NCJ Number
192254
Date Published
December 2000
Length
64 pages
Annotation
This final report detailed the activities of a workshop sponsored by the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Command (SBCCOM) and National Preparedness Office (NDPO) on coordinating the response of the law enforcement community and medical/public health community to a terrorist incident.
Abstract
As a consequence of the growing concern about domestic terrorism, the 104th Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act to help prepare the United States against a potential terrorist incident. The legislation required that the Secretary of Defense develop and implement a program for testing and improving Federal, State, and local agency responses to incidents involving biological, chemical, and radiological weapons. As a result, the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command (SBCCOM) was designated the primary agency for the Department of Defense and was responsible for establishing and executing these programs. In response, SBCCOM created the Biological Warfare (BW) Improved Response Program (IRP) in partnership with Federal agencies. The BW-IRP is a multi-year program designed to identify, evaluate, and demonstrate the best practical ways of improving BW domestic preparedness. Federal, State, and local officials will employ a variety of response activities following a bioterrorist incident. Two of these activities include the criminal and epidemiological investigations. While these investigations occur at the same time, the information is not necessarily shared between these two communities. In an effort to close this gap, SBCCOM collaborated with the National Preparedness Office (NDPO) to sponsor a workshop in January 2000. The goal of the workshop was “to identify methods to establish information-sharing relationships between the law enforcement community and the medical/public health community . . .” This report was divided into three sections. The first section discussed the process used to arrive at the conclusion of this report. The second section briefly discussed the core issues that drove the discussions among the respective panelists. The final section included the panelists’ conclusions and suggestions to facilitate increased coordination between law enforcement and the medical/public health communities. Recommendations in this report provided a starting point for jurisdictions to help improve coordination between law enforcement and medical/public health communities. The workshop participants identified a checklist of questions that is critical to each community’s investigations. Either community may ask these questions, and the information can be shared between the two communities. Another issue was the timely exchange of information once it has been retrieved. The workshop participants proposed an information sharing process with the emergency operations center as the hub for all involved agencies to easily exchange information. The sharing of sensitive information was also a subject of discussion and was the most contentious. The law enforcement community was concerned about releasing case-specific information that may alert potential suspects. The medical/public health community was concerned that if patient-specific data were released, a breach in patient trust would occur. Several obstacles must be overcome in the exchange of sensitive information between the law enforcement and public health communities. Each community must be able to assure the other that the sharing of sensitive information will not compromise an investigation or damage the relationships. This report gave general guidelines and was intended to increase general awareness of the issues surrounding effective investigative coordination between the law enforcement community and medical/public health community.