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Heritage
Foundation
Morning
Bell: Standing with Boston
by James Carafano
April 16, 2013
America
is at its best when it faces adversity
with courage, confidence, and determination. That recipe of “what makes
us who
we are” holds for hurricanes, disasters, and tragedies like the one
that
occurred during yesterday’s Boston Marathon.
A
security professional knows what to do first:
Take care of the injured, protect the responders and bystanders who are
racing
to the scene to help (who can often be the target of follow-on
attacks), and
preserve the evidence available at the scene. Those efforts appear well
underway. We should be proud of the responders and the citizens of
Boston.
Our
assessments and speculation on what to do
next should not outpace what we know. Even very authoritative-sounding
reports
issued from the scene or shared by on-scene reporters or witnesses may
turn out
to be inaccurate. That has already proven the case in Boston with
conflicting
reports on the number of explosions, claims of suspects in custody, and
statements about unexploded devices being recovered.
In
cases such as this, officials often can
garner a tremendous amount of evidence from the crime scene in the
first 72
hours. In such investigations, you start with the evidence and that
leads to
suspects, not the other way around.
Law
enforcement in other communities may want
to take additional precautions. Pittsburg, for example, has a citywide
marathon
coming up in a few weeks. That might be prudent. Any additional
security after
an event like this, however, should be based on professional
assessments of
risk and any intelligence that is available. America’s enemies can’t be
everywhere.
Protecting
large public events is the most
difficult of public safety challenges. Further, these gatherings are
most
vulnerable to exactly the kind of incident that occurred in Boston.
That said,
the reasonable public safety precautions that can be taken to thwart
them are
well known. After the fact, it will have to be determined if these were
properly taken...
Read
the rest of the article at the Heritage
Foundation
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