While Americans celebrate the U. S. Army’s 250th birthday at Saturday’s military parade in the heart of Washington, D.C., communications professionals from around the National Capital Region will gather a few miles away at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), ready to answer any questions that come their way.
“One of the biggest problems you can have during an emergency is if different people are putting out different information,” said Lisa Rodriguez-Presley, a public affairs specialist for the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office. “It’s so important to have a coordinated message and for all of these agencies to be speaking with one voice.”
Rodriguez-Presley is one of more than 50 communicators who will jam into a state-of-the-art data hub to staff the Joint Information Center (JIC). A JIC is set up to support any large-scale event in which critical information needs to be disseminated to the public accurately and quickly. That could range from a traffic update to a potential public safety threat.
When an event is designated as a National Special Security Event (NSSE), like the Army’s 250th birthday parade is, the U.S. Secret Service assumes its mandated role as the lead agency for the design and implementation of the operational security plan. Establishing a JIC is part of that process. Examples of NSSEs include the Presidential Inauguration, the Republican or Democratic National Conventions, the United Nations General Assembly, and the State of the Union or Presidential Address to the Joint Session of Congress.
The last NSSE was the Presidential Address to the Joint Session of Congress (PAJSOC) on March 4. Like the PAJSOC, the JIC for the upcoming parade will be hosted by D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA) inside the EOC, which opened in February 2023.
“This is the room where we bring the external affairs and communications professionals from around the region, all of our local, state, and federal partners into one room - so that when we need to get a message out to the community we can do it like that,” HSEMA Director Clint Osborn said, as he snapped his fingers. Several screens encompass two walls of the room. On the screens are live security cameras from all over D.C., local and national news networks, and other vital information.
“What we know is that our community always responds better when they have good information from trusted sources,” Osborn added. “What this room allows us to do is bring information from all of our agencies, that are all tracking different information, into one space to compare, contrast and then vet it and validate it. Once we do that, we can push information out really, really quickly.”
Some of the partners included in the upcoming JIC are the FBI, Metropolitan Police Department, U.S. Capitol Police, FEMA, and DC Fire and EMS.
As media and community inquiries come into any of the various partner organizations, messaging and response is coordinated as a joint effort inside the JIC.
“Whoever the appropriate person (inside the JIC) would be to answer that inquiry is going to be the one who really takes control of it, kind of develops whatever messaging needs to be put out, and then we run that through the approval process,” Rodriguez-Presley said.
“It’s important to understand that in the National Capital Region, especially in Washington, D.C., where we host a lot of National Special Security Events, the Secret Service has been proactive over time about working with us on the District-side to create a single space where that happens so we don’t have a situation where we have people in different operating centers all over the region trying to coordinate,” Osborne said. “Rather, we can collect the information, bring it here, check it out, and then get it out to the community.”
Running a JIC with administrative, professional, and technical public affairs specialists is relatively new to the Secret Service, only starting over the past ten years in response to the ever-changing media landscape. Employees from the Secret Service’s Communication and Media Relations (CMR) office staff the JIC.
“Typically, we’ll have a public affairs specialist in here, along with a special agent from the CMR section and, usually, we’ll also have a social media person in here so that way if there is information that needs to be put out on our social media channels, we have the person here, in house, to be able to do that,” Rodriguez-Presley said. “But, the agent is here to assist the public affairs specialist by providing their expertise, in terms of operational things that the Secret Service does, so that we can develop the message effectively.”