A suspicious vehicle, an RV, parked in Downtown Nashville for two days was the source of an intentional explosion Christmas morning. The RV was reported Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t until the next day police encountered the vehicle in response to a shots fired call, and called in the bomb squad. The blast occurred a half-hour later after an effort by police to clear the area. While the investigation continues and police search for answers, Americans want to know how to prevent a bombing.
Ever since the September 11th attacks the phrase, “If you see something, say something,” has become a slogan for bomb prevention. According to the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identifying a suspicious item goes a long way when it comes to preventing a bombing. The question then becomes what exactly are you looking for? Bags, packages, or vehicles with unexplainable wires, electronics, sounds, vapors, mists, or odors should be considered suspicious and should immediately be reported.
In the case of the Nashville Christmas bombing all of this happened. People saw something and said something. Still, it was not enough to prevent the bombing. So what more can you do? There are many steps business owners in particular can take to effectively prevent a bombing.
The first step is to get into the mind of someone intent on causing harm to others. This includes determining your weak and blind spots, what makes you soft or hardened target, indicating when and where foot-traffic is heaviest, (if you’re a retailer) knowing what a constitutes a suspicious purchase of items that could be used to make an explosive, and frequently testing your security plans and systems to make sure they can adequately determine and respond to threats in a timely manner.
The knowledge is not common, the tactics are not simple, and the skills are not widely taught. The reality is for most civilians with little to know training, “see something, say something” is the most they can do to prevent a bombing. The rest is expert work best done by security experts, but most businesses can’t afford to always have an expert on staff.
With AEGIS you can afford that luxury through conducting a rapid security assessment, training your team on workplace violence prevention and response, and deploying quality armed security officers to protect and respond on-site. AEGIS Security & Investigations offers will provide you with the security experts needed to keep your business and community safe, and amplify you and your team’s knowledge to give you the tools necessary to help to prevent a bombing.
At the end of the day safety is not just a feeling or responsibility, it’s a commodity and value in which we need to invest through time, saftey training, and security consulting through the experts.
