Commanding the Incident

• NCJ Number: 218278
• Author(s): National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center
• Date Published: January 2007
• Length: 2 pages
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Award: Operation of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC)

Annotation

This article explains the Incident Commander no-cost training program, offering a realistic representation of crisis management with realistic scenarios, realistic time delays, and realistic resource limitations.

Abstract

Available through the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC) system, a program of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs’ National Institute of Justice, the Incident Commander training program is a PC-based software simulation that models real-world situations within a community. It allows for training at the management level during a critical incident. Incident Commander focuses on smaller jurisdictions (less than 50,000 residents) where participants face the problems of dealing with a school hostage situation, a chemical spill, or a possible terrorist incident and fill the roles of the incident commander and the command team. At the conclusion of a scenario, players receive a score based on how well they did in public safety, media response, and total response cost. An extensive outreach program for Incident Commander was also developed. A key lesson learned from the training is that one of the secrets to making incident command work is effective communication with the other participants. Incident Commander was developed to assist public safety agencies, especially smaller agencies in rural and remote parts of the country, which do not often have the staff or budget resources for critical incident command training.