Florida's Response Plan for Emergencies Term Paper

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Emergency Management

The recent mass shooting event at a public school in Broward County, Florida, has brought up the issue once more of how emergence management teams can work together to address these kinds of issues. This paper will discuss the event, identify the legal situations that were being faced, analyze and discuss the main legal situations, and identify how the law in that jurisdiction and the first responder manager could deal with these situations under the law of that jurisdiction and federal law.

On February 15, 2018, a former student of Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County opened fire on students with an AR-15 just before school let out. More than a dozen students were killed. While the motivation for this event is still as of yet unknown, it is no different from many other terror incidents or mass shootings that have occurred in the U.S. in recent years—including in Florida, where another mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub occurred in 2016.

In Florida, the legal operations that have been determined for first responders to an emergency event such as this have been determined in accordance with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which has supplied directives to all the states on how an emergency response should be conducted. The legal situations being faced in this crisis are complicated by the fact that legislators and responders are still looking for solutions to this complex problem. As Redding and Shalf (2001) note, “in the wake of recent school shootings, communities and legislatures are searching for law enforcement solutions to the perceived epidemic of school violence” (p. 297). Bonanno and Levenson (2014) have found that Levin and Madfis’s Five Stage Sequential Model to Adam Lanza (the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter) can be helpful in formulating “prevention strategies, suggestions for positive school climates, school security for the physical plants, and threat assessments”—however, as of now there is little in the way of guidance for first responders other than to treat them as terrorist incidences and follow the guidance formulated by the state at the local, regional and in coordination with the national level. The media also plays a significant role in handling these situations, as they are the source of conveying information and can aid and assist in crisis and emergency management through professional deployment of news anchors to cover the event and maintain calm in the community (Barbieri & Connell, 2015). A Campbell (2018) shows, schools are taking the issue seriously and are now holding drills for mass shootings—just like they would for fire or tornado events.

From an emergency management perspective, there is only so much that can be done in this type of event. The most important steps, however, have already been provided by the State of Florida’s Terrorism Incident Response Annex (2014), which is a state-wide procedure that has been developed for emergency management responders precisely for these types of incidents. The Terrorist Event Response Process is based essentially on the taking of two precise actions that allow emergency operations management to proceed in an orderly and effective manner. The Annex (2014) identifies these two approaches as: “1) Identifying the event as a known, suspected, or threatened terrorist or cyber terrorist attack; and, 2) Assuring notifications to agencies are made” (p. 3-1).

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, 2002), this two-step approach provides the legal framework for responders to take charge of the situation. In such a climate, where panic and chaos is considerable, it is crucial that authority be represented and that responders and emergency management teams know who is in charge and how to proceed. Without establishing order and control of the situation immediately, the incident can escalate quickly and become worse. Thus, the most important step is for emergency managers to identify the type of situation on the ground and notify the necessary agencies so that the management process can begin to be implemented.

FEMA (2002) recommends that state and local leaders maintain their emergency management organizations in such a way that they display the following characteristics:

· Flexibility to address various types of emergency

· Coordination abilities

· Communications abilities

· Contingency planning

· Public information and media relations plans

· Federal agency integration plans

· Local response plans

· Support services ready

Additionally, FEMA’s (2004) Annex suggests that a “structure for a systematic, coordinated, unified, timely, and effective national law enforcement and investigative response to threats or acts of terrorism within the United States” (p. 1) be implemented for all emergency situations of this nature.

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Not knowing the motive or the persons involved in the shooting, it is imperative that all responsible parties have the legal authority to begin to work together to address this type of emergency.

Florida’s Annex helps to codify this legal process so that responders are not clueless as to how to react when a situation like this arises. First, a systematic and highly-coordinated method of reaction has been designed and is ready to implement on the local level, which is in keeping with h FEMA’s (2004) recommendations that states have a ready-to-go legal framework available for local authorities. Florida’s Annex describes the necessary official Response Process step by step so that a general overview is given of which agencies are to be involved in addressing the situation in the first response and then in a more detailed manner by outlining how those agencies are to act and coordinate with other agencies. The Annex also addresses how the local response process should be engaged along with how the state and regional response process should be undertaken. Agencies that are involved in these steps are:

· the Florida National Guard

· the Regional Domestic Security Task Force

· the Department of Environmental Protection and Environmental Terrorism Response Team

The latter is involved in case the use of biological weapons is a threat that has to be neutralized. In an emergency situation like that at the Broward County school, it is never known ahead of time the extent to which the emergency will be revealed, so it is necessary to take all legal and organizational precautions.

The Annex also discusses how the Federal Response is to be carried out in conjunction with the local response. Indeed, this is important because even the President of the United States stops what he is doing to address the public when a mass shooting of this type disrupts the national consciousness.

Florida’s Annex gives clear directions for how operations are to be executed in the first response. The Terrorist Event Process proceeds in three distinct steps that must be carefully followed in order to provide the utmost safety for all concerned in the emergency. These steps are: detection, notification, and threat classification. Detecting the threat is the first step and must be conducted in order to know exactly what is at stake. Notifying the appropriate agencies for response is the next step as the right parties must be involved to respond appropriately. The third step is to classify the nature of the threat so that responders know what they are dealing with and what precautions and policies to implement.

The State Emergency Response Operations Plan calls for the alerting and activating of the State Emergency Operations Center, which has the task of notifying state-level actors, employing state resources and responding until the situation is contained and cleared. In other words, the State Emergency Operations Center has to be on-task from beginning to end, to help oversee the emergency response. The State Emergency Response Operations Plan also identifies the roles that local, regional and state agents must play in the response plan, and describes the necessary training features that respondents must possess.

This Annex thus conforms with FEMA’s (2002) guidelines and helps to illustrate how efforts to coordinate and work together at the state and federal levels can be instrumental in quickly and efficiently responding to emergency situations like the one in Broward County. However, agencies at both state and federal levels should not be satisfied with this type of framework as these types of shootings are becoming all too common and more needs to be done not only to address them after the fact but to prevent them and prevent harm—just like emergency managers have developed strategies to minimize risk associated with storms moving in or with other types of calamities and emergencies, such as medical ones or chemical spills. Simply stating that “all federal Consequence Management Resources will operate as defined under the NRF” and that “the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the lead federal agency for Consequence Management” is not sufficient to really address this type of situation and prevent future incidences from occurring (State of Florida’s Terrorism Incident Response Annex, 2014, p. 2-7). Indeed, while the Annex briefly touches upon how to use the media for distributing pre-incident information that is ready….....

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