MIPT

By Tony Kimery, HSTODAY.com

One outside-the-box security thinker proposes a rationale for action that can be taken by the public in a variety of potential terrorist situations, including attackers on mass transit systems. He’s Robert David Steele, a former CIA officer and internationally recognized authority on 21st Century intelligence reform and functioning.

[Editor’s note: Public transportation security is the focus of the April Homeland Security Today report, “A New Day for Mass Transit.”]

While "'duck and cover’ was the national defense paradigm during the Cold War…'rush and crush’ should be the new paradigm for today,” Steele said in an interview.

“Like lifeguards, the first person to see a threat should yell ‘gun,’ or ‘bomb,’ and point. Everyone else simultaneously throws everything they have—handbags, books, umbrellas, whatever—at the person, and the nearest ten people tackle the threat. Even if it is a bomb and it goes off, doing so will save the many.

"Our public needs to be alert and to understand that 'rush and crush’ tactics will keep the death toll in future incidents down to one or two at most,” Steele told HSToday.us.

The always controversial but visionary Steele further believes that a simple national education program with entertaining drills announced in advance (typically, drills include pre-announced individuals carrying weapons or bomb-like objects painted bright blue), on every form of mass transit, would capture the public imagination.

Similarly, RAND terrorism expert Peter Chalk is a supporter of “active civic outreach efforts” such as ‘if you see something, say something’ campaigns that “stress the need for train passengers to quickly report suspicious behavior or packages.”

But “employee awareness education” also must “be stressed,” Chalk has said. “Rail workers should be equipped with a decisionmaking framework that they can apply to assess potentially dangerous and suspicious situations without having to be an expert in threat identification.”

William Waugh Jr., an internationally known scholar in disaster studies and emergency management who has worked with the Department of Homeland Security extensively researching mass transit security in the United States, also has said that “public awareness and a good reporting system, as well as luck, may be the most effective security system for mass transit systems.”

To this end, some US transit systems have implemented “Transit Watch,” a nationwide public awareness and education campaign that encourages transit employees, passengers and others who use or are near transit stations or infrastructure to be alert to suspicious activities, packages or situations.

But counterterror experts say transit authorities still need to be more visibly aggressive in promoting programs like Transit Watch.

“Maybe they need to use shock and awe in these programs to make employees and the public understand the consequences of an attack,” HSToday.us was told by David Cid, a former FBI counterterrorism specialist and now deputy director of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City.

“They also need to be educated on precisely what suspicious indicators they should be reporting … and more visible [telephone] numbers to call," Cid said.

[Editor's note: David Cid wrote the HSToday.us "Best Practices" report, "Keeping Bombs off America's Streets: A Case Study of Prevention in Oklahoma City"]

You can find the online version of Tony Kimery's article at HSTODAY.com