Organized Chaos: Tactical Level Command, Control, Communications, and Contingencies in Crisis Response

• In Event: Advancing Police Research II

Abstract

Individual officer resilience, or the ability to adapt, respond, and recover from chronic and acute stressors, has gained popularity as a research topic, police executive leadership directive, and industry standard. Organizational resilience reflects the ability of a team to cope, manage, and recover from emergencies. The notion of organizational resilience and “high-reliability organizations (HROs)” is prolific across multiple fields, including healthcare, tourism, and emergency management (EM). Despite the sustained academic interest in organizational resilience, there is a dearth of research relating individual and organizational resilience to disaster response (specifically, crisis response to man-made emergencies). The proposed study will analyze and assess the relationships between self-reported individual officer/organizational resilience and crisis management readiness. Survey methods will be used to access the greater law enforcement community in the United States (US). Once analyzed, the data will be used to support a framework for creating an ad-hoc multijurisdictional HRO capable of responding more efficiently to crises. The data collected and existing literature will generate recommended emergency protocols, best practices, and decision support templates (DSTs) for responding officers, first- and second-line leaders, and executive staff and build a data source for crisis response events. The final products are intended to augment existing federally mandated protocols for organizational emergency response, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident Command System (ICS) and national standard response for individual first responders, such as the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) directives.

Author

• John Miller, Texas State University