I recently watched a reality TV show whose subject is the security force at one of the world’s largest retail malls. The show is aptly named Mall Cops: Mall of America (airs on the TLC network Thursday nights 10E/9C). No ordinary mall, the Mall of America draws over 40 million visitors a year. Covering some 3 million square feet, this immense property is located spitting distance from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport and also houses a metro transit hub.
It is an American capitalist institution and therefore, alas, a potential target for terrorists.
Securing this behemoth is no easy task, but then the MOA team is no ordinary security force. Its members are carefully vetted, many are retired military or aspiring law enforcement officers. But more to my point, its force is also carefully trained. Under the watchful eye of Captain Mike Rozin, a counter terrorism professional, officers are trained to look for indicators of threat in context. They are trained in engaging people in open ended questioning – a critically valuable skill. They know how to profile behavior and they understand their adversaries. The MOA security program has received awards and is lauded as one of the best around.
I applaud MOA for its commitment to professionalism and for going the extra mile. I believe that the strategies they have implemented could be used to great effect in protecting many other environments and that programs such as theirs should be the bar against which security programs are measured.
Maybe this could be on step closer to professionalism in the industry, rather than the warm body, low dollar and limited training plan.
Unfortunately this type of security will be the exception and not the norm until an attack. As with so many of these situations we are reactionary, instead of being action oriented in the industry. Until property owners realize that the threat is real and agree to pay for highly trained professional staff we are at a disadvantage.
It’s great that security specialists in large malls know they represent an attractive target for terrorists, but what’s interesting is that while most
Americans instantly understand why high-profile targets like Mall of America and US Government buildings are symbolically attractive targets, very few understand why other less obvious soft targets (hospitals, schools, police and fire stations, and large sporting event locations can be even more strategically important.
These targets, when hit, can have huge financial effects, and profound effects on the entire first responder network.
The first goal of any terrorist group is to establish a financial base by linking itself with revenue streams from existing criminal enterprises. Their second goal is to plan attacks that will destabilize a region by launching attacks that completely overwhelm its first responder system, and cause the people to believe their government can no longer protect them. Today, we are seeing unprecedented sharing of intelligence, funding, and training between a wide variety of terrorist and criminal groups, all hoping to launch attacks on US soil.
We must be completely prepared at the community level to stop them. The key to all of this is to interrupt their surveillance cycle and inhibit their ability to hit soft targets easily. Every employee and famiiy member must be encouraged to immediately report any threat indicator.
The larger challenge we face as a culture is getting the management ranks of any soft target facility to buy into developing some form of proactive emergency planning BEFORE an attack begins. I have several friends who are highly experienced combat veterans in professional civilian security management positions who have had the bitter experience of having been
asked to implement a complete security program and active shooter training course for their security department in hospitals and large corporate headquarters; and once they have completed the program planning, purchased equpment (including weapons) have been told at the last minute that their jobs have been “eliminated” because some VP “uncomfortable” with the idea of having an armed response on site. In one case, the VP of a large hospital close to O’Hare airport shut down the whole security dept because he felt it was “dangerous” to have weapons in the hospital and that he didn’t feel it was “a good thing for a faith based organization [a hospital] to be associated with.” He clearly is unaware that his hospital would be the secondary attack zone for any primary terrorist attack on O’Hare, and that it is highly likely terrorists would use ambulances as VBIEDs coming to his hospital in a secondary wave of attacks, as they have done numerous times in Pakistan this year.
He’s also ignoring the fact that there are many things in his hospital that are far more dangerous to the public than rifles locked up in a secure location…like the thousands of units of Class III narcotics that are stolen each year, and the roughly 800,000 people who die each year from procedural and medication mistakes in hospitals….
The only way around this might be a public awareness campaign about how crucial each second after an attack is, and how important it is that there be a systematic response to any terrorist attack already planned and available.
The problem is that we can’t even get school administrations to conduct regular active shooter drills in the same manner that they do fire drills. Yet more kids have been killed by active shooters than have ever been harmed by a school fire.
Doubly troubling is the fact that these fire drills just train kids to run out into predictable kill zones. Whether it’s schools or shopping malls, all a terrorist would have to do is pull fire alarms, and people would stream outside into predictable locations. Not good.
The real challenge is that employees in most soft target locations are not trained in predictive profiling, and are asked by their employers to look for attack precursors or to do surveillance detection. Yet they can be trained very simply and cost effectively, if only the managers and administrators of these soft target faciities could understand that training never costs, it always pays.