Voiceover: 00.00 This is the Beat - a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation Melissa Niese: 00.08 Hello and welcome. My name is Melissa Niese, and on behalf of the COPS office I’d like to introduce to you Ian Hay. Ian is the president of the Southeast Emergency Response Network and he is here to talk to us today about emergency management. Ian, can you tell us about the Southeast Emergency Response Network, SEERN for short? And how you work in real time to address public safety and emergency management incidents? Ian Hay: 00.37 Indeed and thanks Melissa for having us. This is a great experience and we’re happy to share what we do. The short version history of SEERN is we were initially established as an FBI-DHS information-sharing pilot under Secretary Ridge predominantly focused on horizontal information sharing, not through sectors. So if the white van showed up at the energy company it made sense to tell the water company that something was going on. After a small period of time, and in 2007, we were established as a 501(c)(3), so a non-profit, based in Georgia to continue that work building a common operating picture for the Southeast, now today reaches the Texas border to the Carolinas and Kentucky to Florida. We’re very fortunate to have great relationships with the National Operations Center under DHS, DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection, the Private Sector Office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and of course FEMA Private Sector Division, and the DoD. And really what we do is we build a common area that people can come and share information, and we run on a platform that probably many of your listeners are familiar with. It’s called the CyperCop Portal sponsored by NC4. And we actually use incidents that are driven off of web or police and fire radio traffic, for instance. There’s some novel communications technologies that NC4 employs. And then we share that information with a given location, whether it be Arkansas or the city of Atlanta, etc. We’re also recently experimenting with a new product to us and that’s the National Operations Center media monitoring capability, and this is capturing web, Twitter, real news feeds. And we’re able to push this to our users, and we’re still in the process of how we’re going to officially pilot that. But our mission is to accelerate information. So if you receive information in, say, Anderson County, South Carolina, and we have an asset there, they could then push that information back saying, “Hey, that incident is over. Everything’s safe.” And so that’s where we get into the real time incident management, whether it’s a suspicious package or a hazmat event or something like the shutdown of I-40, which is a major corridor that would affect business. Niese: 02.51 Great. Can you share with us an example or two of how you addressed a public safety or emergency situation? Hay: 02.59 Happy to. I think there are two that really stick out in our experience. One was before SEERN really existed and this was just a model concept. During the G8 summit we brought the Atlanta headquartered firms into a briefing to describe to them how domestic protesters were going to act during the G8 summit on Sea Island in 2004. And to give them some of a bit of a leg up to understand what their tactics were, how they were going to operate, and how they could respond to us as the public safety command. And by doing this real time we got great information from the private sector and public sector was able to share real time information to help protect assets and or course customers and shoppers alike. The second was in 2008 during the DNC, and you’re going to say, “Well, that was in Colorado, it has nothing to do with the Southeast.” We actually had a request from someone to come out and say, “Hey we know you have experience in national special security events. Could you come out and help us?” And so we did site surveys of construction sites; we worked real time walking along the streets. There were undercover law enforcement, there were protesters. It was a great time. But I think one of the key pieces was communicating with the city emergency management and we had about 40-50,000 people who needed bottled water outside the stadium waiting for then-candidate Obama to speak. And so we worked with the private sector and their command in the state EOC and the city EOC to get them water on a really hot day. So that’s just an example of some of the types of things that we do. Niese: 04.35 That’s great and those are great examples. So, how can law enforcement work with SEERN when an incident occurs? And how can law enforcement learn more about what you do, and how can they be involved? Hay: 04.47 Absolutely. I think my key here, and if you had one takeaway from this conversation, would be you have to train the way you fight. And so in a perfect world, let me use Atlanta as an example. You have a number of headquartered firms. Just imagine if we could bring in law enforcement and tactical teams, SWAT officers, et cetera, to survey each of those corporate headquarters. By training and exercising in that venue they’ll be have a great leg up on any incidents and potential incidents that might happen, whether they be public safety or emergency management. And so really it’s the preparedness aspect of bringing people together so we know each other, we’ve worked together, we know each other by face. Secondly, the key thing that we have to do is we build that relationship of trust to be able to share information. If you share information with me Melissa, and you don’t want it to go anywhere, I’m not going to share that. But if you say, “Hey, this can go to some close-hold people,” then we can modify what we share to really build a common operating picture and a unified response to an incident. In terms of getting involved with SEERN, as I said we’re everything from the Texas border to the Carolinas, Kentucky to Florida. We work with business emergency operations centers; it’s a new wave across the country. New Jersey, sort of has headed up a business emergency center alliance that we’re working—I serve as a board member on. And so we interface with states on a number of different levels. But the best way to reach me is to ping me with an email at membership@seern.org. You can also ping me on my LinkedIn account, and you can follow me on Twitter, IanatSEERN. Niese: 06.32 Great. Thank you so much Ian for joining us today and for providing all of your expertise. Hay: 06.37 It’s my pleasure. Voiceover: 06.41 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation's communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships and solving problems.