NJ Homeland Security & Preparedness on Protecting New Jersey

As part of our Future of Innovation series, Steve Adubato sits down with Jared Maples, Former Director, NJ Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, to discuss the significant findings of the 2019 Terrorism Threat Assessment and innovative ways to protect New Jersey.

4/13/2019 #305

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato. We're coming to you from the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio. It's our pleasure to welcome Jared Maples, Director of the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness. Good to see you Jared. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. You know, the... people... I'm sure people ask you all the time, "How safe are we?" Too broad a question. My question is, what are we doing to be as safe as the state needs to be? That's a great question. And it's something we think about quite a bit. There's always a threat out there, and it's something we talk about frequently. We put out our annual threat assessment for example. The report about all the threats that we see here at the state. What we're doing about it is working in collaboration. One thing I can assure the people of New Jersey is, we work tightly with the FBI, Federal Homeland Security, New Jersey State Police, and all of our local and county partners to counter the threat, to make them aware of what the threats are, and then what they can do about it. An important initiative we operate is getting the community aware of those same things. So the See Something, Say Something campaign, for example. In the terrorism world, some of the work we're doing with cybersecurity to make sure we're highlighting what those threats are, and again, most importantly, what they can do about them. By the way, as we're talking to Jared Maples, who heads up homeland security in the state, the website will be up, and he talked about public awareness and information. It's part of what we are here for as well. So go on to that site to find out more. The 2019 Terrorism Threat Assessment? Mm hmm. When you rank them? Help us on this. Sure. Anarchist extremists who are mobilized to... around perceived injustice. You got ISIS, you got militia extremists, you got sovereign citizens who are anti-government groups who mainly target law enforcement, and you got white supremacists. Is there a ranking there? So yeah, the rankings are done for high, moderate, and low. The interesting part about our rankings are really two buckets, or umbrellas, of terrorism. There's international terrorism and domestic terrorism. We don't rank those. We break them down by ideologies. Which you just listed. So we break them down, for example, a high threat in New Jersey, the highest threat, is homegrown, violent extremists. Rahimi, Saipov, who did the West Side Highway truck ramming about a year and a half ago. Those are great examples of HVEs, and still something we..."