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Release Date: October 16, 2006
Boston, Massachusetts
International Association of the Chiefs of Police Annual Conference
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you for that kind introduction, and for inviting me to address this IACP annual conference. I'm always pleased to see somebody from my adopted state of Maryland in a leadership role. I'm sure there are a number of people from my home state of New Jersey out there also attending the conference. I'm also delighted to see Chief Joe Carter again, the incoming President. The Chief gave me a great tour of the T, the subway system here in Boston, when we came up a few months ago. That's a great example of the way in which technology and good old-fashioned police work combine to raise the level of security of our transportation infrastructure.
Good again to be with Dan Rosenblatt, the Executive Director. I'm particularly pleased to welcome Jim McMahon in his new capacity as incoming Chief of Staff. I had the privilege of working with Jim for years as he held the role of Homeland Security Advisor for Governor Pataki. He was outstanding in leading the homeland security effort in New York in that job, and I know he will be outstanding in his new job.
There's no question that as I look on the challenge of the Department of Homeland Security, and the challenge of homeland security in general, that our principal partner in dealing with the threat of terror is state and local law enforcement. You are a network and a skill set that is indispensable in our protecting the homeland against the possibility of another attack such as that which we experienced on September 11th.
In fact, in recognition of the importance of our partnership, I'm delighted that a number of our DHS senior leaders are attending with me here today, including our Chief Intelligence Officer, Charlie Allen, who many of you know is a legend -- was a legend as a CIA officer; Mark Sullivan, the new Director of the Secret Service; and members of our office of State and Local Government Coordination.
I was also delighted to pass my good friend, Attorney General Al Gonzales as I came in and he was leaving, having given his remarks just a few moments ago. I know he spoke to you about the importance of working together to fight violent crime in our country. He's a dedicated leader. He cares deeply about this issue. And I know he shares the same commitment that I do to working with this organization and with police chiefs and police officers across the country to share a commission, to work together, and to protect our nation. And I'd like to thank the Attorney General for the very strong partnership that he and the Department of Justice have forged with us at the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, as the Chief said, I come to you with most of my professional career having been in the area of law enforcement. I started out as a -- what I call a “baby prosecutor” in the U.S. Attorney's office in the southern district of New York, and I was also a prosecutor and ultimately the U.S. Attorney in the district of New Jersey. And in those jobs, I had the great good fortune to work with local police from New York City, from New York State, and from all number of communities in the state of New Jersey. I had a firsthand look at the dedication, the skill, the integrity, and the superb police work which police from large and small communities brought to fighting crime and protecting the citizens of the states in which I lived.
I understand from personal experience that criminal cases almost always get made at the local level, and it's in partnership with local and state police officials that the federal government -- whether it be the FBI or DHS -- is able to get the job done.
We saw just last week how important local first responders -- police and firefighters -- are when we're dealing with what looks like a potential serious situation. Of course, I'm talking about the air crash in New York City, when a small plane collided with an apartment building in the Upper East Side of New York.
Of course, we did not know in the first moments after that incident whether we were facing a misadventure or terrorist attack. But within minutes, New York police and other first responders were on the scene. And I'm particularly delighted about the fact that a New York Police Department official in our National Operations Center at the Department of Homeland Security was immediately in touch with his counterpart at the city Emergency Operations Center, so we had real-time visibility into what was happening on the ground, and were able immediately to respond with whatever we could bring to the scene, and take the steps we needed to take to make sure that we were not in a situation where others would be put at risk.
That's a great example of the kind of coordination and information sharing which is increasingly the hallmark of our relationship with local police. You, police officers in the communities all across this country and all around the world, are the front line of our defense against terror, because the fact is, you know your communities better than anybody else. You are the most likely to detect the beginning phases of a possible plot, particularly a homegrown plot.
Years and years of accumulated experience and expertise that you bring to defending this country against crime benefit us very directly at the Department of Homeland Security. And your partnership and trust is something we depend upon and take very seriously.
So today I'd like to talk about some steps we are now going to take to strengthen and deepen our partnership in a couple of hours. That includes increased, more robust and quicker sharing of information, and increased sharing of situational awareness, so that we can address threats as soon as they appear on the horizon, and so that we can manage major, multi-jurisdictional incidents if and when they occur.
Let me start by talking a little bit about what we are most concerned about at the Department of Homeland Security in terms of the emerging picture of threats to the homeland from terrorism.
And I want to break it down into three categories. The first, of course, is the possibility of a weapon of mass destruction being introduced into one of our cities or towns here in the United States. We're talking about a radiological weapon, chemical weapon, a biological weapon, even a nuclear weapon.
Such a weapon would have a dramatic, transformative effect on our society in terms of loss of life and in terms of economic impact. And, obviously, the consequences of such an attack are so great, we have to do everything in our power to prevent this from happening. And that's why we are spending a considerable amount of effort and resources developing the technology and deploying the technology that will detect that kind of an attack at the earliest possible stage.
Some of that is going to affect you very directly, because one of our initiatives is our Securing the Cities Initiative, which is going to begin with New York and two other cities not yet selected, to begin to plan and deploy radiation detection equipment in the areas that are the major pathways into the cities, so that we will ultimately be able to detect a possible nuclear threat, even arising within the U.S., before that bomb or that nuclear weapon or that radiological bomb gets into a city where it could do the maximum amount of damage. And you're going to have to be our partners in that effort.
Likewise, we are deploying and will soon be deploying the next generation of biological detectors in dozens of major cities around the country, again, the purpose of which is to give you and us the earliest possible warning of a biological incident, so we can respond effectively to protect our communities against that kind of weapon of mass destruction.
Second major threat we're concerned about is a high-consequence international terrorist plot. And here I want to make mention of the members of the international police community who are present at this conference, because as the events of August 10th of this year made vivid, the only way to deal with an international plot of the kind that we disrupted, that was focused on flights from the United Kingdom to the United States, is to work internationally, police to police, to detect and respond before these plots, quite literally, get off the ground.
But the third area I want to focus on, and I think this is the one which will concern most of you here, is the increasing threat of homegrown plots -- that is to say plots arising in local communities, involving local people, American citizens, who may become radicalized over the Internet or because of a recruiter and train themselves, again -- with networks, small groups -- and then would carry out the kinds of attacks that we saw, for example, in London last year on July 2nd, an attack that could target our transportation systems, possibly our schools, possibly our commercial establishments, or any of the other venues that we are committed to protecting in our cities and towns.
The best tool in dealing with homegrown terrorists is intelligence -- collection, analysis and sharing. That is our early warning system. The sooner we detect a plot or a threat, the better our chances of dismantling it before it becomes operational. And we know that we cannot wait until the last moment to stop that kind of plot from being carried out.
Recognizing that particularly with respect to homegrown plots, it is you -- the police chiefs of America -- who are most likely to be in a position to give us that early warning. I met with a number of major city chiefs this past August to talk about what we can do to accelerate and streamline how you share information with each other. And I'm talking here not just about our sending information down to you; I'm also talking about your sending information up to us. This is a two-way street. And as with all partnerships, both sides have to give and receive.
I continue to have this dialogue. I've asked my senior leaders to go down to Charlotte recently in September to meet with major city chiefs at a conference there to build very specific tools and a very specific way forward to get to the next level of this information sharing.
And this past week, I spoke to Chief Ramsey to make sure he understood I am going to personally monitor the progress of this initiative to make sure we are getting the maximum share that we possibly can out of our partnership.
So here are the steps we have agreed to take with the major city chiefs beginning immediately to start to move our relationship and our sharing to the next level.
First of all, we are going to build upon some of our early initial efforts to establish fusion centers by creating a national network of intelligence fusion centers to support state and local decision-makers, chiefs of police, and state and local intelligence officials. We're going to build new information systems to further facilitate collaboration and sharing of classified and unclassified information, and to allow real-time working collaboration between state and local and federal law enforcement officials, including the ready transmission of classified information over secure communication facilities.
We are going to expedite the classified, secret level clearance process so that we get clearances out to the field more quickly and more generally than we've been able to do in the past. And, as necessary, we're going to work to be more nimble and quicker in granting top secret and SCI clearances for those who do require that level of classified access.
Furthermore, we're going to be assigning experienced intelligence personnel from the federal intelligence community, as well as subject matter experts into these fusion centers that we are now developing. And at the same time, we are going to ask and invite police departments to be sending their intelligence analysts and maybe their operators into our intelligence center and into our operations center so that we can become more deeply embedded in one another's day-to-day intelligence analysis and operational activity.
It's that kind of seamlessness what we saw work, I think, quite well during the airline incident last week that we need to continue to foster.
Now, let me talk a little bit in more depth about a few of these particular initiatives. First, I want to talk about information sharing in two respects. There is the need to share real-time, immediate threat information with our communities when there is an emergency that we potentially face. But there's also the need for more strategic information. Educating police about the deeper kinds of threats that we face on a strategic level, and also giving them the tools they need to begin to stop trends in their communities, trends of radicalization, trends of incipient operational behavior that will help them to better focus on the possibility of the homegrown threat before it ripens and comes to fruition.
We need to make sure we're getting you both kinds of information as quickly and as widely as we possibly can. So we're updating our procedures and our protocols, first of all, to make sure that real-threat information gets to where it needs to go precisely and quickly. As part of that effort, we've invited a number of the major state and local law enforcement entities to make sure we have a database of the critical officials and the critical institutions that need to get real-time threat information as quickly as those of us in federal leadership.
But we also want to continue to make sure we are giving you useful analysis that helps you gain a deeper understanding of the challenge of terrorism. Among other things, for example, our Office of Bomb Prevention is working with the Department of Defense to gain better access and understanding of cutting-edge developments in creation of improvised explosive devices in Iraq and all over the world. We're translating this information into real-time training tools and other education material that you can use to make sure that your bomb squads and bomb protection officials know what to look for as the enemy continues to develop its capabilities in these kinds of destructive devices.
Also, as we talk about these fusion centers, it's important to recognize that these are going to be critical pathways for the sharing of information and expertise across the whole spectrum of concerns we have in dealing with the possibility of terrorism.
We already have intelligence personnel working in five major fusion centers. Just in the last couple of months I was in Los Angles with Chief Bratton and Sheriff Baca and a lot of other of the community police officials as they opened up a joint regional intelligence center, JRIC, which is a regionally focused, intelligence sharing center that we are pleased to participate in as partners with state and local officials.
But our plan is to go further than that, to have personnel in 20 fusion centers by the end of this fiscal year, and up to 35 centers by the end of the next fiscal year.
These intelligence analysts will help -- two-way street -- convey our analytical capabilities and our information to state and local officials, but also giving us a real sense about what you as customers need and want, so that we can make sure we are giving you the service that you deserve. Furthermore, these deployed intelligence and analysis personnel will facilitate the connection with our databases, including our new Homeland Secure Data Network that is a much more robust portal for the transmission of classified information, voice and data, which will make that much more accessible to those who need it to work in these fusion centers.
We want to learn as well as convey information, so we're doing a number of things to encourage state and local officials to get involved in our DNA, become part of our DNA. We are setting up a DHS fellowship program, which will invite senior law enforcement officials to come on multi-month assignments, working within our intelligence and operation offices so they can better understand the way we work and we can better understand what we need to do to help you.
Likewise, we want to broaden access in our National Operation Center to law enforcement personnel and to get them involved in doing the very same kind of work that our federal intelligence and operations folks do. Again, it will help train these personnel and help get us better acquainted with your needs.
Now, finally, I want to talk about the issue of grants. Obviously a very important way in which we support state and local law enforcement is through our Homeland Security Grant Program, including a law enforcement, terrorism prevention program in which we've awarded hundreds of millions of dollars based on risk and need. We've also invested roughly $380 million in state-run fusion centers.
I want to tackle one issue very directly. When I came to the Department I was convinced that it was very important to make sure we had a balanced approach to grants. That means an approach that looks at prevention, protection and response as part of a continuum of what we need to be prepared to do in order to address the issue of terrorism. And certainly, I was well aware of the importance of making sure that our grant programs are very focused on the needs of the law enforcement community -- those who have the fiscal obligation to detect and prevent terrorist attacks which are the best way to resolve this kind of threat to the homeland.
Now, Congress has acted in the last couple of months to do some restructuring at DHS of our Grants and Training Office by transitioning it to be housed within FEMA. But I want to make a personal pledge to you: that transfer of -- our Grants and Training Office -- will not cause one iota of decrease in the commitment that we have to continue to fund the very important prevention programs which we have supported in the past in this law enforcement community and with our state and local police.
Wherever the boxes are in the organizational chart, this is the kind of program that will get top-level attention from me personally and from the leadership of the Department. And I guarantee that you will continue to be a very critical voice in terms of advice and participation in this grant-making process, because I will not stint on the law enforcement element of our mission, wherever the particular threat-making process happens to be housed.
So we will continue to look to you for input as we look at fusion centers and other kinds of tools that we can bring to the table to help you do the job that you have to do as partners in protecting our homeland against the threat of terror.
In the end, the lesson of the last five years since 9/11 has been that we face a threat that continues to evolve. Obviously, a large part of this threat will always be international terrorism, and there the federal government will play a principle role in collecting the intelligence and disseminating the information, and supporting our efforts here at home to defend the homeland.
But more and more, it will also be the case that we will have to be concerned about the kind of threat that we've seen in western Europe, a threat that may be borne over the Internet, maybe as collected only in a very small group of operatives, that could pose a serious potential of harm to our communities all across the country. We're going to have to adapt ourselves at all levels for this emerging threat.
For our part, what I will tell you is we will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you. We will share information, we will share training, we will share tools, and we will work as a team to make sure that whether terrorism comes in the airplanes, from across the ocean, or whether it's borne in apartment buildings in our cities and towns, we will detect it, we will prevent it, and we will respond to it effectively in the interest of protecting our families, our friends, our loved ones, and our fellow citizens.
Thank you, very much, for the work that you do, for your partnership with us, for your courage and your integrity. And I look forward to continuing to work with you in the years ahead. Thank you.
###This page was last reviewed/modified on October 16, 2006.
