(DNRC)

Project description
A written assignment is required in each module. These assignments must be scholarly written and must follow the current American Psychological Association (APA) format and style 750 (e.g., double-spaced, indents, etc.) and include the following: cover page, abstract, discussion, conclusion, and references The APA format.
These written assignments will deal with pertinent topics and subjects discussed in the course materials and related assigned readings, and will require that the student demonstrate insight into an understanding of the course topic and reading materials. Students are encouraged to draw implications and inferences from the material when completing the individual written assignments. These assignments will be evaluated on the following evaluative criteria:
Logical Development of Ideas (LDI)
Level of Detail (LD)
Fact-Finding (FF)
Analysis and Interpretation (AI)
Overall Content (OC)
Please remember that your written assignments should reflect graduate level work. A few of you might lose some points regarding very simple grammatical errors. A few examples include:

1. Avoid contractions.
2. Indent your paragraphs.
3. Avoid citing Wikipedia, dictionaries or encyclopedias.
4. Websites that are not APA formatted.
5. Cite more peer reviewed journal articles (at least three); newspaper articles or magazine articles are not scholarly publications; they are acceptable to cite but must be outnumbered by scholarly literature. Do not cite the textbook.
6. Write in third person.
7. Cite page numbers for quotes from journals; paragraph numbers for quotes of web article.
The Scenario
Scenario Background The following story is a fictional account of an incident that occurred during the mythical Democratic Republican National Convention (DRNC) event in Miami, Florida. The story is loosely based on an amalgamation of real-life occurrences during the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Miami, Florida, in 2003. The names of all the characters in the story are fictional. This scenario corresponds with the objectives listed below. 1. Relate the importance of timely and well-documented communications that impact the development of threat assessments and mitigation capabilities. 2. Sufficiently summarize key factors of risk, in terms of stakeholders, approaches, methods, and influencing factors that impact risk management. 3. Compare and contrast the pros and cons of organizational culture and its influence on risk identification and mitigation. Story In the year leading up to the DRNC, a lot of critical decisions will have to be made by the top policy makers in county government, as well as federal, state, and other local stakeholder agencies and organizations involved in the planning of the event. Decisions have to be made about what equipment and supplies need to be purchased to keep the police officers, firefighters, and other emergency workers safe during the week-long event. The good news is that Miami-Dade County has hosted ten Super Bowls (1968, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1979, 1989, 1995, 1999, 2007, and 2010), the Summit of the Americas (1994), and the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Conference (2003), as well as Major League Baseball World Series (1997 and 2003), and a myriad of other large-scale special events. Miami-Dade not only has the physical infrastructure to handle these types of events, but over the years it has developed a cadre of highly skilled and experienced experts in this type of planning. The expertise of the professionals in the police, fire, and emergency management agencies has long been a core competency that puts the county at a great advantage over many other large municipal areas. 2 While the general expertise acquired from all these previous events will be helpful, each new event is different, and, in a sense, there will be a re-learning curve for many new planners who will be involved this time around. While many of the planners for the DRNC have experience with planning large-scale events, others have retired or moved on to other places and their knowledge and experience has been lost. Moreover, many of the new planners and policy makers were involved in planning past events, but they may have been involved at the lower- and mid-levels, and may not be as experienced in their new roles. In an effort to retain knowledge and avoid having the planners re-learn everything from scratch every time a new event comes to town, the Miami-Dade Police Department has kept files of after-action reports for each of the past events, as well as unplanned incidents such as the Elian Gonzalez civil disturbances of 2000. These after-action reports are available for review to the new planners of the DRNC. In addition, a vast library of after-action reports of previous similar events, such as the Republican National Convention in Tampa (2012), the WTO Conference in Quebec City (2001), and the WTO Conference in Seattle, Washington (1999), are available for review. As in previous large-scale special events, one of the first things that needs to be done is a risk assessment that takes into consideration the vulnerabilities of the stakeholders involved in the area of operation, the threats (both internal and external), and the relative consequences faced by various infrastructure assets. To that end, a six person team comprised of MDPD Bomb Squad, MDPD Special Response Team (SRT), MDPD Canine Unit, FBI Hazardous Material Response Unit (HMRU), ATF Explosive Ordnance, and Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Hazmat was put together to conduct vulnerability assessments of several select infrastructure assets located within and nearby the designated Area of Operation for the DRNC (Attachment 1). Another team comprised of FBI, ATF, U.S. Secret Service, and MDPD investigators was tasked with conducting a threat assessment as it relates to the DRNC Area of Operations. This threat assessment is based on open sources of information (such as newspapers, websites, and blogs) and looks at a wide spectrum of threats ranging from non-violent protest groups, to violent Anarchist and Black Bloc groups, to actual terrorist groups. Both the vulnerability assessment team and the threat assessment team report directly to the Security & Public Safety Subcommittee, chaired by Samantha Salerno, Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC), US Secret Service (see Slide 4 of Attachment 2). It is the responsibility of this committee to determine the overall risk posed to the critical assets and stakeholder holdings in the DRNC Area of Operation. The overall risk is determined through an established quantitative-based risk analysis instrument which takes into consideration the threat factors, vulnerability factors, and the consequence factors (based on the intrinsic and symbolic values of the asset). The overall risk analysis conducted by the Security and Public Safety Subcommittee will determine to a great extent the strategy and tactics employed by the law enforcement and emergency management agencies during the event. More importantly, the risk analysis report filed by this committee will go a long way in determining how the allocated funding will be put to best use leading up to the event. Decisions such as number of personnel needed for the event, projected man-hours (and overtime expenditures), the purchase or lease of fencing and barricades, the purchase of riot gear and safety equipment (such as shields, fire-retardant uniforms, helmets, etc.), and many more expenditures. To see what these purchases involve, you can refer to Attachment 4, which is an actual expenditure tracking spreadsheet that was used for the 2003 FTAA event by Miami-Dade Police. 3 Assignment Instructions For this assignment, you are to play the role of ASAC Samantha Salerno as the Chairperson, and Lead Federal Coordinator for the Security and Public Safety Subcommittee (refer to Attachment 2). Based on the input provided to you by the vulnerability assessment team and the threat assessment team, your committee has completed an overall risk analysis of the critical infrastructure assets within the DRNCs