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WASHINGTON--Amtrak, Transportation Security Administration personnel and local law enforcement officers on Sept. 23 staged the largest joint training exercise along the rail system, involving more than 150 railway stations along the Northeast corridor extending from Virginia to Vermont. Relationship building among different levels of authority was a large purpose of the exercise, said Ann Davis, a spokesperson for the TSA. "It's important to note that this was not a response to a credible threat, but rather an opportunity to enhance and familiarize [agencies] with the rail system and make important inroads with local police departments, so if there is ever a threat to the rail system we already have operation in place, we already have relationships established and are able to provide assets to support Amtrak quickly across a large region," Davis said. "We don't want to be exchanging business cards. We want operational plans established so everyone knows what everyone's roles and responsibilities are, so no one's trying to figure it out [during an event]." The deployment was largely an exercise in the simultaneous deployment of multiple agencies over a large geographic region. "The purpose was to mobilize on quick notice and get [law enforcement] to the stations looking for specific behavior," said John Tewey, deputy chief of the Amtrak Police, Mid-Atlantic region. "One basic deliverable was to familiarize [local police] with the station itself. We wanted them to be familiar with their local station, familiar with safety hazards in the railroad environment and we wanted high visibility so people would see them and be on alert to look for suspicious behavior." Tewey said the training exercise involved the coordination of more than 100 police departments throughout the Northeast. In order to perform the initiative simultaneously, a local coordinator was appointed in each area to reach out and organize local police, Tewey said. Tewey said the scale of the deployment, both the coverage of the geographic region and the simultaneous mobilization of so many agencies, made this exercise a major undertaking. "We didn't know if we could pull it off, we needed to do it to know we could do it," he said. "It seems to have worked and it's worked with enthusiasm on the part of local police agencies." Tewey and Davis both affirmed that similar deployments of this scale along the mass transit system are to be expected in the future. "This was the first time, so we wanted to keep it less complicated and focus on whether or not could get the numbers of people out there that we needed," Tewey said. "In future exercises, we need to turn the volume up, no doubt."
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