Public Policy Sponsors Citizen Panel for Department of Homeland Security

By Stephanie Kriner, MFA ’05

Last fall, the Critical Infrastructure Working Group at the School of Public Policy (SPP) conducted a citizens’ panel on critical infrastructure protection, vulnerability, and public confidence for the National Capital Region (NCR) of the Department of Homeland Security. The panel met on Mason’s Arlington Campus.

“The purpose of the panel is to help the NCR develop a clearer understanding of the role of public confidence in managing critical infrastructure protection in the Washington region,” says Todd LaPorte, a professor in SPP’s International Commerce and Policy Program. “We hope an examination of public attitudes toward vulnerability, interdependence, and institutional performance will help shed light on that and other questions facing NCR.”

The panel comprised a representative selection of 18 people from across the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. “It was about citizens in debate,” LaPorte explains.

Over the course of two days, the panelists spoke to a series of experts about various aspects of homeland security. The sessions were meant to help them reflect on the state of affairs, current thinking, and policy on the following:

• how people typically respond to disasters and extreme events;
• new and traditional threats to critical infrastructures, especially from terrorism;
• the degree of interdependence among key systems and the scope for disruption;
• protective government activities currently under way in government and the private sector and possible alternative approaches;
• how people understand and react to risk, including terrorist attacks; and
• how institutions can maintain or lose public confidence, and how they might regain it.

On the third day of the conference, panelists met to discuss what they had heard and learned. With the assistance of the project team, the panelists produced a short report laying out their views on how vulnerable they feel they are to extreme events, the extent to which they feel prepared to deal with terrorist attacks or other disruptions, and what priorities they believe public authorities should have in protecting against disruptions and extreme events.

LaPorte hopes the findings will be used to ease the anxiety people have about the government’s ability to provide security and safety. “We want to help government figure out what it needs to do to instill in the population a sense of confidence,” LaPorte says. “We want to answer the question, how can government be trustworthy?”

This article originally appeared in SPP Currents in a slightly different form.

Todd LaPorte