Secretary Napolitano highlighted the Department's progress in 2011, emphasizing the major steps the Department has taken this year to enhance America's capabilities to guard against terrorism, and to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters.
DHS implemented the National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) to replace the former color-coded alert systems. Under NTAS, DHS will coordinate with other federal entities to issue detailed alerts to the public when the federal government receives information about a specific and credible terrorist threat. NTAS alerts provide a concise summary of the potential threat including geographic region, mode of transportation, or critical infrastructure potentially affected by the threat, actions being taken to ensure public safety, and recommended steps to take to help prevent, mitigate or respond to a threat.
DHS expanded the "If You See Something, Say Something®" public awareness campaign - a simple and effective program to engage the public to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities- through partnerships with numerous sports teams and leagues, transportation agencies, private sector partners, states, municipalities, and colleges and universities. DHS also unveiled new Public Service Announcements (PSAs) which have been distributed to television and radio stations across the country.
- The Department continued its strong support for fusion centers, working in coordination with other federal partners, through training, technical assistance, technology and grant funding as well as the deployment of DHS intelligence officers who work side by side with fusion center personnel to assess threats and share information. DHS also worked with state and major urban area fusion centers to create comprehensive privacy policies and provide civil rights, civil liberty, and privacy law training to fusion center personnel.
- The Department continued implementation of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center's (FLETC) Rural Policing Institute initiative, through which more than 15,000 state, local, tribal and campus law enforcement officers and emergency responders from rural agencies were trained in FY 2011. Training addressed critical homeland security priorities, including information-sharing, the protection of civil rights and civil liberties, emergency response, suspicious activity reporting, officer safety and survival, domestic violence, and narcotics enforcement.
- DHS continued to work with its federal, state, local and private sector partners to expand the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI)—an administration effort to train state and local law enforcement to recognize behaviors and indicators related to terrorism, crime and other threats while standardizing how those observations are documented and shared with FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) for investigation and fusion centers for analysis. Thanks to partnerships with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the Major County Sheriffs' Association, and the National Sheriffs' Association, more than 180,000 frontline law enforcement personnel have been trained through the SAR initiative. DHS continued to work closely with its partners across the federal government on information-sharing initiatives, including:
- DHS supported the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Joint Terrorism Task Forces with hundreds of personnel, including ICE Homeland Security Investigations special agents, U.S. Secret Service agents, Federal Air Marshals, CBP officers, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers and representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG).
- DHS worked closely with private sector partners, holding Security Seminar and Exercise for Chemical Industry Stakeholders workshops for over 1,000 critical infrastructure security professionals and first responders on active shooter and vehicle-borne improvised explosive device scenarios to foster communication between facilities and their local emergency response teams.
- The Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Private Sector Office, and FEMA hosted Joint Counter-Terrorism Awareness Workshops in six U.S. cities involving approximately 1,200 federal, state, local and private sector participants in partnership with the National Counter-Terrorism Center and the Department of Justice (DOJ)/FBI in order to improve situational awareness and information sharing and identify capability gaps and best practices to support future planning and emergency response efforts.
- DHS facilitated the conclusion of a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Department of Defense (DOD) governing the sharing of biometric data, to support critical infrastructure protection, transportation and border security, administration of immigration benefits, emergency management, and intelligence.
DHS opened the new FLETC Intermodal Training Facility in Glynco, GA, a first of its kind facility that addresses evolving threats to homeland security by offering frontline law enforcement personnel hands-on training in a realistic, state-of-the-art intermodal transportation environment.
- The DHS Federal Protective Service trained hundreds of Federal, state and local law enforcement officers and agents in "Active Shooter Response Tactics."