May 2013

Oklahoma Tornado, Boston Bombing, Young Soldier Killed – It’s time to do a Security Risk Assessment!

Posted on May 24, 2013 2:18 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

More Tornado victims will be buried this week. Including many children who died at their schools because the school district didn’t spend the extra $3000 to have a storm cellar/safe room available.

One month ago, we watched as victims of the Boston Marathon Bombings were buried.

Yesterday, we watched an Islamic Jihadist savagely kill a young British soldier with knives.

What other events do we have to witness before we start taking security assessments seriously? How many more grieving parents do we have to watch crying on TV and, in my opinion, the casualities did not need to be so high and the aftermath so catastrophic.

If you group all these disasters together, you can that at the root of each one, is the feeling that, “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”….. Britain, for example, has tolerated mosques preaching hate, thinking that nothing like the knife attack could happen in civilized London.

In Moore, Oklahoma, people thought, “we already had a major tornado, so IT CAN’T HAPPEN AGAIN”! Well, surprise – it happened again. While forecasters cannot dictate the exact path of a tornado, they can get close, and with just fifteen minutes advance warning, there is time to get everyone into storm cellars, safe rooms and underground shelters. BUT IF THERE IS NO SHELTER AT A SCHOOL…….

Many obvious solutions-controls-safeguards were missed in these recent tragedies because proper, formal security risk assessments weren’t done effectively. If they had been done, perhaps the London police could have picked up someone who touted murder and hate.

If a risk assessment had been done in Moore, OK, maybe the high risk of a tornado would have allowed the schools to all add the safe rooms they needed, and in Boston, the older brother Boston bomber, should have been in jail already for his participation in a previous murder – or at least actively monitored based on his facebook postings.

The clues are all there, and, looking backwards, you can see the pieces that SHOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH TO PROMOTE some kind of action to either:

1. Eliminate the threat or,

2. Reduce the severity of a potential threat in case it occurred.

Security risk assessments gather the numbers and the information organizations need to make better choices about how to protect people’s lives, facilities, and organizations. I hope these events will prompt more Security Directors to take an objective and unbiased look at their own organizations, and the controls they have in place, before you end up on CNN!

The Active Shooter – What’s the Right Response? Run Out or Lock Down?

Posted on May 18, 2013 10:35 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

I got to sit in on a security group discussion yesterday. It includes both security directors and local law enforcement and It was interesting to see how both groups approached the active shooter scenario differently. Which way is the best? Is there a best?

For law enforcement officers at both the state, city and county level, they want all doors to be unlocked so that all the occupants of a facility, or a hospital, can get out and run for safety as quickly as possible. They say that means more people will survive, not get shot, and it works with the natural human reaction to run away from danger.

Some of the active shooter experts in the room said that active shooter situations should be treated like fire drills, because people are used to fire drills, and they know what to do, because they practice fire drills more frequently than active shooter drills.

For the Security Directors, especially of hospitals, they wanted to be able to lock down if there was an active shooter call in their facility. They felt that there were problems in evacuating quickly, and some were concerned about leaving bed-ridden patients behind while the clinical staff run out of the building. So they advocated locking down all doors instantly.

While the heated discussion continued for almost three hours – at the end there was no “BEST” solution. Each Security Director or Manager will have to decide for themselves which approach is right for their organization. The important thing is to think it through in advance, prepare people in advance, and take advantage of the great materials that are available to help organizations prepared.

Get more information including videos, training materials, on line courses and more at
http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness.

Benghazi Hearing Demonstrates Attack Uncovered A Fatal Lack of Coordination & Funding for Embassy Security

Posted on May 8, 2013 2:37 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Just two weeks ago, we were talking about the lack of coordination between DHS agencies and known intelligence on the brothers responsible.

Now we have the Benghazi Senate hearings, and here is the same problem again – lack of coordination between different parts of the State Department, and with the Defense Department, AND with the CIA and the intelligence community.

Add to this, the appalling cuts in funding for diplomatic security, and a flawed process about what needs to be done about security and protection to our embassies around the world.

“In these tight budget times, the committee has had to make some tough choices to prioritize funding.”, said a GOP aide in The Hill article (GOP cuts to embassy security draw scrutiny), by Alexander Bolton on September 18, 2012. In spite of the uncertainly of the Arab Spring, the demonstrations every Friday in streets from Bahrain to Tunesia, the embassies had their budgets cut.

Of course, security experts are used to this, security doesn’t directly generate revenue, and it is often one of the first functions on the chopping block. However, to cut funding to the critical embassy functions in this volatile environment, is obviously a very bad decision on the part of the GOP.

For example, the security risk assessment which are routinely done on these embassies are not done on a systematic basis. As a risk expert, these security risk assessments should be done WEEKLY, and they should be automated so they can instantly be compared to environments in other embassies, and comparisons made by month, by year, and trends can be tracked.

If we can’t afford to do these assessments and just as important, if we can’t afford to fix the problems that assessments reveal, then we should not have embassies in these places.

The security risk assessments that are done properly must also include complete threat assessments. “We need to develop a paradigm for managing risk“, said Gregory Hicks, a Foreign Service Officer who testified today on Capitol Hill.

These paradigms for managing risk already exist and they have been totally ignored by the State Department, which makes it almost impossible to get a clear, unfiltered view of the security situation at any embassy, at any point in time.

At least both sides of the political aisle agree, we do not want this to happen again! Benghazi is not a political problem, it is a massive security failure problem!

3 Cleveland Women Freed -The New Front Line of the War on Women

Posted on May 8, 2013 1:54 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton

For the past 4 days, media attention has been focused on the three Cleveland girls who were abducted close to their homes and kept as prisoners in an old run-down house with neighbors on all sides.

NOW, neighbors tell how they broke down the door to free the women, the little 6-year old girl who came out with them, presumably the child of their abductor, and stories of screams coming from the house over the LAST TEN YEARS.

Besides the obvious curiosity about how they are, how this happened, how they were subdued for so long, and all the salient details, my question is WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, AND WHAT DO WE NEED TO CHANGE TO MAKE SURE IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!

As a security analyst, I have to place some of the blame at the door of the Cleveland police, not that they are different from any other police department in the U.S. Police are trained to catch criminals – that is their reason for being. But it seems that, increasingly, in crimes where women go missing, even a 16-year-old, the search for them never really gets underway. With no speeding car to chase, no easy suspicious person to detain, they stop looking.

Statistics say that about 2300 people go missing every day, over half are men, so that
leaves about 1000 females, and of these, about 70% are young women. so that easy math – about 700 A DAY! or 255,500 EVERY YEAR!

My point is just that the Cleveland Triple Abduction should be a wake up call for parents, citizens AND law enforcement to find a better way to search for these missing girls.

The world has changed – we have cameras, social media, facebook pages, and we need for all of these to be routinely used to find missing girls before we see another case exactly like this one.

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