 So our next panel is on essentially first responders and I'm just going to introduce Danelle Harmon who will introduce the panel. Danelle, and again you have his full bio, but we're very pleased that he's joined the college on the full time faculty this semester. He came to us from the office of the chief medical examiner where he was deputy director of their special operations which if you are a squeamish it's about what you would imagine. Prior to that he has a long history with the department of health and he never thinks it's funny but I just think it's an irresistible line that when he got promoted he was working outside of the office of the medical examiner so he was working with sick people and then he was promoted and works with dead people. Is this thing on? Okay, so anyway let me continue very quickly and move on since this is a tough room. Just a few things about the panelists, this is a panel I've worked with all three of the panelists and have a long association with them and so I just want to acknowledge that. Steve Sauer and I go back well over 20 years, we work together on a project for the U.S. Fire Administration doing a fire department communications manual which is maybe 25 years. Okay, and Steve if you read his bio just scratches the surface. I mean you just put a leather binder on Steve, he's got a remarkable wealth of experience and is really one of the most seasoned and knowledgeable and influential public safety communications experts in the nation. And I say that without any reservation. Frank Straub has had a long and very law enforcement career. I think the high point of Frank's career was in 2002 when he hired me as deputy commissioner of public safety in the city of White Plains. And we had a really remarkable experience there over, I was there five and a half years Frank was there a little longer but really taking a public safety department that had police and fire under a single commissioner and taking two separate organizations and really making great strides on integrating them and in a post 9-11 world doing a lot of work on that. And of course Glenn who needs no introduction but Glenn for those of you who don't know him is a, you know as I like to say there's no civilized fire station in the United States that doesn't have a book written or edited by Glenn Corbett on its bookshelf and so he's really, there's a rock star in the fire service world of academia, it's Glenn. So with that I will turn it over to Danelle and off we go. Oh, sorry. And one thing Frank Straub in his capacity in Spokane is going to be, is piloting body cameras for his officers. And so after this panel and before lunch he's going to show us a videotape about that and answer some, briefly some questions and answers about body cameras and all the issues those raise in terms of releasing that information. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Good morning everybody. Good morning. So before we begin I want to put something in perspective that I don't think we often appreciate. It's the reason why we're here and we're able to be here. So right now some place far remote, some place you'll never visit, there's a soldier laying and sleeping on the ground, hasn't had a hot shower or possibly a meal in weeks and hasn't slept in the bed in months. Right now there's a firefighter and she's climbing through a burning building to try to pull somebody out. There's a paramedic underneath a car trying to stabilize somebody. There's a police officer chasing someone down the street to try to make us safe. And so the reason why we're able to sit here and listen and talk about these things is because there are people out there getting down and getting dirty and doing the work. Okay. And to those folks we owe it to them to bring these issues out. So never forget them when you're talking about first responders and we're having these academic discussions. Never forget the people who make this possible. Not just those who are doing the job but those who have passed doing the job and those who are still dying, especially our brothers and sisters after 9-11. As a public health professional I can stand here with assertivity and tell you that in the next 20 years we'll have multitudes and multitudes of first responders who die after 9-11 as a result of 9-11. And so just a little briefly about myself and why I feel so close to the panel. I've been a first responder ever since high school. At 18 I knew what I wanted to do. I became an emergency medical technician. I became a paramedic at 21. I've never known anything but the streets of New York. And because of that I've responded since I was 18 to every major disaster in New York City. I was a paramedic student oddly enough in the back of the Beekman downtown hospital ambulance. And on that day in 1993 when the First World Trade Center bombing occurred. I didn't know what was going on. The radio chatter was just crazy. There's a fire. That's what we knew. I left my shift and said well there's a fire. We didn't understand what happened. There was no positive confirmation. We had no idea what we were going into. Fast forward to 9-11. I was actually a student here at 9-11 and I was running the EMT course. And I was working as a paramedic for the fire department. And then all call went out to all members to respond. I was on the A train when that happened. I was on the A train on Canal Street and I saw the second plane hit the towers. And I walked down from Canal Street to the first tower. I located an EMS command post and I started walking towards there. Not looking up because when you look up there were things falling down that you didn't want to see. Something I've never seen before. And I got about a block away from the first tower when I heard the loudest noise in my entire life. And I looked down and the world came down upon me. I was able to sit here and talk about these things but many of us are not. Many of our brothers and sisters aren't able to. And so plane crashes, train crashes. The whole works if you're a first responder in New York City you can respond to that stuff. And I'm fortunate enough to be in a position here at John Jay that I'm able to train the new generations of first responders. And the work that Sally and Glenn and Charles have done with this institution and preparing that next generation often goes unrecognized. The work that Professor Strozer who I studied under when I was a student here in terrorism often goes unrecognized. But these are the folks that are preparing the next generation of individuals that are going to allow us to have these type of conversations. And hopefully these conversations will happen a lot less frequently. But unfortunately as we've seen time and time again governments do not want to be held accountable. Governments do lack transparency and that usually permeates down and affects the people on the ground which are the first responders and the people they're trying to save. You people. And so large scale disasters often place a huge burden on first responders. As a first responder I never know what I'm going into. In fact the word terrorism didn't even impact me on that day in 9-11. I said that's odd. There's a hole in one of the buildings and I saw the other plane hit. As a first responder it didn't equate. A day later it didn't equate. And I said why would someone want to do that? So we're rushing into these scenes and not understanding. People are calling saying this is what's going on. We're not getting situational awareness and we're at the situation. We're on the ground and we have no concept of what's going on. And this is not going to change. It doesn't matter what country you're in. I speak around the globe. I speak to other first responders. High impact, large scale disasters impact first responders in a way that places them in what we call tunnel vision. And they just need to focus on, like I was focused on that day, let me just get to the EMS Lieutenant or CAF and get my instructions because I can't look at the madness that's going around. I can't do it. And so there's a breakdown of communications. Allowing the first response community to self-evaluate and look at their response retrospectively with the release of tapes, with the help of academia, with the help of citizens and family that are impacted, really brings the full response that they're going to be doing together. I'm here to tell you that after-action reports, you may have heard of that term, after-action reports are usually done after large scale events. They're generally scams. They're shams. They're commissioned by the same agency that doesn't want people to look at externally what they're doing. So they release these things. You can look at them. There's some usually good stuff, but there's nothing really hard-hitting unless you get a commission. Even then, it's not too often hard-hitting enough. But with that said, every after-action and every commission that you've ever seen for a high-impact instant always mentions one thing. And what's that? Communications. Every drill that's done, and I just did a large-scale drill, I consult for the District of Columbia. We just did a large-scale active shooter, suicide bomber drill about three weeks ago down in the district. And the first thing across the board, down the ladder, every agency said was communications. This is 13 years later. And we still can't get our communications right? We know it's a problem. We can't get it right. And so that places the first responders and the community at risk. And so we talked about the transparency, and obviously our panelists are very well-bursted in that, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I want you folks to see, we got the family's perspective. We're going to talk about the first-response community's perspective and how not releasing information is a hazard for first responders. Do you get that concept? They need to learn. They're smart individuals. They need to learn as an industry from their mistakes. And the release of this forces certain mechanisms that they may not be able to control within their agency. So the first responders, even up the leadership ladder, may understand what needs to be done, but there's external forces that need to happen. Maybe lawsuits. Lawsuits aren't bad. Lawsuits open up the books and allow... There's a lot of first responders and agencies that know what has to be done, but they can't get elected officials to do it. And the release of these type of things, you will be helping them. You will not be harming them. And so you've heard enough about, for me, obviously you have the extensive panel here, and I'm not going to take up too much more time, but I would like to introduce Professor Glenn Corbett, who is one of my... a person that's led me throughout my career for a very long time, and you have his bio, and Professor Jennings always mentioned it, Chief Frank Straub, who obviously is a leader in law enforcement and pushing the envelope, and Steve Soder, who's really widely recognized, and I've read some stuff that he's put out on communications for a long time, so I don't want to take up their time. I'd like to give the floor to them and ask them to say a few words, and hopefully we'll have some time for some interaction at the end, so thank you. Okay, I'll start first. As I mentioned, when we started today's conference, Charles and I have been talking about this a long time, and I think one of the reasons we've been talking about it for so long is because he and I have sort of hit those bumps in the road that we know that are out there, things that are impediments to getting access to information, because ultimately, what is this all about? You heard from the family members this morning that learning from the past is incredibly important, so you don't repeat it in the future, of course. So let me just give you three particular nuggets here. I think from my perspective that sort of pulled us together. For a long time, I've been technical editor of Fire Engineering Magazine. We're a 140-year-old trade journal, one of the oldest trade journals, actually, in the country. We started right after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, so that tells you how long we've been doing things. And one of our jobs, basically, is to study different kind of incidents, of course, primarily fire incidents across the country. And I can tell you, for the last 20-some odd years, I've been involved with them in these incidents. And I have to say, we do a particularly good job at being able to extract lessons and issues out of these incidents without making those organizations look particularly bad, you know? Because that's always an issue. You can really crucify us in your magazine and make us look really bad. Well, we do a particularly good job at that, but what I can tell you is that, again, over those last 20-some odd years, it's become increasingly difficult to get access to, even though a lot of these guys and gals are our friends, they run the fire departments across the country. They're in these things. The city's legal departments, each one of these cases just shuts it right down. And so we can't get access to it. We can't find out. And, of course, from our perspective, we write for, really, an international, but primarily a national audience here. And these are all other fire departments who very likely might end up going to the fire departments. So that's been our motto with the magazine is to get that information out. What was learned? How could we do things perhaps a little bit differently in the future based on perhaps things that didn't go well, but what did go well? What really worked incredibly well to help inform us as to how to move forward again with other kind of incidents. I wrote an editorial many years ago for another magazine we had and it basically was an editorial that effectively said, we're not going to move the business of fire protection and firefighting emergency response. We're not going to move the ball if all these cities sort of become clams and just hold in information for fear of liability or for whatever, for political purposes. So that's a particularly big issue, one to throw on the table. Another one, particularly with Dave Cain's situation that I was involved with the National Institute of Starens and Technology when they first formed their National Construction Safety Team to study, they've done actually three events now. The first two were of course September 11th and the other one they did at the time was they were on a nightclub fire. And one of the other things that comes up pretty quickly is that when you're dealing with a terrorist attack or some kind of an event where there's some level of criminality involved, that also shuts down the information pipeline too. And NIST although had federal authority to actually subpoena witnesses and to do all those kind of things to get information, up in West Warwick, Rhode Island was shut down by the State of Rhode Island Attorney General. In my mind, I think NIST's own attorneys probably didn't handle the situation correctly because having done this for a long time there's sort of the soft approach and the media approach and then the hard approach. So you sort of ramp up your dealings with the local community and say, look, we understand that you have a criminal act that you're investigating but there's absolutely no reason why the other non-criminal investigators can't have a participating role and basically do their jobs. Most of these agencies have no problem signing non-disclosure agreements for a period of time while that investigation is active. We saw the same problem in West Texas where the Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco and Firearms unfortunately effectively pushed out the chemical safety board and other federal agency from doing an investigation. At the end of the day we still don't know how that explosion actually occurred down there. So there's this conflict about releasing information about the criminal act involved and that could be it's under the guise of well as an active investigation but on the other hand, of course, there's the political element to that as well. So those are a couple things I want to throw out there that are perhaps a little bit an outer layer of this onion that we keep peeling away at but let me give you a success story here from my perspective particularly with September 11th. One of the things that we understood early on was that September 11th as the Santors and Sally mentioned earlier, the dispatchers that were involved in Metro Tech really didn't have a good clue actually exactly what was going on over there and one of the other things is they followed their protocol. They followed the protocol for any normal high-rise fire and of course that was the day not to follow the protocol. But we didn't know that then. We didn't know that and so for a long time all of us realized that sort of the substance of making positive change was going to come out of the information from that day including not only the oral histories but the transmission tapes from the 9-11 dispatchers. And I can tell you a couple reasons. One is I've learned again doing this a long time that despite the fact this was an incredible event in our nation's history you know as the ball rose further down the line basically as you move away from an incident it becomes increasingly difficult to make any positive changes in terms of protocols, procedures, codes, regulations, whatever. It just gets incredibly hard and I'll tell you having dealt with those folks for a long time you got to show it's a Missouri situation you got to show them right and so is it just anecdotal information not well anyway you can see that the information that comes out of those dispatcher tapes is incredibly important. So flash forward several years this afternoon from Norman Siegel and from one of the justices actually was on that court to make the decision about the tapes. You'll hear from them this afternoon but we realized as researchers and working with the family members that again this is incredibly important information. So what does that mean? It means that once we got those tapes even though we only got half the conversation we did not get the private side we called the private side of those tapes the portion of the tapes of the private individual making the call but there was enough information on there to tell us a couple really important things particularly in the South Tower. In the case of the South Tower we know that there's 15, 18 depending on who you talk to survivors from above the point of impact right? Stanley Praymouth and Brian Clark are the probably two notable examples you've seen them on a lot of the documentaries over time. Those are folks that actually made it down from way up above the point of impact in the South Tower Brian Clark even said he tried to make a phone call to the 911 dispatchers to tell them what was going on. He couldn't get through from one of the house lines in the Twin Towers in the South Tower. So at the end of the day what we find out is that in fact there are people who did get out from above the point of impact and most importantly how did we deal with that? Well we didn't have a mechanism dealing with that. So going forward what we've recommended to fire departments particularly and emergency responders in large events is you've got to deploy a group of intelligence gathering senior people. Their sole job is to go out during a major disaster and they're not running the scene, they're not telling people what to do, all they're doing is gathering information and if we had simply posted people at the base of those three stairwells in the Twin Towers we would have found out a lot of information. Eventually we would have had Stanley Praymouth and Brian Clark would have come by and they would have said hey where are you coming from? How did you get down here? Well we took, we went started B, worked over to the C stairwell what have you, worked the way down. Jim Dwyer from New York Times and I when those tapes were released worked backwards in time to figure out how much time would have been available for example if we'd simply done that sort of interrogatory with the people coming out and we figured out that if in fact we have people positioned gathering information specifics, their sole job, distilling it putting it back to the incident commanders and more importantly putting it back to the 9-11 dispatch centers there was enough time to do that to get connected with people which we found out because the tapes were released all those dispatchers say oh you're in the 101st floor east corner of the building 100 people with you so you hear them repeating the information that the private individuals are telling them they also got a lot of their cell phone numbers and can you imagine today if we had simply had that information we knew there was a path to get out we changed the model from what it's been for 100 years in high-rise fires to tell people stair we are we'll eventually get to you kind of thing to instead tell them hey look you gotta go to the stairwell it's gonna be tough there's some difficulties but you'll be able to make it down. Jim Dwyer and I figured out there was probably enough time to at least get some of those people out of there so that is very difficult situation politically to deal with that there were saveable people for a variety of reasons that day it dealt with the protocols of our response and the way we handle 9-11 dispatcher interactions and things but that's the reason why we study this stuff we don't want to repeat it over and over again can you imagine when I was down in west Texas you know looking at these folks that just lost 14 or 15 of their firefighters EMTs when in the same state 1947 they had another ammonium nitrate explosion killed the entire Texas city volunteer fire department it's like repeating history over and over again so to complete my thoughts here that's the bottom line getting accesses information is not you know just from an attempt to sensationalize things we don't want that but from the families you heard from them earlier they want the information because a lot of them want to know what happened to their loved ones we found out one last point about that they didn't mention was that a lot of things they have been told were completely different from what were in those oral histories that came out because the court order basically so I think you get my point here is that there's a lot of value in getting accesses information maybe at the end of today's session we can think about how can we do this in such a way that it's made accessible to the media it's made accessible to the families it's made accessible to academics, emergency responders but done in a way that it's done quickly and it's done in a way that doesn't sensationalize it because that's always what the politicians a lot of folks even some family members go back to that sensationalism part of this so anyway thank you so I'm just does that work I never had so many mics in front of me except when I at a press conference and you don't want the mics in front of you at a press conference so I'm just going to make a few remarks because I'm coming back around at the end to talk about a lot of cameras but so I'm born and raised in New York if you can't tell from my accent and I was at the World Trade Center on 9-11 on 9-11 I was actually ironically on my way to one police plaza to become the deputy commissioner of training I had been offered the job and was in the elevator going down when the first plane hit I got out on the street and saw it went back upstairs I was working it for the state inspector general at the time went back upstairs watched the second plane hit felt the second plane hit and then myself and a couple of people that I worked with went up to the trade center and spent the day there I am at that point a career law enforcement person but after 9-11 I fell in love with the fire department when the second tower came down I was fortunate enough to run a little bit faster than the person behind me and was saved by a fire truck and fortunately despite the fact that the engine went up in the air it came back down and the tires held and I was able to go home to my family I just want to share one perspective with you because I don't know that I think the families clearly get the importance of what's going on today I would argue that the rest of the country has lost sight of this and I can say this because now I've traveled and live at the total opposite end of the country I went as Charles set up to avoid planes and after serving as the deputy commissioner of training for the NYPD and the assistant commissioner for counter terrorism we did amazing things up there we built I think some amazing buildings because we learned from what happened here our mayor despite the fact that we had a fight with him occasionally did build safe buildings we did have a good communication and I left White Plains after seven and a half years and went out to Indianapolis where I was the director of public safety for all practical purposes the deputy mayor of the 11th largest city in the country for public safety was hired to prepare the city for the Super Bowl and Charles and I went back and forth as to what I should talk about because I've had interesting history but when I went to Indianapolis one of the things I did was build a regional operation center to coordinate not only the Super Bowl but the sharing of information and communications and so on and so forth amongst disciplines and we did pretty good in Indianapolis but politics is a horrible thing and it's nice to be with true believers I guess because you feel sometimes like you're rolling the rock up the hill and it keeps coming back down and crushing you and that was my experience in Indianapolis is trying to get people to realize just how grave these situations are and they come out of nowhere right I mean 9-11 was like a day like today except it was warmer and none of us saw it coming and it's ironic because I worked on the original attack on the World Trade Center I actually had an informant who went to the mosque in New Jersey but it was incomprehensible to us that day that we were being attacked on our own soil and the magnitude of it but what I think is really weird is how quickly we forget about it and I admire your tenacity I admire your passion it is something that we need to keep talking about I can tell you in Spokane, Washington which is the second largest city in the state of Washington 9-11 is what it is it's something in history books and when you try to talk about it you need to get people to understand the gravity of these situations and I'm on a regional communications board the importance of being able to talk to people in buildings in the basement and on the top floors and there's no margin for error because there's people's lives that are at stake and you do feel like the rock is coming back down on you but you have to keep pushing and you have to keep going because I think the thing that keeps me going from my memories is that as long as I am in public safety I can't ever let it happen again that's my charge right so I'm going to talk a little bit later about body cameras so I'll shut up now and I was probably totally incoherent and I apologize and I'll pass it to my colleague thank you chief and good morning before I even start I'd like to thank you again Dave and chief Santora I listened intently to your remarks Sally I had heard yours previously and I feel your anguish I looked at the bios of my co-presenters today and I think I'm safe in saying that I'm the only one on the collective panel that 911 is my business I have the good fortune of being the 911 director of the Fairfax County Virginia department of communications which is 911 prior to that I have been in Arlington County 911 on 9-11 and coincidentally 13 years ago today I was in the Marriott hotel across from the courthouse and that's the Metro Tech in Brooklyn and that meeting was called by the Federal Communications Commission and the meeting itself had been long scheduled but they changed their agenda after 9-11 and they instead invited to the meeting my colleagues from FDNY from NYPD from Shanksville, Somerset County Pennsylvania and myself from Arlington County to talk about our experience that had occurred two months before that there was a lot of talk about radios and spectrum and antenna in building coverage unified command all day long some of the things which were mentioned in the first panel and then at the end of the panel there was a wrap-up session as there will be today and everybody was asked to make one last comment and I took the opportunity to say something that I think had not been on the agenda but it was certainly heartfelt and that I did not want anybody to leave that meeting without understanding and appreciating a component of communications on both 9-11 and every other day and that is the 9-11 call takers and the police and fire dispatchers which were in many ways unsung heroes that day 9-11 and almost every other day and I think that probably everybody in this room appreciates that as we talk about 9-11 it's often talked about kind of in conjunction with dispatch but I think for context it might be helpful for me to just stress the point that in most communication centers 9-11 call takers are just that they are the people that answer the 9-11 call they take that call they triage it they enter it into a computer radar dispatch system and they then send it off times just a few short feet away to a police or a fire dispatcher and since the theme of this conference is 9-11 I also think it's important to recognize that 9-11 calls are recorded independently of police and fire radio dispatch there are approximately 240,000 9-11 calls made every day in the United States every one of them is recorded quick mass says about 82 million 9-11 calls annually every one of those are recorded as well so when we talk about release of tapes and content of tapes I think it's important to recognize that a lot of what we talked about in the first panel was the radio dispatch tapes to the event and the radio traffic that occurred at the event not only between people inside or outside the building first responders back to dispatch but also first responders amongst themselves it's important to recognize there's kind of two silos there if you will the tapes that I understand have been released were released founded on a federal law that was passed in July of 1986 and it was called the Freedom of Information Act and it's rather broad and it's nonspecific and in essence if you read it you could dissect it to mean that government should be as forthcoming and as transparent as it can be and then it gives charge to the 50 states to the District of Columbia and to five territories to create a law within their jurisdiction that is specific to them and those laws as you can well imagine are from very very restrictive to very very unrestrictive very precise to very unprecise and I certainly am more familiar with the way the law reads in Maryland and the District of Columbia than I am perhaps in New York but going back to our meeting at Metro Tech or excuse me at the Marriott I did not want anybody there to not appreciate what both the dispatchers radio to radio were going through in their struggle whatever they had whatever it was with those on the scenes and I did not want anybody to leave without appreciating the fact that the 911 call takers were inodated with calls of the type that 911 call takers are just not usually going to get calls that if you've listened to any of those were calls of anguish they were in many times well known by the caller making the call from within the towers they knew it was probably the last call they were going to make and they consequently had conversations with the call taker that were unlike what had occurred the day before or what has occurred every day since and that they were calls where the caller was pleading to the call taker to call my husband to call my wife why am I being recorded because I want to talk to my children for the last time calls of anguish and calls of great duration because as these people pleaded with the call taker many other calls were being received and the dispatchers excuse me the call takers had a real challenge to be understanding and to be sympathetic but at the same time to be efficient and to recognize that 911 is non discriminatory meaning the city continued to operate there were other emergencies ongoing so you just couldn't spend the amount of time that you might like to spend and certainly that the caller wanted you to spend in their last minutes of life but that's the world of 911 and having said that I think it presented to the group that was meeting in the hotel kind of another component of both communications in general and certainly 911 in particular a lot has happened since then I understand what the court allowed to be released and did not allow to be released and my knowledge is certainly more familiar with the 911 calls than it is with the radio dispatch but as I said earlier I can certainly sympathize with the four that were at this table a few minutes ago about their anguish in wanting to know more than they knew or now even know if you will but I like Frank next to me and Glenn too want to provide an opportunity for you to chat with us and for Frank to get back to body cameras so I'm just going to fade away for the moment and we'll be happy to talk with you about any component that you may have about 911 thank you I thank you Steve for your remarks I want to say to you that all of us that went and listened to the 911 tapes all of us unanimously understood the difficult job that the those folks had and all of us said in unison that they really were pawns in a terrible horrible situation and how guilty they must have felt when they discovered that the towers had come down because they had no knowledge of this they had no knowledge of this and your point that you can't blame what we were disagreeing with was our right to hear the whole story and the fact that it was giving us another piece in our journey to heal but I'm very glad you mentioned this because I cried listening to those tapes and I cried not only for the response but I knew that those folks in that building without any windows had no idea that the towers had been hit and I felt oh my god when they find this out how badly they're going to feel and how guilty they're going to feel that they gave this information because they had no information and so I thank you very much for your remarks. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I think it went off though again so. Hello, there you go. Okay, sorry. A question for Professor Corbett. I understand that you were on the NIST Technical Review Committee for the reports related to 9-11. There were about 30 or so interviews with fire department personnel that are referenced in footnotes and I was wondering if you might have had the opportunity to review them. They are and they are not they have not been released. Only referenced in footnotes but no context or details. Did you have any access to those and do you have any comments on those? Thanks. I'm going to go back to NIST and there was an enormous amount of information. I was the emergency responder categorized person on the advisory board so I basically pushed them into getting access to the tapes and things like that. I can tell you at this point that NIST also as a federal agency was really difficult to get that information and it got to the point where those subpoenas were going to be issued through the federal attorney general's office to the city of New York to get but eventually they were lent and gave them the information. I was not privy to all those specifically. I was sort of in the aggregate of all that information that was coming forward. So Charles foiled a bunch of stuff from this we're still waiting for. We're still waiting for some of that stuff and we're in the same boat basically. We've got a lot of photographs but we don't have a lot of the other information that we record. Can you tell us how your 9-1-1 system is and is there a communication if God forbid something like 9-1-1 would happen? Can you just explain to us how is your 9-1-1 system different than what we had on 9-1-1 and then I wanted to ask Glenn is our system better now? What is our system like now? Thank you. Although Sally speaks to 9-1-1 systems I find that if you don't mind and say radio systems if you will because that really once the 9-1-1 call has been received in dispatch then it becomes a radio event if you will. And to your point because of the uniqueness of the District of Columbia and the fact it is separated by Virginia which is where the Pentagon is at in Arlington, Virginia but separated by the river and the fact that we at Columbia and Virginia operate interoperably operationally, forget radio for them interoperably every single day we had in place already a very interoperable radio system wherein Maryland could talk to Virginia and Virginia could call for the District and any other combination that you may wish to do. So at the Pentagon which was obviously an event way larger than any one jurisdiction could handle in Arlington County. Very, very quickly Fairfax County the city of Alexandria National Airport the District of Columbia, Prince George's County Maryland, Montgomery County Maryland were on the scene within 20 minutes if you will and that interoperable radio system which had been in place before that became invaluable but I should add too that it didn't happen overnight meaning that integrated radio system that was a product of 19 years of effort 19 years of effort of taking advantage of technology and also having relationships between each jurisdiction and maintaining those relationships as other people retired and quite frankly passed on if you will. That was incredibly important but it's also important to note and coincidentally that interoperability was born one quarter mile away from where the Pentagon was at and it was born 19 years before and some of you may remember an event that occurred on January 13th of 1982 am I seeing any nodding heads? The infamous crash of the airplane that was taking off from National Airport crashed into the 14th street bridge and then into the river it was quite frankly a disaster within a disaster because the same entities responded and yet 19 years before they couldn't talk to anybody but that borned the concept of interoperable radio and the region took advantage of the technology which allowed that interoperability and fortunately 19 years later one quarter mile away on the morning of September 11th, 2001 it had its greatest test and it allowed for a far more integrated response and on-scene activities than would have occurred 19 or did occur 19 years before that. Thank you, Sally. In both Indianapolis and Spokane we do have fully interoperable radios Indianapolis was really ahead of the curve and on 9-11 by then they already had interoperability they had a military plane that went off a runway and hit a hotel fortunately nobody in the hotel was injured, the flight crew passed as a result of the accident and so at the time of that crash they had pure bedlam everybody coming to help and nobody able to talk to each other so they had started an interoperable system and it actually they created a separate communications agency called MECA which was the Metropolitan Emergency Communications Agency it functioned extremely well for many many years broke down a lot of the barriers that you would have between disciplines and traditions and agencies during my tenure we disbanded it because it wasn't anything good it eventually kind of has a shelf life and over time it was defunded pretty significantly so it wasn't able to keep up to what I would I considered at the time appropriate levels of performance so we brought it under our umbrella and we were able to infuse some more funding to it Spokane we're very fortunate there the fire districts plus the city fire we have several different police departments in a large area we suffer from wildfires there so because of that there's been a lot of communications built around interoperability between police and fire because that's the only way you can survive we do have issues with dark out areas sometimes in the city more so in our rural areas because we have a lot of mountains and that causes problems one of the good things though that I hadn't seen before in my tenure was a real concern around qualtakers and dispatchers our work out of a separate communication center but anytime we have a significant incident a fire with injuries or deaths a police action shooting we bring those qualtakers and dispatchers into the critical incident briefing because I think as you heard and you've even said they only hear part of it you know they're the people that are charged particularly the dispatchers with keeping things from going to total and complete chaos and so there are in many ways guiding the response of EMS personnel firefighters police officers but the only thing they have is what they can hear they can't see it and so frequently they don't really know the outcome and we see that here with 9-11 so every single incident we bring them in and they are part of the initial debriefing and then they also have the opportunity to meet with the department psychologist at the same rate that our police officers to ensure their mental health as we move on from these incidents so for me if there is a good take away from Spokane besides the obvious including them in that the briefing process so that they're not just sitting there as isolated individuals I think has been incredibly helpful Just quickly to answer Sally's question I think from a cultural standpoint I think we've made strides in New York specifically we've talked about the word interoperability and most people think about the technical part of it the radios, the hardware the frequencies, things like that but there was a cultural interoperability issue on 9-11 also so that you had separate command posts for the police and fire departments six blocks from each other you heard Al Santora mention earlier about the helicopters from the NYPD the fire commander so I think to a great extent that's been resolved is that the right word fixed what have you I don't think the public would tolerate that again so I think that part of it is fixed but from a technical standpoint the radios I think we're still we've made improvements certainly but I think we're still behind April here in New York we still have a situation where we cannot communicate in subways for the firefighters and it's still the case to my knowledge that they can in some areas they can't high rises as well so I mean there's a lot more work to do here and the fact is that billions and billions of dollars are spent on this and yet we're still not quite there yet so anyway it's something Frank mentioned the rock coming down the hill we've just got to keep pushing on it and again it's these incidents that happen and we look at what happened and we take an honest review of what took place there that really helps provide the fuel to move this stuff forward because again Frank mentioned earlier on the west coast 9-11 is in the history books now and to some extent it's happening around here too we have a whole generation of people that weren't even born that day right so it's moving and again having done this like a lot of you folks who all know that it just gets harder and harder and harder until something else happens to sort of be able to move the ball so I'm going to add one thing and I'd like Steve to corroborate this all 9-11, 9-11 recordings on 9-11 contacts between the public and the 9-11 system are recorded not all radio frequency transmissions are recorded and essentially if you're using if the first responders are using what we call a tactical frequency a point to point frequency that doesn't hit a repeater that they actually purposely go to those frequencies so they can have private conversations on the ground those aren't generally captured is that correct? that is correct and I would add a footnote that you might find interesting our center is one of the largest in the country it's probably about 9, 10 or 11 somewhere in that area by call volume and we get a fair number of requests for 9-11 tapes the most frequent call requested are guess what? and I'll take the guessing out of it we provide emergency medical dispatch pre-arrival medical instruction on every request for an ambulance and the most frequent requests that we get for tapes are from those cases where we have over the phone assisted in the birth of a child and over the phone you can hear the first cry of that child so invariably the parents that have been involved with that want as a memoir for their newborn the tape of them being born Glen just to follow up with what Sally said about the radios and that was what I was going to mention that they haven't improved them probably for all these high rises but yet they still continue to give permits and continually build these high rises so is there any communication with the developers and the building about putting some type of a radio system in the building that might the city did pass some changes to the city's fire code to actually require that but of course that they've only applied it to new buildings though it's all the existing ones that's where the problem is and to my knowledge there hasn't been sort of maybe staying correct if someone knows different but I don't know that there's been a concerted effort to try to identify all those older buildings that don't have it so and I would one last pitch the regulations actually allow for two different type system one's a repeater system one's a hardwired system with the old style which I would anybody's here I would just argue against it it's a useless system the old hardwired telephone handset systems function well with the way we operate so my question is sort of related to that one about high rises there are so many high rise buildings internationally in Singapore and Malaysia I mean have we been able to access information from them or assistance from them about how they would handle a similar situation with buildings of that magnitude well let me take a real quick shot at yeah I think you know what's ironic is that maybe this says something here based on the NIST investigation where change is made to require communications in high rises all these kind of these kind of areas basically and the fire codes nationally were changed remember our fire codes are written by the private sector and adopted by individual states and cities well I'll make a long story short there were cities in this country that had adopted the international fire code about 6-7 years ago that were implementing what Eileen just mentioned of improved rate of communication people from the city of New York did it I mean that's pretty ironic I mean Jim Hoffer actually did a story he'll be here this afternoon he did a story and it's saying why is in New York like following other places and this is the place that happened so one of the problems here is this real resistance I can tell you that video surveillance in the codes now to allow fire and emergency responders to see what's going on in stairwells and high rises that also came in this investigation but ironically the general services administration another federal agency pushed back for four or five years saying we can't do that we can't do that we can't require this and we're saying well like you represent what 0.002% of all the high rises in this country and they fought it and they just lost recently but here's one a federal agency fighting another over video surveillance which I assume also is perhaps personally a public building foyable right public building certainly we've made some improvements we still got more work to do I think that's the answer I actually have a question for all three of you if you can just briefly give an answer the name of our conference today is 9-1-1 recordings to release a withhold do any of you can any of you give us a circumstance or scenario in which you would advocate withholding or redacting certain recordings I'll take the lead because it happens every day in my jurisdiction every request that is received gets reviewed if you will and those that are being reviewed by what I call my archivist the person that is in charge and is the custodian of the tapes there are sensitive issues involved they'll allow me the opportunity to kind of put my ear to it I have a law that I must adhere to but I also have a moral obligation to the person that might be on that tape and I try to balance those two requirements so that I not release a tape that if it's going to play on the evening news is going to bring even more anguish to someone that may have made that call sometimes it's very difficult sometimes it's very cut and dry an easy decision if you will but I do believe that there is a moral obligation that has to be looked at in conjunction with the legal obligation the law in Virginia and as a member to every one of the laws is slightly different but I can redact out certain things and when I've done that and if it's played on TV radio there are gaps there but that's the reason why that we have redacted out maybe an address a name an emotion being expressed because these things are being made no differently than were made on 9-11 by people who have just suffered a significant event in their life and we all reacted that differently, thank you so very quickly in the state of Washington we probably have the broadest public records of request law in the country it is virtually impossible for us to hold anything back as a matter of fact it frequently gets released pre-trial even I have some issues with that because I think sometimes we probably skew juries and various other things but it's very very difficult if not impossible in the state of Washington to keep things back I'll just go back to an old day, I was actually a dispatcher and a coal taker in Patterson, New Jersey for the police department, I was a graduate student and we had a bad fire in downtown Patterson, a hotel fire killed 15 people and one of the things that came out and this is the early days of really early days one of the things that came out was the hotel owner it was a flop house basically was arguing that it took the fire department 26 minutes to get there something along those lines and of course when it ended up happening we had all the information so it does work for the cities as well I mean there's this public perception oh my god it took the fire department so long to get there well it turned out one of the fire dispatchers actually lived in this hotel and he's the one who called it in basically it was an arson fire but the point is that it actually benefited the city by putting that out I understand what Steve is saying I think maybe that's again what I was talking about earlier perhaps at the end of the day there's got to be some kind of mechanism to make this stuff available to the people the families want it they should have it it's their loved ones involved there I think Steve is responding to the issue of the sensationalism we've got to deal with that one way or another so maybe we'll have an answer to that and it's standardized because again it depends on where you are poor Michael Jackson dies of a heart failure and his tape is out within four or five hours because you can imagine the enormous pressure that every media outlet is calling the LA county fire department he gets those calls right I'm sure if some major federal official has a medical issue in his jurisdiction in Fairfax and Arlington County he's going to be the guy getting the call to say I want that information out there and he's going to make that judgment on you know but I think there's sort of shades of this so the other shades are on the far end here where it's obvious that the event is over with it's not like it's in the case of September 11th that it's we're going to capture somebody in the United States for doing something obviously what has happened why hold that back the sensational part but why not make it accessible why shouldn't they say hey come right over here we're going to go to the entire thing you're able to do that so we're going to close down questions who can say no to Sally okay I want to say Danelle I hope that you could ask Norman Siegel that question and just you know pursuant to what you were saying Steve in the court decision of the New York State Court of Appeals there are sections where the judge or one of these several judges they address that point and I think even with the oral testimony that was given that was also disclosed they put down it's going to be fully released unless it would be personally embarrassing or you know what he mean so this type of thing that you mentioned was also in the in that decision but I'd like to hear Norman's take on it too absolutely everybody I'm going to take the last question and then we're going to stay in our seats we're going to do a quick switch and then Frank's probably going to talk about body cameras but the last question and there's lots more time for opportunity for questions later and see it just getting warm and Chuck know you're cut off so the last question is first net okay so this is it's not a million dollar question what is an 8 billion dollar question I see Steve shifting around as chair already okay so first net is basically a direct outgrowth of 9-11 and it's the federal government's attempt to fund a nationwide interoperable public safety voice and data network and my contention would be and this has been funded by auctions of radio spectrum by the FCC and there is now money in the bank just as way of background if given the history we've had with federal funding going to localities to fund interoperability do we think that first net as envisioned or as currently conceived I know it's fairly early on in the process will be successful without major revision or significant mishap and I'll get you off the hook by just saying you can give a brief yes no or unsure answer I'd say it's too early to say it is only three years old except the law that created it it certainly has an extraordinarily lofty ambition and high goal but it is like anything else that we try to do nationwide across as many police and fire departments as there are notwithstanding states and counties and cities it's a very very ambitious project and I just hope that they're successful and I hope that the funding that has been initially allocated will continue to be allocated because I do not believe it's doable in the small amount that's been initially allocated what he said agreed I think it's too early to tell Charles I mean we had well look we had what was the name of the New York state system what was it what was that called huh nice one which which we're rest in peace right it didn't go anywhere that was an attempt to have it be able to communicate from buffalo down to hop hog basically in the communicate and it just didn't pan out so that's a lofty goal right it's a lofty goal and I guess we're gonna be around to see it actually it's finished or what do you think Steve I don't know I'd love to be around when it's finished okay with that I'd like to thank the panel this is very good I'm gonna ask Frank to speak on or we're gonna give a presentation or he's gonna give a presentation on body cameras now play the video first or do you want me to give a little let me give you a little bit of context so body cameras are now the latest and greatest in the world we are probably the leading city of size of Washington so I'm wrestling with body cameras every day and actually even as I'm sitting here I'm wrestling with body cameras and I'll tell you about that in a minute so much of the emphasis on body cameras is really to catch the police doing bad things because we all know that we get up in the morning and we do bad things and we continue to do bad things and I'm obviously being facetious and so there are very broad perspectives on what should be happening with body cameras the far left position is that an officer should come to work they should put on their body camera their supervisor should activate the body camera because we can't trust the police officer to do so and at the end of their shift their supervisor should turn off the body camera well think about what you do in the course of your day you go to the bathroom you talk to always in a loving manner your significant other you have conversations with your children always again in a very loving manner you interact with your boss you interact with your coworkers well that extreme every one of those conversations and every one of those activities in the course of your day because you're a public official our fodder for public release and public disclosure so as I said in the state of Washington there would be really no ability to protect that the other extreme is that officers should have discretion personal discretion to turn on or turn off body cameras depending on the circumstance all well and good until we start to realize on the public side that body cameras record both sides of the interaction both audio and video so in the state of Washington this is a perplexing problem because as I said we have very broad public records and laws so if you are having a fight with your next door neighbor about the height of the rose bushes in between your property and the police come to your neighbor's house for a heart attack a kid that's out of control whatever the call may be within probably about five days you will have that body camera footage in its entirety and so you get to see the innermost workings of your neighbor's house once you have it you have the ability to put it on YouTube so I'm a proponent I'll just put that out there of body cameras but we are treading on very dangerous waters and we will end up with Supreme Court of the United States cases the other problem is human error and last Saturday at about I guess it was about seven o'clock one of my officers shot somebody fortunately did not kill the individual and I have to be somewhat careful because it's an ongoing investigation he failed to activate his body camera we've only had the body cameras shot up since September 1st my conjecture probably is that that was the last thing he was thinking about he was with a partner they were looking for an individual who had been involved in stalking who had an extensive violent criminal history and the car actually came past them they ended up hitting the car as a way to stop it the details as we know him right now was that the individual then tried to hit the officer with the vehicle and that caused him to fire the rounds that he did one of the articles that I read yesterday when I was flying out here and my wife is part of the language extremely pissed off that I can never let my job go was from a group who was saying this is intolerable this is unacceptable I have to hang the police officer for not activating the body camera he is an outstanding police officer who took action to preserve the safety of the community that he serves so when I get back I'll be back in the media again Charles because we'll have a little bit of a dialogue but let me show you this film and I'll talk a little bit more about it and answer some questions you may have about the body cameras actually it's funny we're dealing with technology and as we all know sometimes technology works and sometimes it doesn't work since we've rolled out the camera we have had public forums with an excess of probably about four or five hundred people we've brought them out to the police academy we've had them wear body cameras in our interactive simulator this is actually footage being shown from the body camera and it's not bad in terms of clarity's sake later on in the newscast we actually did a demonstration and we do this for the public where you think you're getting a perspective from the body camera because the body camera picks up in real life the noise that's generated and so on and so forth and it sounds like the person in the demonstration is getting a crack beat out of them as it turns out there was no violence associated at all with the arrest but the body camera was picking up the friction on the officers uniform it was picking up the friction in the contact as they were handcuffing the individual and magnifying it to the point like it sounded like the individual in the demo was getting severely beaten I think the big thing that I would urge is anybody contemplating body cameras and really it's kind of the theme of the whole presentation is intensive community dialogue we still think in this business that we know all the answers to everything and one of the most interesting things that came out of our body camera project was our law legal department said that because of fourth amendment rights and our requirement to do two party consent New York is a one party consent state in Washington you need two party consent that if we went into somebody's home we couldn't activate the body cameras unless we had affirmative consent from them to activate the cameras so I'm doing a presentation and this woman raises her hand and says well my house and my husband has beaten me and so now you're responding to a domestic violence call and my husband says don't record the body camera my interview what are you going to do because clearly I'm going to want the incident recorded my interview recorded my injuries recorded and so I actually made the decision to have full recording if we get one party consent in the house over the objection of my law department in another incident in speaking to a victims advocacy group a woman stood up and we have a great relationship she's a victims advocate and she said what do you do with a child sexual abuse case an adult sexual abuse case what do you do if the victim says don't record the body cam the interview and so there we're giving our officers discretion that if they think that that would prevent the victim from giving us a statement there to not use the body cameras my wife who's an attorney and a judge said well I disagree with that I think you should try to record everything because sometimes in those first moments of a critical incident that's where you get your best testimony and so why would you want to lose that another issue is persons that are in mental health crisis and again remember we have to warn you or advise you that we're recording so if I have somebody on the ledge of a bridge my officer who has a body camera on has to say sir ma'am are you going video recording this interaction when we have a person in crisis on the bridge so that has become a real sticking point I'm giving my officers the discretion to not activate the body camera in that situation individuals on the far left are saying they shouldn't have that discretion they have to record the interaction regardless of the person who is off the bridge because of the advisement and we exacerbate the crisis so I would ask you to watch this watch the media conversations watch the conversations that are going to go on here in New York we are now taking government into the most private areas of your life we're in your bathrooms we're in your bedrooms we're talking to victims at their worst state and again in the state of Washington just like we did with marijuana we put the body cameras out first and now we're trying to create the laws around them and it's similar to what we've all talked about about the 911 tapes it's similar about building buildings in today's day and age and not putting repeaters in there so that radios work we have to do a much better job on the front end and not always be trying to correct problems after the fact so we legalized marijuana and now we're trying to figure out how to regulate it we didn't think about the public health consequences of legalized marijuana we have body cameras out there but we haven't thought about the privacy right implications because we were so concerned about catching police officers and police officers do some dumb shit in this business 30 years I've seen it all well I can't say that because every day they do something that I never thought of so I'm wrong when I say that but we have to do a better job we have to be more thoughtful we have to be more precise in developing the laws developing the policies and procedures vetting these things with the communities we serve or else we end up with disastrous situations here at the end of the day police officers get victimized and victims get even further traumatized because we weren't thoughtful about the process so I'll shut up because it's between me and lunch if you have any body camera questions real quick I'll be happy to answer them you know I keep on thinking about what Steve was saying about so many of these births you know these people who have a dental giving birth at home and I'm thinking of you know you call 9-1-1 and the police rush in to help this woman who's giving birth who would want that to be a matter of public record and put on YouTube so I think if there's really a privacy issue and it's I think it's great that this has to be publicized more there's two sides to every proposal there's a public who also videotape on their phone and how does this extend their rights extend or how their videos extend from what you're talking about well it's pretty much a free-for-all right I had another police shooting it's a whole different part of the country there we shoot a lot of people unfortunately I'm doing my best to stop that but so we had an incident where a guy had done a series of armed robberies our officers confronted him I was told when I arrived a few minutes after the shooting that we had negotiated with him on the porch as it turned out we hadn't negotiated with him on the porch we had negotiated with him through a screen door while somebody in the neighborhood had the video of the shooting and before I was even on the scene and it had already been put on YouTube that's the problem is that there is no ability to control much of anything anymore and these things go viral so quickly and I agree 100% with the release of the 911 tapes I think the country is going to hear just horrific conversations that's a very unique circumstance to some degree the movement now is to get rid of street cameras automated license plate readers because that's an intrusion on people's privacy but yet I can walk up with my cell phone and record anything I want and put it on mass media so this struggle that we're talking about here in terms of privacy and private rights and what do we do with these very sensitive communications this will become I think one of the biggest national discussions that we're going to have hold on are there other jurisdictions that have the body cameras that have already gotten some experience a little more like a year or two years into it yeah and so there are a number of big small medium sized departments throughout the country that have them it is very much an evolving process regardless of how long you've had them it's an evolving process around technology evolving process around privacy rights it's an evolving process around redaction and the problem will be is that there will never be a national policy because every state is very unique in terms particularly of the privacy piece of it and the redaction requirements so people that are talking on a global scale and saying well there needs to be a model national policy there can be at some level but when we get to the privacy issues that's going to go state by state by state and so it's a very difficult thing to deal with okay great it's been very thoughtful Frank we're going to take one last question one last question then we'll play the video while people are queuing up for lunch yeah thank you I understand that you're a proponent of body cameras but oftentimes in controversial incidents there's like a recording from like you said a private citizen or something like that and arguments always made that perhaps there was creative recording it's different angles because you're not as close and that can also be an issue so I can see how body cameras can also help give a more direct perception of what actually is going on I do see the privacy issues but what would you offer a suggestion to counter that because I mean there's nothing that's going to stop people from recording with their own stuff and they'll release it anyway it'll just look bad on the police or if it's not showing the whole story showing part of the story so what would you suggest to replace body cameras of anything I wouldn't suggest anything as a matter of fact my officers now won't leave and go out on posts without their body cameras and other jurisdictions around us that are much smaller it's the same thing because 99% of the time you're seeing very good police work right on officer involved shootings or officer involved use of force the officers want that footage to be there to explain why they did what they did and one of the things that we're looking at now in terms of use of force in addition to body cameras and again this goes maybe from learning from things like 9-11 is that use of force incident starts at the point that the call was dispatched and ends after the force has been used right and the person is transported to a hospital or whatever the case may be and we have to look at these events holistically what are all the things that led up to that event happening and then how was it immediately dealt with so those recordings right now we're freezing the initial call taker the dispatch the body camera footage because that's the only way we're going to get the complete story of what happened and why it happened and were there failures in the system that put that officer or did they put themselves in a situation where they had no alternative and so this whole lessons learned piece becomes critically important so I think you're going to see police officers wearing body cameras I think what we have to do is wrap our arms around how do we control the release of data and how do we do it in a manner that's respectful two victims two victims families to the officers so on and so forth eventually the information goes but I think yes we want body cameras for sure