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We spend enormous amounts of resources equipping, training and monitoring our first responders. The focus of this instruction often lends itself to preventing events from escalating beyond the watch commander's control. However, law enforcement professionals nationwide can point to a variety of historical incidents where seemingly innocuous occurrences have evolved into a full fledge crisis. Critical incidents have a trajectory and the department's command staff has a crucial role to play in mitigating liability along its flight path. Does the L.A.P.D provide critical incident training for its command level officers?
The answer is; they do now. The Hydra Simulation System fills an existing gap in the continued education of police executives. The system was first adopted by the Metropolitan Police Services in London as a response to the Hillsborough Disaster. Following this incident, the system's developer, Dr. Jonathan Crego, worked tirelessly alongside UK law enforcement professionals in a successful effort to improve training. Hydra is the result.
A recent example of the program at work occurred when the L.A.P.D conducted a multi-agency exercise for its command officers, FBI supervisory agents, Los Angeles Fire Department personnel and U.K. counter terrorism experts. The exercise was centered on a group of home grown terror suspects recently radicalized and released from Folsom State Prison. Recent events in the Middle East had prompted this group to target the Israeli consulate and prominent Jewish synagogues.
The delegates were provided global, national and local intelligence updates, recent crime and suspicious activity reports, police surveillance videos and local newscasts. External and internal communication strategies, operational planning methods, intelligence dissemination guidelines and organizational policies were put to the test. The department plans on running this exercise again in June 2010 with a new group of command staff personnel, Muslim and Jewish community leaders as well as board members of the Los Angeles Police Commission.
The Hydra suite consists of six rooms. The control room houses the Hydra events and communications. The control room is adjoined by a plenary room, three syndicate rooms and a role play room. Each room serves a specific purpose. The plenary room acts as a debriefing center where all decisions are discussed in open forum. Delegates receive their initial briefing in the plenary room and return to it based on the exercise parameters.
Syndicate rooms act as "break out" centers and house a Hydra computer terminal, conference table and white boards. The role play room can be used in a variety of ways. In the L.A.P.D's most recent exercise, two delegates were chosen to brief the department's chief of staff concerning their operational plan. In real life, this type of tasking will normally involve some trepidation. Hydra delivered that realism by placing the delegates in the role play room with the department's chief of staff.
This briefing was captured on live video and fed into the plenary room for the other delegates to observe. Hydra delegates are broken down into incident management teams (IMTs). They receive a variety of injects in their designated syndicate rooms including news cast videos, intelligence update videos, audio clips, phone calls, police radio traffic reports and police reports.
Delegates enter their decisions and supporting rationale into the Hydra system where it is captured for use during the next plenary session. All the while the subject matter experts within the control room monitor each syndicate via live video and audio feed. The delegates are then directed back to the plenary room where all decisions and supporting rationales are discussed in a frank manner.
This affords each IMT a glimpse into the other team's decision making process. The Los Angeles Police Department is very pleased with the program's initial implementation. Hydra will play a significant role in the department's training regimen for years to come and may even create a paradigm shift in the way law enforcement executives across the country are trained to handle critical incidents.
Timothy J. Kalkus is a sergeant with the Training Division at the Los Angeles Police Department. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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