Since the terrorist attacks of seven years ago today, nearly a half billion dollars in grants have poured into the region to upgrade security while new bureaucracies have emerged with the mandate to make us safe.
But has it worked?
On one hand, most experts agree that the D.C. area is safer than it was on Sept. 10, 2001. It’s certainly better prepared for a disaster.
And yet a sense of unease still exists among security experts, partly because response to some recent episodes has been far from flawless.
Last week, after an alert went out that a man had driven up to the Capitol with live hand grenades and a rifle in his car, it took the D.C. police department three hours to dispatch rifles to officers so they could back up their fellow officers on the Hill, said D.C. police union Chairman Kristopher Baumann.
“We’ve still a long way away,” he said.
There have been other disturbing lapses and warning signs in the last year alone:
» A House Government Oversight and Government Reform Committee found in March that hospitals in the D.C. area had one of the most acute bed shortages in the country, meaning that the region’s emergency services could be overwhelmed by a terrorist attack.
» Last summer, a man drove his car into the Capitol Visitors Center construction site, ran up the steps of the Capitol and roamed inside the Rotunda before being stopped by Hill staffers. He was carrying a derringer in his back pocket.
» Earlier this year, it emerged that Capitol Police hadn’t properly searched the car of a man arrested walking up to the Capitol with a loaded shotgun. The car had explosives in it that weren’t discovered until three weeks later.
» This spring, when high levels of arsenic were discovered in a city park, it took most of a day for local police to be notified about the discovery by the National Park Service.
That episode caused D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, concern about whether D.C. is really ready for a disaster.
“It highlighted a real gap between the federal government and the District,” she said. “I was happy … that it turned out to be a nonissue. But if we had something that was really serious, I don’t have confidence now that we have the proper kind of communication between the two governments.”
Baumann also said he was worried about interagency cooperation. After the attacks, Congress passed legislation urging the three dozen police departments in Maryland, D.C. and Northern Virginia to work together. To date, the D.C. police department has signed working agreements with only a handful of agencies.
One of the biggest inadequacies in the Washington metropolitan area is a lack of communication among hospitals in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, said National Capital Region Emergency Preparedness Council Chairman Gerry Connolly on Wednesday.
Vital data from a hospital in Fairfax County can’t be shared with doctors in Montgomery County, he said.
That could cost lives in the event of a pandemic flu like the one that killed tens of millions in 1918, or a biological attack, which could take up to a week before doctors can realize what is happening, Connolly said.
“We can’t settle for that,” he said. “We need to sit down with the health care community in the region and bang on some heads.”
Since 9/11, more than $455 million in federal security grants have flowed to the region. But there is growing concern that the country’s expensive new security apparatus is only ready for the last attack, not the next one.
“We probably need to have a more significant national debate about preparedness,” said P.J. Crowley, a former Clinton administration aide and a national security fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “It’ll be important to put terrorism back in perspective. It’s only one of a number of things that we confront.”
Crowley said he was not sure the billions that have been dumped into state and local governments can be sustained. He pointed to New York City, which has been forced to cut its police force by 5,000 in recent years.
James Jay Carafano, a security expert for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the United States was “obviously” safer today than it was seven years ago — but not because of anything the security bureaucracy has done.
“It’s not because of the billions we’ve poured into Homeland Security grants. All of the things we were doing before 9/11, we’re just doing better. It’s counterterrorism,” he said.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., voted against creating a Homeland Security Department.
“The vote looks better and better all the time,” she said. “Their priorities are ill-defined. Clear threats are ignored, the administration has been lacking, and the result has been an expensive bureaucratic mess.”
Lofgren pointed to a law passed by Congress several years ago requiring all seaport employees to carry biometric identification cards, like the kinds currently used by airport workers. After years of delays, Homeland Security officials announced that they had finally created a card and were ready to produce them.
“But, oops, they don’t have any readers for the cards,” Lofgren said. “It’s stunning.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Carafano said critiques like Lofgren’s are mostly politics.
“Next year when there’s a Democratic Congress and probably a Democratic president, all of the complaints about Homeland Security will go away. Because then it’ll be their department,” he said. “And Homeland Security will be just another piggy bank they can raid.”
Despite glitches, bureaucratic battles and the temptation of politicians to turn security into a campaign issue, there has been steady improvement in the local security infrastructure, experts said.
For example, Jack Brown, acting director of emergency management for Arlington County, said seven years ago the county had a tiny budget and one person dedicated to emergency management. Now, the county has a staff of 15 people dedicated to security and a $7.2 million budget.
Has the result been a safer region?
“I like to say yes,” Brown said. “I say that because it’s hard to quantify how safe we are. We’ve taken a lot of steps to make our community safer. Do you have more work to do? Yes. We are always working to get ready for the next big one, whatever that is.”
