TerrorismNevada Sheriff wants DHS to do more before, rather than after, attacks

Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Doug Gillespie says DHS needs to make a bigger effort to help local law enforcement work on preventing terrorist attacks, instead of responding to them after the fact.

The Las Vegas Review-Journalreports that the Nevada Commission on Homeland Security voted unanimously last week to approve $3.3 million for eighteen programs for the 2013 fiscal year Homeland Security Grant Program, $700,000 more than last year. The $3.3 million will be divided among statewide homeland security efforts ($1.36 million), Southern Nevada agencies ($1.61 million), and rural and Northern Nevada agencies ($316,000).

Seven additional projects did not receive funding, but may in the future.

Gillespie’s issue with the funding has to do with the fact that six of the eighteen programs to receive funding are primarily focused on response after an attack rather than the prevention of an attack.

“The Department of Homeland Security continues to place law enforcement in a difficult position,” Gillespie told theJournal. “They continue to require, each and every year, more and more a percentage of these funds go to response and mitigation and not to a prevention component.”

Gillespie used the Boston Marathon bombings as an example of the importance of prevention efforts, noting that the response to the attacks was handled well, but that people were already killed and injured.

“But many of us in the law enforcement community are looking at the events that led up to the placing of those devices as we did not do a good enough job,” Gillespie added. Federal financial help for prevention efforts is needed because it is very expensive, Gillespie continued on.

“The system is broken in my opinion and it needs to be fixed,” Gillespie stated.

The grants recommended for funding include:

• Almost $20,000 to the Metropolitan Police Department to maintain two part-time investigators to conduct background investigations on 350 volunteers for the Metro Volunteer Program. The money will allow the program to be expanded, which will enhance any response to an attack or natural disaster.
• More than $155,000 to the city of Las Vegas’s Office of Emergency Management to train 350 people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Community Emergency Response Team course. Those who have completed the course have responded to incidents in Southern Nevada.
• A total of $185,000 to the Las Vegas Fire Department to continue public health and medical services coordination as well as intelligence and information sharing in Southern Nevada. The funding will support and enhance the integration of local emergency management and other agencies so they can prepare for and respond to large-scale incidences.
• Nearly $750,000 to Las Vegas police to support its fusion center. The National Network of Fusion Centers is the key to DHS’s plan to protect the United States against terrorist attacks, relying on sharing and exchanging information to detect and deter potential threats.

Four other grants were also recommended on Friday.