Twenty Years After I Wrote About Emergency Management Topics, Where Do Things Stand Now?

In the personal statement I wrote for one of my graduate school applications, I wrote:

"... I remembered that as [a Law Enforcement] Explorer, before getting married and starting a family, I had in fact been interested in emergency management as a career. At that time, it was still a fairly new concept. The 1996 All Hazards Conference, held at Boston’s World Trade Center that June, was filled with discussion about the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah federal building bombing and the 1993 attempt on New York City’s World Trade Center. In addition, the Great Hanshin Earthquake in Kobe, Japan in 1995 was a major topic of discussion."

I never actually got into emergency management, though. My Air Force career had ended in ROTC before it even began due to running injuries. With no idea what else to do with myself (note to all kids and daydreamers everywhere: always have a Plan B, and maybe a Plan C too), I got married in 1999, two years before 9/11 and my pivot to become a freelance writer.

As it turned out, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and all the federal grant money flowing from that priority made for plenty of writing opportunities. I decided writing about emergency management and policing was the next best thing to actually working in those fields.

I didn't write anything earth-shattering, or groundbreaking. Most of what I wrote in those years, including several of the following articles, were considered "earned media" -- coverage of commercial solutions being advertised, or candidates for advertising.

(I still have mixed feelings about that, as I'll describe. At the time, I thought of trade media as a stepping stone into "real" journalism, only for me it didn't work out that way. It wasn't long before I was raising babies alongside my writing work. In a home office instead of a newsroom, I think I was too tapped out on hormones and meeting all those impossible new-mother standards to really commit to learning or honing good journalism.)

I didn't yet understand the whole machine behind corporate public relations – everything from the customer-sources they curated, to the stories they spun – and I couldn't figure out how to schmooze the right sources to go layers deeper.

Nonetheless, the articles serve as a (very) small snapshot of the years just following 9/11; how vendors operating in the law enforcement space were shaping response to emergencies and the investigations that might surround them.

Interoperability, information sharing, and training

My first article on the topic was published in Law Enforcement Technology a month after DHS' inception. "Stretching Your Resources: How a regional consortium can help your agency get what it needs" focused on how larger law enforcement agencies could form groups with smaller ones, each helping the other share better information and access better technology through funding, training, and support.

Then came "Wireless middleware helps agencies communicate over disparate networks," a more technology-focused look at interoperability. This earned-media piece, published in July 2003, described the use of various software suites and the need for information security via encryption and firewall technology.

I then turned my attention to training. "How can agencies best coordinate their efforts to determine who responds where and get what they need to be most effective?" I asked in "Communicating at TOPOFF 2: A keystone in terrorism response" published in the July/August 2003 issue of Police & Security News. "Furthermore, how do they address problems like equipment failure or interagency miscommunication?"

Such problems had been identified in May 2000, at the first federally directed, multistate disaster drill known as TOPOFF 2000, and in September 2001 during the 9/11 attacks. Three years after the first drill, TOPOFF 2 coordinated responses to a mock dirty bomb attack in Seattle and a mock pneumonic plague bioterror attack in Chicago. A separate but concurrent communications drill was held in the National Capital Region.

Some of the problems were definitely signs of the times. Responders in both cities identified the need for more computers, which might seem unimaginable in today's age of commonplace computing technology. In addition, FEMA was still working out the bugs of having been absorbed into DHS after more than 20 years functioning independently.

Other problems, though, remain perennial. Conflicting reports from other federal agencies, miscommunications among first responders, and the need to keep the public informed without inciting panic have not changed. And, though the technology-related challenges may have shifted, they continue to challenge responders. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, for instance, cellular service and even radio systems were down.

I've noticed that no matter what discipline these problems occur in, people nod when you talk about them. Then the same problems recur in the next response. People know the unthinkable can happen, but they're willing to play the odds that it won't. As a species, we fear change and seek comfort.

(I also drew on TOPOFF learnings in another earned-media advertorial piece, "Safety on the Scene," published in Law Enforcement Technology several months before TOPOFF 2 took place. It described self-contained breathing apparatus for law enforcement, particularly tactical units.)

"WMD Preparedness From a Distance" was an earned-media article published in Law Enforcement Technology in August 2003. It was about various newly launched online training and higher education programs, most of which, other than FEMA's Emergency Management Institute (EMI), I wasn't able to find through search.

Of course, such programs have become widespread nowadays, making WMD preparedness just one specialty under the broader umbrella of homeland security and/or emergency management programs. Undergraduate and graduate certificate and degree programs join the more practical training offered by state emergency management departments and institutes like the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Services (TEEX).

A year after writing about WMD preparedness, I argued for "The value of police / fire cross training," encouraging departments to learn how each discipline worked beyond their silos, with an eye toward communicating and working together more effectively to support unified command.

"Cross-training ideally eliminates the individual's reaction in favor of a unified, informed response," I wrote, pointing to examples like the need to preserve evidence along with decontaminating clothing at, say, a terrorist incident, identifying clandestine drug labs, and field as well as academy-level training.

While I can't claim that single article made any major impact, I was happy that in my recent ICS 300 experience, the trainers saw fit to mix disciplines within the room's four groups. Mine included two fire officers, a detective, and a forestry expert. Other groups included dispatchers and emergency medical responders.

Not only cross-training but also the interoperable technology to support interagency communication was necessary. April 2005's "Justice XML: What is it, and what does it mean?" was a very technical, in-the-weeds piece about the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM), or Justice XML standard for interoperability, which underpins several regional data-sharing initiatives across the United States.

The following month, Law Enforcement Technology published my more accessible sequel, "How Law Enforcement Agencies Are Implementing GJXDM," an earned-media piece that described the Northwest Indiana Criminal Justice Network, Los Angeles County's RISA project, and CrimeCog, which was targeted to small- to medium-sized agencies.

These information-sharing initiatives focused on predictive or "intelligence led" policing and crime analysis, which were also big trends at that time (and the subject of other articles I wrote). The vendors marketing the tools often included language about investigative information-sharing, offender tracking, and mass-casualty event management.

Natural disasters may not be "attributable," but rarely do modern natural disasters happen without some degree of technological or human caused compounding factors.

My audience, though, seemed more interested in the predictive analytics they could implement in their day-to-day operations, rather than the less likely or more specialized "use cases" of terrorist attacks. In fact, another earned-media piece the following month made for a de facto series on "Shareable intelligence," and a second article, "How Useful Are Commercial Aerial and Satellite Images to Law Enforcement?" published in Police & Security News' September / October 2005 issue, described basically open source intelligence (OSINT): the consolidation of maps and aerial imagery from the US Geological Service (USGS) for one, not just to conduct tactical operations but also to preplan VIP visits and even respond to hurricanes.

How it started / how it's going

At that point in my career, I found myself wishing I could cover more of the organizations I was writing about – the six Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS), the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTAs), the Department of Homeland Security’s Joint Regional Information Exchange System (JRIES), and others – than the software products they were using.

Yet with each new article, the vendors seemed to be the only people available to talk with. I didn't yet understand the whole machine behind corporate public relations – everything from the customer-sources they curated, to the stories they spun – and I couldn't figure out how to schmooze the right sources to go layers deeper.

On another timeline, I might have been in a better position to properly assess the way vendors were shaping both public safety technology and the emergency responses it was designed to support.

By the time I went to work for vendors in digital forensics, though, technological solutionism had infused vendors' every corner: from development to production to marketing and sales. As the snowball of preparedness (and, crucially, its federal funding) gained momentum throughout the aughts, teens, and 20s, so did vendors' conviction that their products were nothing less than a form of doing their part to contribute to a safer society.

Do I, as a citizen, feel safer, though? I'm not sure:

I've noticed emergency managers posting on LinkedIn about the role of AI in emergency management, without stopping to consider how water-guzzling AI data centers might contribute to future emergencies to manage.

And those perennial communications problems? I've noticed that no matter what discipline they occur in, people nod when you talk about them. Then the same problems recur in the next response. People know the unthinkable can happen, but they're willing to play the odds that it won't. As a species, we fear change and seek comfort.

Recent disasters in my local community were handled as well as they could be by a system now undercut by a lengthening federal government shutdown and plans to shift the burden of response to states and localities. Given the effort that went into coordinating everything from debris cleanup to public information last time, I imagine recovery from another major disaster in my area wouldn't go as smoothly next time. I'm not so sure our community is strong enough to effectively distribute funds, labor, or other necessities to affected people, at least not evenly. Having survived as a single mother of limited means, I worry that who deserves it might be top of mind for many.

At which point, I'm not comfortable with the degree of intelligence police continue to reach for. Intelligence isn't evidence, as the saying goes, so not only is it not intended to be defensible in court; it also isn't, by definition, subject to the same Fourth Amendment protections as evidence, nor admissibility standards like scientific reasoning.

The theories (stories) that can be constructed from intelligence are as prone to bias as any interpretation of evidence, and with regard to emergency preparedness and response, that matters. A lot. Natural disasters may not be "attributable," but rarely do modern natural disasters happen without some degree of technological or human caused compounding factors – think of a bridge washout or a poorly snuffed campfire. The difference between negligence and criminal intent could come down to social media posts, Alexa recordings, Ring doorbell cameras, or other pieces of "intelligence."

Alas, by now, I don't have any fight left in me to take up my mightier-than-the-sword writing implement and wade back into the fray to help make sense of all this. Better experienced and resourced professionals are already doing a great job. Mine at the moment involves grad school and a much deeper, more personal look at the effects of trauma on disaster response at various levels. Subscribe to keep on learning with me!