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Case Number 60
In August 2004, I was contacted by our county communications center on a Sunday to meet with the United States Secret Service at one of our local hotels. The dispatcher contacting me had no further information. Upon arrival at the hotel, I was met by two Secret Service agents who informed me that we had two days to plan for a Presidential visit. President George W. Bush was planning on speaking at a picnic in the western end of Cumberland County and then using this picnic as a backdrop to introduce his wife at the 2004 Republican Convention.
As the plan started to develop every member of our agency was utilized in some respect in this VIP Security Detail, with the exception of the on-duty shift who remained available to handle our normal calls for service. This also included our community service officers, who were used at traffic control points distant to the main location, and our administrative and clerical staff that was on stand-by at our station for resource contacting, should that become necessary. Our plan for using county resources was hindered, due to the fact that the majority of those resources were already committed to the event in the western part of our county.
In all, over 28 sworn officers from four different jurisdictions were used on the detail. So many officers in fact, that we ran out of police vehicles and utilized codes enforcement and public works vehicles at certain distant locations. Additionally, we reached out to our planning partners through our resource/notification manual to get additional items necessary to ensure a well-developed plan was in place to meet our needs and those of the Secret Service.
Once the President arrived at his next venue, we conducted an informal debriefing. Comments were received from outside agencies who were surprised at the detailed nature of our planning, since they had never been exposed to such an event in the past. In the end, the best compliment came from the special agent in charge of the security detail who complimented the organization on pulling together a successful operation of this detail in such a short amount of time. There is no doubt in my mind that had it not been for compliance with the CALEA Standards on Special Event and VIP Planning, we would not have been so successful in preparing for and handling such a detail.
In May 2005, Lower Allen Township Police Department’s planning was again put to the test. Unbeknownst to the department, a domestic situation which had been brewing for some time came to a head in an elementary school parking lot. Once again, prior planning with our partners, in this case the West Shore School District, facilitated a successful response to a tragic situation.
A woman, attempting to get out of a reported abusive situation, arrived at the elementary school to pick-up her daughter and move to a new location with relatives, away from an abusive partner. The partner arrived in the parking lot and confronted the female victim, eventually taking her life before committing suicide.
Planning with the school district for incident response and training agency personnel on the incident command system, allowed a coordinated response, not only from the police department, but with our emergency medical services providers and our fire department in successfully mitigating this situation. Fortunately, no students were involved, as the school immediately went into lock down and then coordinated a dismissal procedure for the children with the police department, so as not to walk them anywhere close to the crime scene. Once again, adherence to the CALEA Standards for unusual occurrences, and our program relationship with the school district, allowed all of the players to be familiar with each other and with the response prior to an incident.
The incident command system was used successfully in both of these events, and were just two of several incidents reviewed as part of the analysis required by the incident command standards in Chapter 46, Critical Incidents, Special Operations, and Homeland Security. The required analysis enabled our agency to take a critical review of our actions and of our planning to identify areas to be improved, and where continual training needed to be provided. In both of these high-profile events, adherence to the CALEA Standards allowed a small size agency to successfully handle incidents of this magnitude.
Frank E. Williamson, Jr., Director of Public Safety Lower Allen Township (PA) Police Department
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