By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
It’s a program that has caught the attention of the highest echelons of the Department of Homeland Security. SAFE Washington, a unique emergency alert system created by and implemented in the Puget Sound region’s Jewish community, has been helpful in not only giving the 40 member organizations immediate warnings about criminal incidents against local agencies, but also as a first defense against public health threats.
“When we have communicated and shared knowledge about things that have happened right on our campuses, we have been able to better protect our organizations,” said Larry Broder, executive director of Temple De Hirsch Sinai and a member of SAFE Washington’s core leadership team.
Members of SAFE Washington met with a group of law enforcement officials on Nov. 20 to explain the system as well as to get feedback on ways they can improve communication and notification across jurisdictions.
Jeff Slotnick, president of security company Setracon and a founder of SAFE Washington, outlined the program to the officials, representatives from the cities of Seattle, Bellevue and Mercer Island as well as from the King County Sheriff’s Department and the FBI.
The program, he said, utilizes communications systems within the state and nationwide to ascertain whether there might be any threat — be it physical, technological or viral — that would require further action. While created for Seattle’s Jewish community, Slotnick said, it can be taken to any ethnic, religious or other type of discrete community.
“We’re opening it up as a model for any community to replicate this,” Slotnick said. There is “no cost to the community. All it takes is commitment and time.”
Though SAFE Washington’s genesis is based in the aftermath of the shooting at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006, Slotnick said conversations about building something like it had been occurring prior.
“We found out there’s a much wider need for disaster resilience,” Slotnick said. “We had no means of communication in case of a heightened disaster.”
A briefing on the coalition has reached the chief of staff of Homeland Security, Slotnick told JTNews. That could allow the program here to be replicated anywhere. The Seattle Archdiocese is currently looking at implementing a version of SAFE Washington, he said.
SAFE Washington now includes 40 Jewish organizations and synagogues, from Everett to the north to Tacoma to the south. Since even before the shooting, the Federation, which maintains SAFE Washington, disbursed money from Homeland Security to apply to security measures, including training in learning best practices.
“We need that protocol,” Broder said. “We need to know exactly what to do.”
Organizations have received anywhere from $14,000 to $408,000 since 2005.
SAFE Washington is connected to several communications sources, including the Washington Interfaith Disaster Recovery Organization and the Northwest Warning, Alert and Response Network, a collaboration of government and private entities that deal with security and disaster preparedness. Were it not for the NW WARN system letting SAFE Washington in, “we would not be here today,” Slotnick said.
Broder said that since the system came online in Sept-ember 2008 he sees more activity, but that might also be due to people actually paying attention.
“The more you test, the more you find,” he said. “Whenever we have an inkling that there’s an issue that should be reported, we get that out.”
Temple De Hirsch Sinai’s Seattle facility, which straddles Seattle’s Capitol Hill and Central District neighborhoods, is something of a nexus for possible criminal activity, Broder said.
SAFE Washington has been used to broadcast images of people who have exhibited threatening behavior toward Jewish sites in the event they show up at other Jewish agencies.
“Even if that person leaves the place, [if he] shows up somewhere else, we already know,” Slotnick said.
Slotnick also demonstrated to the officers how SAFE Washington responded to events nationwide. In July, within a minute of a Twitter posting announcing the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “we had 40 agencies on modified lockdown,”
he said.
A shooting in the parking garage of a Sephardic synagogue in Los Angeles in October had a possible connection to the Seattle area, which also prompted an alert.
“When the shooting occurred in Los Angeles, we received communication within the Secure Community Network,” Slotnick said. “The report went out to all law enforcement in Washington State.”
SCN is a system that alerts Jewish communities nationwide to any issues around security or disaster preparedness.
Briefings from the Departments of Health on the spread of the H1N1 virus have also been spread on the network.
What became clear over the course of the meeting is that while SAFE Washington has been effective in transmitting information to its member groups — assuming those member groups act when necessary — mitigating circumstances can sometimes keep information from getting into the right hands at the right time. For example, officers charged with notification and understanding religious or ethnic communities’ needs often change positions, leaving no institutional memory or backup information. And many agencies simply do not have the manpower to keep these smaller communities apprised of a threat.
“There’s this big gap,” said one officer in attendance. “Let’s address how we’re going to mitigate this gap.”
Det. Doug Larm of the Seattle Police Department said that with the 30 smaller police departments that surround Seattle averaging about 12 officers, having a network like SAFE Washington in place is a great concept, but “the only way this is going to work is communication and commitment,” he said.
That means already overstretched officers must be willing to take calls in the middle of the night or on weekends, and then act on that information. Given the economic realities of departments today and the pressures of working in law enforcement, it’s not always easy to find a point person to take on that responsibility.
Still, it’s important that the information on possible threats be disseminated rather than ignored, Larm said.
“In the real world it’s going to be based on communication, communication, communication,” he said. “I’d rather have more stuff in my inbox.”
Cross-agency communication is also an issue. Bellevue, for instance, where a large number of Washington’s Jews reside, does not subscribe to the Fusion network that disseminates intelligence to law enforcement agencies across the state. And though they are two of the state’s largest municipalities, Bellevue and Seattle have neither adequate communication, nor similar protocols, to coordinate in the event of a multi-pronged threat.
Another challenge not just for SAFE Washington, but for threat assessment in general, is defining what exactly constitutes suspicious behavior, what constitutes a threat, and what should be communicated.
Information, said one officer in attendance, might not always be useful, particularly if it is not vetted and processed. Raw information, he said, can in fact sometimes be dangerous.
“You can cause the whole community to go into lockdown based on useless information,” he said.
The danger in waiting, however, is that if the information gathering takes too much time, the resulting intelligence can quickly become stale, meaning it may be too late to act on a threat.
Hilary Bernstein, regional director for the Anti-Defamation League’s Pacific Northwest office and a member of the SAFE Washington core team, said her agency can be of assistance in speeding up the intelligence-
gathering process through identifying hate groups’ tattoos or graffiti tags, for example.
Within the Jewish community, Broder said, it’s important that members of SAFE Washington actually use the system.
“Something will happen and we find out about it two days later,” he said, noting that it’s the failure to act that could put the larger community in jeopardy.
“I want to do my part to keep the community safe,” he said. That, in turn, “keeps my temple community safe.”