“W e have a police force of 1,600 sworn officers within the greater remit of the Authority which includes airports, tunnels, bridges and of course the ports themselves. We also have close to 300 civilian security guards plus thirty or so civilian professionals who focus on security and emergency management. That includes me and my team.<\/p>\n
“The force has special training in emergency services, handling hazardous materials, crowd control. We have marine and aviation sectors, a canine unit and now anti-terrorism and intelligence branches within the police force who work with federal state and law enforcement agencies on what is a joint terrorism taskforce. There’s quite a bit of intel sharing going on at all levels of federal, state and local government on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
“We’ve also recently created an office of operations and emergency management that deals with the strategic nature of security for the entire agency in terms of detection, deterrence, prevention, response and ultimately consequence management if, God forbid, something else happens. The police are handling tactical and operational day-to-day law enforcement and public safety.<\/p>\n
“From a strategic perspective we look at things in terms of those four areas of prevention, response, detection and mitigation. In the port sector I’m interested not just in the physical security of our facilities, which we can control, but the unknown which we don’t have much control over, and that means cargo security.<\/p>\n
“In terms of physical security, we have worked very hard over the last two and a half years to try and influence the US legislation and regulation that is going to guide our industry today. That’s the ISPS Code, which became the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) here, and then on cargo security, we’re more of an interested party. We’re not directly responsible for the movement or security of cargo but we use our position to leverage and be a catalyst for change. So we’re working on projects like Operation Safe Commerce which is supply chain security from point of origin to destination with the ultimate goal of perhaps recommending what could be international standards for cargo security. We support and endorse the C-TPAT and CSI programmes that Customs has put together, and other such initiatives.<\/p>\n
“In the maritime sector we have spent about $10m on capital security programmes. We have a five-year plan to spend $32.7m. It’s important to note that is just for the area the port authority has control and jurisdiction over.<\/p>\n
“We have a variety of private terminal operators within our estate.<\/p>\n
Under the ISPS Code\/MTSA, they are required to maintain their own security. So my $32.7m covers only what the port authority is responsible for.”<\/p>\n
ON COST? “We figure on a cost of around $3.50\/TEU for security costs and we did 3.2m TEUs last year. We have chosen to date, not to impose a security fee on our customers to recover this. We’re waiting to see what comes out of the AAPA’s discussions with the Federal Maritime Commission in order to set our course for the future. We have applied for federal funding and have been granted just over $8m for security.<\/p>\n
The rest will come out of our own capital budget.<\/p>\n
“We have no choice. The regulations under ISPS Code\/MTSA go into effect on July 1. The cost of non-compliance is $25,000 a day per offence. So if we don’t put our physical and operational measures in place it would add up pretty fast. And it’s good business sense for us. You may get a different response from us than from other ports, because we were attacked. We see no choice. Yes, we’re pushing for federal dollars but whether or not we get it, we’re committed to the programme anyway. I think everyone agrees it should be shared between public and private sectors. It’s a question of how much and who.<\/p>\n
ON INTELLIGENCE? “Good human intelligence is absolutely critical if we want to stay ten steps ahead of the terrorists. The people out there everyday: the longshoreman, the agents, the tugboat crews and pilots, these men and women have been doing their work for years and if there’s an anomaly, they’re going to know it long before anyone else. We need to leverage this fact that such people know the business process better than anyone else. They know if there’s something wrong with a container. They know who their co-workers are so if there’s someone lurking around the facility who doesn’t belong there they can make that call to the law enforcement people. We’ve embarked on an initiative to train the longshoremen and other waterfront workers on suspect behaviour recognition and threat recognition. Most of it is common sense but there is some categorical behaviour of terrorists.<\/p>\n
Suicide bombers don’t usually act alone. Some act as watchmen to help the bomber get to his target. So we’re training the port workers in that extra knowledge they need to help us be the eyes and ears.<\/p>\n
It’s people and processes that are the absolutely critical factors to security. Technology is a tiny part of it all.<\/p>\n
ON SCANNING? “The US is predominantly an importing nation. If we’re going to scan every container then we need to do it overseas. And we would need the ability to scan our export containers before they leave the US. It has to be at the port of export. If we scan an import container here it’s already too late – if it’s just a matter of a remote detonator, as we have seen.<\/p>\n
“But if we put processes in place up the supply chain, we know who’s stuffing the container. There’s a validation of what’s going into the container, the container is sealed, the seal is witnessed, as the container is moved from mode to mode, from one waypoint to another, we validate that the seal is still intact and no-one has interfered with the container. We can apply technology but it’s predominantly the people and the process. I have to trust that the system put in place by Customs is a good system. They have created a targeting methodology based on patterns and anomalies that indicate the containers they should inspect.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If anyone should worry about the threat of a terrorist attack its New York. Security manager, Bethann Rooney is responsible for implementing and managing a port security programme and setting future strategy. She has been actively involved in the legislative process and works with federal government and other parties to address awareness, prevention, response and consequence management including Operation Safe Commerce, port security grants, demonstrations of new technology and the preparation of security plans and vulnerability assessments. She spoke to Nick Elliott.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-2512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-terminal-operations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2514,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512\/revisions\/2514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2512"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=2512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}