Building Community Resilience Instructor

Terminal Objectives  Define and describe the most efficient ways to increase resilience in school based law enforcement.  Understand the disaster cycle and its nomenclature  Identify how websites and social media can assist law enforcement in times of disaster  Identify the importance of a Public Information Officer in times of emergency

Enabling Objectives  Define: resilience and its ideology  Recognize how to increase situational awareness and increase preparedness of school based law enforcement  Define internal and external communications and how they differ.  Explain the importance of websites and social media  Understand the basic steps to construct an Emergency Operations Center (EOC)

Defining: Resilience  Resilience has recently become a buzzword among policymakers and homeland security experts.  President Barack Obama called for the need to,” enhance our resilience in the campus security initiative”.  Through resilience the campus based policing model can forge the ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for, withstand, and rapidly recover from disruptions or emergencies.

Enhancing our abilities  School based law enforcement can increase their resilience to emergencies through increased focus in the following areas:  Prevention  Mitigation  Preparedness and swift response  Recovery

Disaster cycle

Prevention  Prevention of catastrophic breakdown of the campus security system can take place from a breakdown of key elements.  Situational awareness is imperative to alerting students and staff to impending emergencies or risk to the campus environment. C-Cert (Campus Emergency Response Teams increase situational awareness

Situational Awareness  Situational awareness enables students and staff to be informed and ready to accept breakdowns in communications and disruptions.  Society tends to be fairly resilient to high probability events because collectively we are accustomed to dealing with them. We learn ways to adapt to temporary disruption, but we tend to be much worse at displaying resiliency towards low probability/high consequence events.

Preparedness  Enhancing risk communication across the entire campus community, state and local governments is crucial. This can be easily facilitated by utilizing both:  Internal Communications  External Communications

Why is it important to write an emergency plan?  Not only is it important to have a plan, but it is also imperative to share these plans with departments, faculty, and students so that everyone knows their responsibilities in the event of an emergency.  A well formulated plan, aids the school based law enforcement officer in being prepared in times of crisis.  A written plan can aid in planning contingencies if the plan is well formulated but still fails.  The written plan can help educate those who are directly impacted by the effects of an emergency situation on campus or its surroundings.

Mitigation  Through mitigation and preparedness a campus has many tools available to educate, prepare, and inform of emergencies and disasters.  The most important aspect to resilience is through effective communication

Internal Communications  As the faculty, students, and society as a whole collectively use Twitter and facebook, many jurisdictions are far behind.  Social media has the ability not only to disseminate messages to the public, but also to gather situational awareness from the field. It can be a powerful tool to augment already existing methods of communication

External Communications  External communications can be established in many ways. College based law enforcement should have direct and immediate contact with local state and government agencies including surrounding police departments.  Local agreements should be established with surrounding police and fire departments for mutual aid.  A specific member of the school based law enforcement staff should be selected to become the media and public information officer to streamline communications in emergency situations

Communications training  Many Texas state agencies will offer free training in public information officer duties.  This training will assist in a departments level of internal and external communications.  FEMA offers free training for communications and public information officer training: they even provide your flight, hotel, and training all FREE  on.shtm on.shtm

Principle mission  The principle task of any campus based law enforcement agency is to develop all-hazard plans and identify critical and key resources to allow faculty, staff, and students the opportunity to recover from emergencies and disasters affecting our campuses. Our highest priority is to help provide a safe and secure scholastic environment for the school community of students, faculty, staff, and visitors.

Response and Recovery  Response and recovery happen at the same time. It is imperative that campus based law enforcement communicates the response to an emergency as well as the recovery process.  Another facet of this communication can come from: web-site development and social media

Web-site and social media  In response to an emergency or pending disaster, getting the message out is of crucial importance.  The police department must have the tools necessary to immediately take over communications on a campus.  This can include but is not limited to the following:  Controlling the schools website, establishing facebook, twitter, or nixle notifications.  Emergency notification or public address systems, campus emergency notification boxes

Mock exercises  Refer to Texas State for ideas on conducting emergency exercises. Exercises include tornados, active shooter and much more.  Website:  The tabletop exercise is a meeting to discuss a simulated emergency situation. Members of the campus emergency management team review and discuss the actions they would take in a particular emergency, testing their emergency operations plan in an informal, low-stress environment.  Tabletop exercises are used to clarify roles and responsibilities and to identify additional campus mitigation and preparedness needs. They should result in actions plans for continued improvement of the campus emergency operations plan.

EOC (Emergency Operations Center)  Campus based law enforcement should strongly consider the establishment of an EOC (Emergency Operations Center)  They are easy to establish and are simply a place for major role- players in the campus community to meet in a secure area and deal with emergency situations.

Group Project  Project: The school principle is concerned that there is no formal plan to respond to the risk of a bomb threat on your campus. The principle would like you to develop a draft outline of a plan and report back to him with your departments suggestions on what should be done should this event happen in real life.  You have decided to seek the input from your officers for this project. Remember that you not only want to plan for actions taken in the event of a bomb threat, but you also want to mention factors that can mitigate the after effects of such an event.

Reference  Jerome Kahn, et al, Concept Development: An Operational Framework for Resilience. Arlington, VA: Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, 2009,  Fran H. Norris, et al, “Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology Vol. 31 (2007):  Susan L. Cutter, et al, Community and Regional Resilience: Perspectives from Hazards, Disasters, and Emergency Management, Columbia, SC: Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, 2008, FINAL_CUTTER_ _ pdf.  Thomas J. Campanella and Lawrence J. Vale, The Resilient City, How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster, New York: Oxford Press,  Ferguson, R. (n.d.). Tabletop exercise scenarios. Retrieved from

Reference  Website _objectives_and_outcomes/  Federal Emergency Management Association, “National Disaster Recovery Framework,” draft, Feb. 5, 2010,  U.S. Department of Homeland Security Homeland Security Advisory Council, “Report of the Critical Infrastructure Task Force,” Washington, D.C.: 2006,  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Health Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, D.C.: 2009,