accepts the value of emergency responders monitoring Twitter, YouTube and blogs, as well as the working of the search engines to glean what different elements of the digital public are also saying. You can't rely any more on just the traditional media sources of newspapers, radio and television, he observes.

Nonetheless, this former emergency planning engineer in radiological emergency preparedness for a US nuclear power utility worries that social networks can be another vehicle for the dissemination of false and inaccurate stories to the point of information overload. "How many more rumors can be generated that we have to follow up on and quash so that the public doesn't get excessively scared?"

Hickernell also urges emergency responders to maintain their policy of limiting access to social media sites within their internal organizations despite the griping in some quarters. Rules coming out of the IT department that forbid employees from accessing sites like Twitter for the latest news of an ongoing disaster should be maintained, not loosened up, he urged. Leave the monitoring of information of social networks to specifically assigned media monitors -- often done by a third party provider as the disaster is taking place.

For Hickernell it is obvious that you need a centralized process to test the reliability of the bits of information coming in during a chaotic period, he argues.

Social media has speeded up the availability of information including both new and rumours from emergencies coming from a greater number of sources. But that process does not mean what is being uttered digitally is anymore accurate, he told me.

"Things in an emergency happen at the same pace and the same rate that they did a thousand years ago, in a hurricane or in a nuclear emergency -- today versus 20 years ago. Things happen in the exact same way.  It is just that people can talk about [a disaster] more rapidly and on a larger scale. It doesn't change facts; it doesn't change procedures that emergency responders use to mitigate events themselves."

Yet, the pressures that social media places on emergency responders can also be positive, Hickernell almost grudgingly admits.

"[Social media] can certainly exacerbate the demand on a public information organization to get out correct information faster. No doubt, it places an additional demand on them, but it is not anymore inherently correct or accurate just because people can say things."

Here is where I part with Hickernell who happened to be associated with the notoriously secretive nuclear power industry. Emergency responders are also complex hierarchical entities bedeviled by political considerations. We know about how the Federal Emergency Management Administration under the Bush administration let down the people of New Orleans. (I am not sure if social media, which had not gotten off the ground during Katrina, would have helped the impoverished and digitally deprived people of the city's flooded 9th Ward.)

Sociologist and social media watcher Jeanette Sutton argues that having a greater number of voices engaged in an ongoing event like the bush fires in the Australian state of Victoria allowed for a better understanding of what was transpiring. She calls the phenomenon "crowd intelligence."

Victims of those fires or the latest Red River flooding in North Dakota were also able to help each other in ways that were not possible before social networks.

"You can communicate with others and increase your coping mechanism by sharing information, talking about the event and how did it happen to you."