Criminal Justice - Cim Training

Criminal Justice - CIM Training SCENARIO-BASED PLANNING in CRITICAL INCIDENT Management The attacks of September 11th 2001 highlighted the need for critical incident management very dramatically even before emergency services reviews officially disclosed that basic communications breakdowns, specifically, were responsible for most of the 343 uniformed firefighters who died at the World Trade Center.

In its immediate aftermath, conflicts between the NYPD and the NYFD over authority and direction over recovery efforts at Ground Zero illustrated that strategic management and joint agency administrative planning and preparation are equally important to operational and tactical elements of critical incident management. Four years later, Hurricane Katrina illustrated that critical incident management is also critical for responses to natural disasters at the federal level, particularly since homeland security is considered the primary threat to the United States.

Unfortunately, Katrina revealed that even four years after September 11th, federal emergency strategic management is ill-equipped to respond to large-scale natural disasters, let alone to a significant terrorist attack involving widespread physical damage, contamination, or mass casualties. Resolving the problems of under-preparedness requires, among other things, a commitment to implementing scenario-based administrative and operational planning across the entire spectrum of the most likely significant threats to U.S. health, safety, and security (Koestner 2006).

The Role of Scenario-Based Planning in Critical Incident Management: Scenario-based tactical training has played a major role in military and law enforcement training for decades; virtually all modern local and state police officers and federal law enforcement agencies employ scenario-based training throughout their academies and in-service training programs. Originally conceived by military tacticians, repetitive training scenarios exploit the potential of performance improvement accomplished through developing trained reflexive responses (Lynch 2005) from repeated exposure to simulated tactical situations.

In law enforcement, scenario-based training was first incorporated into patrol officer training in connection with so-called "routine" situations, such as motor vehicle stops, restraining and subduing combative subjects, clearing interior crime scenes and securing external perimeters. Special services like SWAT, SERT, suicide prevention, and hostage negotiation teams expanded scenario-based training from tactical operations to include psychological components such as establishing rapport with subjects to effect peaceful surrender.

More recently, advances in computer capacity and sophisticated graphics have provided scenario-based testing programs in the law enforcement officer candidate selection process, enabling selection committees to identify personality and temperament qualities consistent with projected officer performance by observing candidates' responses to typical encounters and situations expected in the field (Lynch 2005). The recent focus on homeland security and terrorism has provided the impetus for extensive interagency strategic planning, particularly near presumed high-value targets and population centers.

In this regard, the law enforcement community has begun implementing scenario-based strategic planning in the nature of that used by American military strategists since the Cold War. Interagency strategic planning now includes scenario-based training wherein the specific components of local, state, and federal agencies charged with responding to critical incidents participate in joint exercises simulating the foreseeable demands for their joint services (Koestner 2006).

Benefits and Potential Difficulties: Scenario-based tactical training in law enforcement has undoubtedly improved the safety of officers, subjects, and victims at crime scenes by conditioning officers to respond reflexively after hours of repetitive simulated tactical exposure (Lynch 2005). In the case of strategic planning, operational synchronicity and resource implementation are the goals rather than reflexive individual responses, but, the benefit is analogous.

In much the same way that scenario-based tactical training ensures the desired application of force on the force continuum authorized for use by police on street patrol, scenario-based strategic planning ensures that the combined physical and human resources of large agencies (and multi-agency joint task forces) respond to critical incidents appropriately and as efficiently as possible (Koestner 2006).

At the same time that effective emergency management planning and critical incidence response efficiency requires scenario-based training, it is also susceptible to some of the same types of potential shortcomings that must be considered in tactical training situations. Specifically, while a wide range of situations is capable of.