Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary Kristie Canegallo delivered the following remarks in her keynote address to the 48th Annual National Organization of Black Law Enforcement (NOBLE) Executives Conference in New Orleans, LA.
I'll be honest with you, this is my first time at the NOBLE Conference, and I was so excited to be here in person to say some of the things I'm going to say to this broader audience and group about the partnership and the work we do together.
But I'm really here to say thank you to you for your leadership. Thank you to you for your leadership. Thank you to this entire dais for your leadership. We've all seen challenges, and we know that when challenge come, leaders step up. And leaders say the things that need to be said. And I really want to commend and thank NOBLE in the wake of the assassination attempt against former President Trump for being one of the first and one of the few folks to say loudly and proudly that women in law enforcement are performing critical roles. They are keeping our communities safer, and they can do that job as effectively as any man can. So, thank you for that, and thank you for using your voice to that end.
It is an honor to be here in New Orleans with all of you. And six months from now, DHS will be back in full force. Four hundred of us will be working with many of you, our state, local and other federal partners, to help ensure the safety and security of the 75,000 people that are attending Super Bowl 59 at the Superdome, and the hundreds of thousands of fans from across the world who will be celebrating throughout the week.
As a fan of the Washington Commanders, I'm not sure that I will be here, but hope springs eternal.
Maintaining vigilance and mitigating threats throughout the Super Bowl week – it's vitally important. It's incredibly difficult, and if you'll forgive the pun, it is fundamentally a team sport. And already, DHS, the FBI, DOJ, Louisiana State officials and the State Police, the State Fusion Center, local law enforcement – including officers and teams who serve under Orleans Paris Sheriff Susan Hudson and New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Kirkpatrick, both NOBLE members and valued partners of our Department – have started working together to assess the threat landscape.
We're jointly conducting vulnerability assessments and securing resources necessary to harden those gaps. And as Super Bowl Week approaches, we're going to start working together to stand and inspect vehicles and cargo; to make sure that we're spotting and disrupting human trafficking across the city; keeping unauthorized drones away from sensitive areas; and even tracking and disrupting the sale of counterfeit goods like fake tickets. And across each of these lines of effort and many more, our work together is more effective because of the months of training, the open communication, and the partnership across every level of law enforcement.
You know, Homeland Security, it is fundamentally an exercise in partnerships. And that is not just true during significant national events like the Super Bowl. It happens every day in our communities, big and small, across our nation. Continuous, open and multi-direction collaboration and support among Federal, State, Local, Tribal, Territorial and Campus law enforcement agencies and the departments is vital to the everyday safety, strength and resilience of our nation and each community.
That's especially true as our law enforcement prevention is confronting two significant challenges, some of which some of our speakers have spoken about earlier today.
The first is the evolving and expanding threat landscape we face, and the second is the evolving and expanding nature of law enforcement itself.
I'm going to first talk about the threat landscape and our perspective from the Department of Homeland Security as we're working together to confront it.
So, DHS is the largest law enforcement organization in the Federal Government. We were founded over 20 years ago in the wake of 9/11 and at that time, the threat of foreign terrorism was our Department's most significant and primary public safety concern. And while that threat remains, now the most prominent terrorism-related public safety threat facing our country comes from lone offenders. They're present here in the United States, and these offenders might be radicalized to violence based on ideologies of hate directed towards a particular group or community. They might be motivated by anti-government sentiment, conspiracy theories, or personal grievances. These offenders might gravitate to less hardened targets, like schools or campuses, houses of worship, grocery stores or hospitals, or more visible targets – local elected officials, local law enforcement.
The bottom line is one that each of you know all too well: that ours is a world where any locality can be a target. Where a vehicle, a firearm or a piece of software can do meaningful damage. Where it can feel overwhelming to predict and prevent these diverse attacks, and where it often winds up falling on you, on law enforcement officers and local leaders, to pick up the pieces of a broken community.
Mitigating this heightened threat landscape isn't something that any individual law enforcement agency or office at any level can do alone. Partnership across the Federal, State, and local law enforcement community is essential, and so our role at DHS is to ensure that we're doing our part to make sure that every law enforcement department has the support and information you need to do your jobs.
And throughout the past four years, we've taken significant steps to do so. We've modernized our grantmaking program to increase access to law enforcement agencies of all sizes and at every scale. That includes our Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention grant program, the only federal grant program solely dedicated to helping local communities strengthen, pilot, and share their prevention capabilities.
With another election season already well underway, we're also continuing to put out a number of resources to help every community better ensure the safety, security, and protection of polling places and election workers. These resources include an election security toolkit tabletop exercise that's designed specifically for local law enforcement, and we've developed multiple bulletins for law enforcement and election workers around public safety, to include swatting.
And as the new school year approaches, we're working and are eager to work with campus and local law enforcement officers alike to develop specific security trainings and exercises to increase information sharing and access critical resources that, taken together, can ensure the safe academic environment that every student deserves.
So these are just a few examples of the work that we at DHS are doing to try to directly support law enforcement in our partnership. It's a two-way street. When lines of communication are open, when we know what you know and you know what we know, our whole nation is safer and our individual lines of effort are more effective.
That's why, last year, we restructured DHS to give local law enforcement a permanent, prominent seat at our decision making table, elevating our Office for State and Local Law Enforcement and Chief Heather Fong, who is very well deserving of that shout out, she and her team are responsible for coordinating with and advocating within our department for the 18,000 State, Local, Tribal, Territorial and Campus law enforcement agencies across the country. She now directly reports to the Secretary, and he relies on her advice and guidance day in and day out, to tackle the many challenges that we're confronting together.
It's also why we've taken deliberate steps to strengthen and expand our information sharing efforts, ensuring that the threat intelligence that we're collectively gathering, be it at the Federal level or the Sheriff who's getting a call from a concerned citizen, is shared at the lowest classification level possible and ultimately makes its way to the hands of operators in the field who need it. We've reinvigorated, to help do that, our nationwide suspicious activity report initiative, our Homeland Security Investigation Network. We've revamped DHS Intel, which is an app that delivers timely intelligence to law enforcement and first responders. If you don't have it on your phone, please download it. We are hosting biweekly calls through our Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and we've increased our coordination with the National Network of Fusion Centers.
But while confronting and mitigating this heightened threat environment, these myriad threats, is one important challenge that you're facing, it's far from the only significant challenge.
As has been discussed and as you know better than I, the demands of this job are extraordinary. They are growing, and they are constantly changing. The pay is too low. The physical and mental challenges are steep. They're steep for you. They're steep for your families and your loved ones. The responsibilities that every officer is expected to shoulder are increasing – to be, all at once, a warrior guardian, a community resource agent, a mental health advisor, and more.
And the communities we serve, meanwhile, are increasingly divided over the role law enforcement should play, and this is exacerbating a deepening national law enforcement recruitment and retention crisis.
And so partnerships are no less essential to confronting these challenges – to calling more people of every background to serve; to inspiring our fellow first responders, our communities and our country; to making the entire profession stronger and our nation safer.
And for 48 years, NOBLE has epitomized what it means to be just such a partner. For 48 years, you have helped countless agents, deputies and officers see a place and a future for themselves in the profession. You have worked to build the public trust in law enforcement that public safety requires, including by working with our administration to design and implement President Biden's historic Executive Order on advancing effective, accountable policing and criminal justice practices – an order that, two years later, has proven to the nation that the values of dignity, accountability, trust, and equity are essential to effective policing.
You've leveraged your platform, your reach and the respect that you have across the law enforcement community to champion important, yet often underrepresented public safety efforts, like the prevention of online child sexual exploitation and abuse. Your continued partnership with the DHS Know2Protect campaign has helped empower schools, parents, trusted adults, and local leaders across the country with tools necessary to keep kids safe online, and it has saved lives.
You brought your important perspective and practical, solutions-oriented experience to our Department's decision making table, including through former President Linda Williams’ service on our Homeland Security Advisory Council and through regular meetings with departmental leadership like Secretary Mayorkas and I.
And you have, throughout your history, recognized, championed and driven progress towards a law enforcement enterprise that has more impact because it is more fully representative of the people it serves. And that includes, as we were talking about earlier, NOBLE being one of the first and one of the few law enforcement organizations to publicly denounce the baseless, insulting, and dangerous commentary with respect to women in law enforcement. Your strong statement of support, alongside WIFLE, NAWLEE, The 30 by 30 Initiative, a statement Secretary Mayorkas, myself and all of the leaders of DHS agencies and offices with law enforcement responsibilities – it sends a clear message to every law enforcement officer across the country, no matter where you serve and no matter how you serve, you are critical to the mission of public safety and security. You are supported by your fellow officers, and we have your backs.
I want to commend and thank you for standing up and saying that, not just with your words, but with your continued actions. And at DHS, we're going to keep saying as much, privately and publicly, loudly and clearly, and also taking steps to make sure that our Department better reflects the communities we serve.
So the theme of this year's NOBLE conference is strengthening our future. We know what a strong future looks like: It's a future where everyone who wants to step up and serve can. It's a future where everyone who serves has the support they need to advance and thrive. And it's a future where we're all safer because every perspective is represented and heard and valued.
And for 48 years, NOBLE has helped move us closer, as a nation and a profession, closer to that ideal.
I'm so grateful for your continued work, for your guidance, your advocacy, your leadership, and your partnership. And at DHS, we're incredibly grateful for the opportunity to build towards this future alongside you.
Thank you very much, and thank you for all that each of you do every day.