Category Archives: www.caroline-hamilton.com

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

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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.

 

 

 

Lack of Security Risk Assessments cited as Contributing to Benghazi Embassy Attack

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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 -The New Front Line of the War on Women

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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.

 

 

How to Plan for a Rare Threat or Weather Event

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Whether it’s a crime, a meteor shower, a dam breach or a major hack attack, how can
security directors, managers (and even individuals) plan for the extremely rare threat event?

Even with the challenges of global warmings and changing patterns in society, and, apparently, in space, it’s still possible to anticipate and prepare for the outlier events.

You start with the known elements, for example, lately, some residential developers have been building in established flood plains, because, hey , there hasn’t been a flood in over 50 years.  But there are 100-year flood plains, 50-year flood plains and 200-year flood plains.  If your home, or facility, is located in a 50-year flood plain, and it’s been 48 years since the last flood, you can correctly infer that the next five years, you have an increased flood risk!

How to find out about flood risk?  If you live in the USA, you can go to www.floodsmart.gov, put in your zip code, and find out whether or not you are located in a flood plain, or flood prone area.  If you find out that you are, then you can add some additional preparation to make sure this threat is not going to materialize, or if it does, you’re ready!

Another example,  if your house/facility is in a high risk flood area, that means that there is a 1 in 4 chance (25% chance) that the property will experience a flood during the next 30 years.

If we look at chance of being hit by a meteor shower, we might find that a meteor hits the earth, with an impact, once every hundred years.   And so we take that 1 in 100 number and factor in the global surface, say divide it into 50 regions.  So that reduces that 1 in 100 number down to a much lesser number, maybe one in 100,000.

While the rare events are shocking when they occur, you can plan for them, by analyzing your risk, and putting in the proper controls so that if or when it happens, you’re ready and can continue to operate with the minimal of disruption!

We’re analyzing and examining  over 65 threats in the next 12 months, so subscribe to the blog and collect all the latest threat information.

Adding a New and Real Threat – Meteor Shower Damage

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After the meteor showers over Siberia this week, Russia put together a Financial analysis of the damage from

1200 injured by flying glass
$33,000,000 in damage
4,000 building damaged
50 Acres of windows shattered

In the last twenty-five years, as the rate of climate change has increase, we have added new threats like Tsunami and ash pollution (from Subic Bay in the Phillipines).

Now meteor showers have actually come to cause damage to companies so they are another factor to be included in risk assessments.

In evaluating threats for a risk assessment, many in the northeast would always tell me,“take out earthquakes”, we don’t have earthquakes in Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio.  That changed in 2011 when the Mineral, Virginia earthquake hit during a mid-week business day.

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) – Aug. 24, 2011.  There was an earthquake in Central Virginia that measured 5.8 on the Richter scale centered about 5 miles south of Mineral in Louisa, depth 3.7 miles at about 1:51 p.m. The quake was centered at 38°N, 78°W.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was centered about 38 miles northwest of Richmond, Va., about 84 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., and was felt as far north as Rhode Island and New York City. See a map of the quake from Chuck Bailey, professor of geology at the College of William and Mary.

Hospitals, government offices, dams and power generating plants,  including nuclear plants, were forced to suddenly reevaluate the long held idea that earthquakes just didn’t happen in the NorthEast.

The threat from meteor damage is the same idea.  It never happened before, but now it has happened again, if you count Tunguska as the first time.

Damage from meteor showers will now add a new category into the Threat index, even though this was the first event in my lifetime, if analyst factor in the previously known instances, such as the Tunguska Meteor Event, which did not occur thousands of years ago, like the meteor event in the Yucatan peninsula that killed off the dinosaurs, but
Tunguska occurred in 1908!   Almost in this century.

Over the next month, we’ll be looking at each different threat every week.  Sign up for my blog or access by following me on twitter at www.twitter.com/riskalert.

 

Assessing School Security Takes on New Dimensions after Sandy Hook Tragedy

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After 30 years of security risk assessment experience and working with hundreds of schools, hospitals, facilities, I have to say that schools have not taken school security seriously.

Obviously there are the social pressures including mental health screening, proposed assault weapons bans, gun owner screening, etc., but these are the thing that won’t change overnight.  EVEN IF THEY ARE LEGISLATED, it takes time to implement, and
implementation may not be perfect.

TODAY IS THE DAY TO DO A SCHOOL VIOLENCE ASSESSMENT – not tomorrow, not after new gun laws, not after the holidays — TODAY.

There are indicators you can look for to see if your school is at risk of an active shooter incident.  And ways to be prepared if the unthinkable happens and an active shooter comes to your school.

Strong, simple access control is the most effective solution, and yes, this may mean that
a plain glass front door or window is not enough.  Glass is easily broken, and yes, it means that all staff must be a little more accountable, and it probably means a red phone or connection to the local police.

There is a simple school risk assessment program that will give guidance on what you need to do TODAY, what controls you need to implement, what threats are most likely to occur.  These can be accessed on the www.riskandsecurityllc.com website.

Some things are preventable, some aren’t.  But lockdown drills, alarm systems, and active monitoring of cameras are just a few of the 60 controls every school should have in place to protect our precious children.

And this comes from the grandmother who’s 3-year old twins turned 3 yesterday!

 

After The Surgeon Kills Girlfriend at the Hospital – what next?

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Time for a Workplace Violence Assessment? You think?

The shooting death of 33-year-old Jacqueline Wisniewski at Erie County Medical Center left the community in shock last week, especially since the shooter was a surgeon!

The surgeon’s body was found Friday, near his home, with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. And this tragedy illustrates why EVERY hospital and medical center should be required to do a Baseline Workplace Violence Assessment.

The warning signs were there, the surgeon had lost weight, had become moody and distant, and also had advanced special forces weapons training in his background.

That’s exactly why he passed a background check, but after that initial check, his blatant symptoms of personal problems were ignored, even by the very people who observed them.

Now the hospital staff is traumatized, a beautiful young nurse is dead, the Eric County Medical Center administrators can look forward to an in-depth OSHA investigation, with possible fines and even more disruption.

Don’t let your hospital be a victim of this kind of incident. A Workplace Violence Assessment can be completed in just 5 days, and will reduce the chance of a potential violent incident by over 75%.

Email me directly to get the new white paper on how to prevent workplace violence incidents at caroline-hamilton@att.net.

Rats with Spinal Cord Injuries Recover to Walk and Run using Electricity & Chocolate!

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The amazing part of this experiment was that if you believe in the power of positive thinking…

And you watched WHAT THE BLEEP more than twice….

And you believe in the power of visualization and of the brain to rewire itself….

YOU WERE RIGHT!

The article was published in SCIENCE MAGAZINE today, June 1, 2012.

The rats had severe (not moderate) spinal cord injuries and were rehabbed with a combination of electric stimulus and the rats were also shown a big reward – chocolate, that they had to “visualize themselves” getting.

“After a couple of weeks of neurorehabilitation with a combination of a robotic harness and electrical-chemical stimulation, our rats are not only voluntarily initiating a walking gait, but they are soon sprinting, climbing up stairs and avoiding obstacles when stimulated,” Courtine, chairman of the International Paraplegic Foundation, said in a statement.

The brain and spinal cord can adapt and recover from moderate injury, a quality known as neuroplasticity, but until now, the spinal cord expressed so little plasticity after severe injury that recovery was impossible.

Courtine said his findings prove, under certain conditions, plasticity and recovery can take place in these severe cases after the spinal cord was injected a chemical solution of monoamine agonists.

These chemicals trigger cell responses by binding to specific dopamine, adrenaline and serotonin receptors located on the spinal neurons, Courtine said.

Five to 10 minutes after the injection, the scientists electrically stimulated the spinal cord with electrodes implanted in the outermost layer of the spinal canal, which sent continuous electrical signals through nerve fibers to the chemically excited neurons that control leg movement, the researchers said.

The findings are scheduled to be published in the June 1 issue of Science.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2012/05/31/Rats-with-spinal-cord-injuries-are-walking/UPI-89361338517404/#ixzz1wZpkM6Qw

How long does it take for OSHA to develop standards – like for Workplace Violence?

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Why OSHA standards take so long to develop

The Government Accountability office reports to Congress on items of interest to Congress and their constituents.  One area that was recently examined was how long it takes OSHA to update standards, or develop new standards.  Here’s a look at the results:

By: David LaHoda, April 30th, 2012

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on why OSHA standards take, on average, more than seven years to complete found that “increased procedural requirements, shifting priorities, and a rigorous standard of judicial review” contributed to the lengthy time frame.

In responding to the GAO report, Randy Rabinowitz, OMB Watch’s director of regulatory policy said: “In the years since its creation, OSHA’s charge to protect workers from harm has been undermined by Kafkaesque demands for additional reviews of existing rules mandated by new statutes and executive orders,” according to The Hill. While OSHA’s internal inability to remain focused on priorities and regulatory follow-through was the counter argument presented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“While some of the changes, such as improving coordination with other agencies to leverage expertise, are within OSHA’s authority, others call for significant procedural changes that would require amending existing laws,” according tot he GAO report.

The GAO report recommended that that OSHA and NIOSH improve collaboration on researching occupational hazards. In that way OSHA could better “leverage NIOSH expertise in determining the needs for new standards and developing them.”

For the entire 55-page report go to http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-330