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Sunday's counterterrorism exercise at Fenway Park will be more Aurora or San Bernardino than Paris
By adamg on Wed, 06/08/2016 - 9:56am
A training exercise that will turn Fenway Park into a series of battlefields this weekend is aimed more at training Boston Police and other first responders how to deal with a lone gunman with a large arsenal than a coordinated attack by terrorists.
The City Council today is scheduled to voted on accepting an $85,000 grant training grant from the Department of Homeland Security for participation in an "active shooter exercise" as part of a federal program known as Combating Terrorism Technology Evaluation.
The program, run by Homeland Security and the Army, is aimed at figuring out how to stop "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area."
As in a similar exercise at a Brooklyn high school last month, participants will test the use of drones and specialized software to neutralize a gunman.
The Brooklyn exercise saw the use of software that lets scene commanders combine "imagery from commercial, satellite and tactical sources" to get a better feel for the situation and to better figure out how to evacuate large numbers of people.
Another key part of the training will be the use of an extensive high-definition camera network to record how first responders react - and reviewing the video for ways to improve that response.
Embedded timestamps help synchronize videos, which allows footage from several dozens of cameras and devices to be pieced together into a whole timeline for analysis. Each exercise generates approximately two terabytes of video, which is downloaded onto hard drives with quad splits for the police departments, first responders, and training evaluators.
According to the FBI, 486 people were killed and 557 wounded in 160 "active shooter" incidents in the US between 2010 and 2013.
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Comments
Honestly it seems like the
Honestly it seems like the region would benefit a lot more from a Paris type response training. The performance level of police departments in the manhunt of the Boston bombers was astoundingly poor. It was like little kids at a soccer game, everybody chasing the ball.
Perhaps command and control has been improved but... I dunno, I sure hope it has.
Baby steps, as you note, the
Baby steps, as you note, the local police were inept and their response was dangerous and boffoonish during the manhunt for the 2 marathon bombers, so they need to work on responding to smaller groups of attackers adequately before they can work up to large groups like the Paris attacks.
Unfortunately you may have a
Unfortunately you may have a good point.
Thanks for the details. If I
Thanks for the details. If I was a lone gunman, I would be shaking in my shoes, If I was a terrorist, I would be holding a party.
An interesting additional
An interesting additional factoid to this is that the Boston Police are still not property equipped to deal with these scenarios. Patrol cars lack patrol rifles (modern sporting rifles), the ideal tool for such an situation. Pistols are a self defense compromise, real fighting is done with rifles.
Their biggest problem is
Their biggest problem is still an outdated radio system 15 years after 9/11!
All the firepower in the world is useless and dangerous if it can't be safely coordinated in an urban area. Watertown narrowly missed being a friendly fire free for all.
The radios in Boston and 12 other cities and towns.....
All share the same radios and can speak with one another. Not sure Watertown was/is part of the uasii group.
Muslim Marathon terrorists were handled well
Although I never worked along with the Watertown Police, what a great job they did, a dead Muslim terrorist ringleader (hand to hand combat) and his Muslim terrorist brother awaiting the death penalty with the help of a concerned citizen. The only negativity was perhaps too many dedicated cops who self-deployed, their concern and motivation took them there. Although I wish both terrorists were dead, credit to Commissioner Mousey Evans of the Boston Police who called for the cease fire at the boat, taking the younger terrorist into custody for a fair trial and death sentence, to the horror of our liberal media. We were also told that a death sentence would allow him to avoid the Supermax Prison in Colorado, not true, he's there. Police work is never an exact science, nothing is routine and our officers performed very well that week. God bless them all!
Fishy doesn't do his homework - ever
Even the audits by cops said the whole mess was a lunatic flustercrux, dude.
Keep dreaming of your glory days of "police" work though.
I don't think it said lunatic cluster......
And plenty of internal and external reports has found much worse and worded it as such.
An off-topic thought
I once thought that before the bombings that Boston was safe and don't have to prepare for such a possibility. The closest thing we can recall to was the 2007 Lite-brite thing. The reasoning was that while Boston is a major city. All attention from from anyone ill-intended will always go for NYC - as morbid that thought was.
I was wrong with that. But I hope these training will never be needed.