Combating Terrorism; Threat and Risk Assessments Can Help Prioritize and TargetProgram Investments

摘要

Our review includes an assessment of the program's status and progress, thecriteria and methodology used to select cities that receive assistance, the approach used to determine the capabilities and needs of participating cities, and the potential cost of equipping a city to respond to a terrorist incident involving a WMD. As part of that effort, we explored how some public and private sector organizations establish requirements and prioritize and allocate resources to safeguard assets against a variety of threats, including terrorism. Specifically, we (1) examined threat and risk assessment approaches used by several public and private sector organizations to deal with terrorist and other security risks and obtained detailed information on a private company's risk-assessment process, (2) determined whether 11 of the first 27 cities selected for NLD training and assistance used threat and risk assessments to establish requirements for dealing with WMD terrorist incidents, and (3) assessed the challenges of using formal threat and risk assessments to help define requirements and prioritize and target NLD program resources. This report discusses an opportunity to enhance decisions on how to allocate NLD and other similar federally funded program resources. We will report later on the rest of the work.