Officials say more security staff needed

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has pumped about $8 million into Spokane and surrounding counties, but law enforcement officials are frustrated that none of the money has come for what is needed most – two more detectives.

Spokane Police Chief Roger Bragdon and Spokane County Sheriff Mark Sterk said they’ve received more equipment than they need, and it’s all designed to respond to the next big terrorist event or catastrophe.

Both Bragdon and Sterk said they have plans in place that could help prevent a domestic or even international terrorism attack, but the federal government continues to deny requests to hire people to coordinate that effort.

“The bottom line is, everything that Homeland Security says we can buy is already stuff we have too much of,” Bragdon said in a recent interview. “You are not going to prevent an attack in this country by issuing first responders” chemical protection suits.

The nation’s intelligence services were criticized after Sept. 11 because they had not been sharing information that could have been used to warn of an impending attack.

“We are beefing up security at airports, but what ever happened to information sharing?” Bragdon said. “Even though it was recognized right after 9/11, it still hasn’t been done or funded. And it’s very frustrating.

“If there is an opportunity to prevent it, it happened because information was shared from the bottom to the top.”

Sterk said the federal government won’t release money to allow the county and the city to each put a detective, a crime analyst and a clerk in an office that receives information from all local and state law enforcement agencies.

“That’s critical to us,” Sterk said, “because it is taking all the intelligence from other agencies to let us know if we are at risk from some terrorism event. We don’t need the equipment, we need people.”

“You would think the federal government would say, ‘What do you need to get the job done?’ And then do it for us,” Sterk said.

Undersheriff Larry Lindskog said he doesn’t know why Congress has been hesitant to fund the requests for more people. In response, local police officials plan to ask Washington’s congressional delegation to get involved.

“The issue we have is not so much international terrorism but domestic terrorism,” Lindskog said.

He mentioned the Hummer 2 that was torched recently in Liberty Lake. The Earth Liberation Front took credit for the arson, which remains under investigation, he said.

“We need to be able to link it together. Not just here, but across the nation,” Lindskog said.

Spokane is the hub of 10-county Region 9, which includes Stevens, Pend Oreille, Lincoln, Whitman, Asotin, Ferry, Adams, Columbia and Garfield counties, and the Spokane and Kalispel tribes, said Dave Byrnes, who is the region’s Homeland Security Coordinator.

So far, Region 9 has received about $8 million. The money has been used for everything from chemical suits for first responders to equipment that is supposed to allow local law enforcement agencies on different radio frequencies to communicate with each other, he said.

“A lot of it has gone for communications equipment,” Byrnes said. “Some of the counties have had real problems in the past communicating with each other. So they installed antennas, computers and radios.”

The money has allowed Spokane sheriff and police officials to build a triple redundancy into their bomb squads. That means they could respond to bomb events in three different locations simultaneously, he said.

Both Spokane and Spokane County have SWAT teams, so they can deal with two separate incidents. But the region only has one team to respond to hazardous material spills, Byrnes said. More requests for funds have been made to fix that situation.

“We are looking at a regional approach for dealing with terrorism threats,” Byrnes said.

But Bragdon said hiring detectives to analyze reports from other agencies would do more than just provide the ability to respond to a bomb incident in Republic or Pomeroy. The state currently has a framework of a system that gathers information from police reports and sends them to federal authorities.

Those regional information-gathering centers have been located in Spokane, Redmond, Seattle, Bellingham, Vancouver and Pierce County, he said.

“This can also be used to fight terrorism at the national or international level. But it starts with officers in the vehicle running around with notebooks,” Bragdon said.

The system can be used to track gang members from California to the Aryan Nations, Bragdon said.

The city and county’s Crime Analysis Unit uses a version of the same system. It uses police reports and computers to generate daily graphics of where crime is occurring so officials can send officers to those areas. “There are not enough resources to send people out and just watch for something to happen,” he said.

He gave the example of a bank robbery in Spokane last year. As the call came in, the criminal analysis officers started punching information into a computer based on the suspect’s description, the names of bank robbers who’d recently been released from prison and the direction the suspect was seen fleeing.

“In this case, the criminal analysis unit put all the pieces of information together and sent an officer over to a possible suspect’s house,” Bragdon said. “The officer … arrested him when he drove up. The intelligence was working at the time of the call.”

That same system can work statewide, he said.

“Pieces of information are like pieces of a puzzle. If all the pieces end up on the right desk, that last piece completes the picture and then it’s obvious what they are going to do,” Bragdon said. “That’s what intelligence is.”

But the city and county each need a detective to receive those reports from the various police agencies in Region 9, he said. And that’s what Homeland Security hasn’t funded.

Byrnes said Major Gen. Timothy Lowenberg, adjutant general of the Washington National Guard, has sent a letter to Homeland Security asking officials to reconsider the denial to pay for detectives out of the Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program. “So, it’s still up in the air if it’s going to occur or not,” he said.

Bragdon has said many times that frontline officers will be the ones who thwart the next big terrorism attack.

“There is a way,” he said. “It just has to be funded so local law enforcement has the ability to get that information.”